Louis Theroux

Wednesday

Toby Young

Louis Theroux needs to make a positive case for masculinity

I’ve always had a soft spot for Louis Theroux. I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly, but I’ve known him for about 40 years. We started our journalistic careers at the same time and would frequently bump into each other at parties. He’s intelligent and funny and, in person, doesn’t answer every question with a question or pretend to be puzzled when he’s evidently long made up his mind. The passive–aggressive ‘just asking questions’ routine is, thankfully, confined to his TV appearances. By this I mean he has no hesitation in telling me I’m being ‘unbelievably stupid’ – which, because we disagree about politics, is quite often. But he’s a

Thursday

James Walton

How come the only Palestinians Louis Theroux met were non-violent sweeties?

Louis Theroux: The Settlers was never likely to be a programme with much of a narrative arc – and so it proved. In the first 30 seconds, Louis put it to a Jewish householder on the West Bank that his house was ‘quite deep in what are called the Palestinian Territories’. ‘You call it the Palestinian Territories,’ the man replied. ‘I call it the heart of Judea.’ And that, on the whole, was that. Louis travelled from one Jewish settlement to another, doing his best to challenge the inhabitants with his faux-naif questions and impressive range of quizzical expressions. And yet, of course, none of them budged an inch. The