MacTaggart Summer Series | The Risk of Not Taking Risks, Louis Theroux

Words Spoken by Louis Theroux at the Edinburgh TV Festival 2023

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From the Staff

Thank you so much for subscribing and supporting Reflections: A Television Digest.

All hands are on deck at The TV Foundation and Edinburgh TV Festival as we prepare for, well, our Festival (less than a week to go!). So, we’re taking a short summer break from our commissioned Reflections posts.

Instead, we’ll be sending some MacTaggart Lectures straight to your inbox! The James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture is our keynote speech by a leading figure in television. We hope you enjoy and are excited to see what comes out of the Festival this year.

Last year’s lecture was given by documentarian Louis Theroux - enjoy!

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It was Jean-Luc Godard who said a story should have a beginning a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. So, let me start at the end. 

We need television that is confrontational, surprising, and upsetting. We should aspire to challenge viewers’ assumptions and resist orthodoxy whenever possible. We serve social justice best when we aim to make television that reaches people and engages them. Take risks. Sail close to the wind. Do that thoughtfully and you can do almost anything in television. Expect the highest values from TV as you would from any art form. Thank you and good night.  

Esteemed TV industry colleagues. I stand here as someone more used to spending time in prisons in America, religious cults, maximum-security mental hospitals, talking to sexually violent predators and psychopaths. Looking at all of you, I feel completely at home. 

In a sense I’m someone who’s made a career of trying to belong where I don’t belong. Making connections with people who, on the face of it, maybe don’t deserve to be connected with. The TV industry is no more and no less a milieu I feel totally comfortable in than many others I’ve explored for work. I don’t read the trade magazines or keep up with what’s going on, except in a haphazard and anecdotal way. For a long time, I used to view industry people as a load of plonkers swanking around their cocktail parties and their sessions.  

Confession. I watched my first MacTaggart lecture a few months ago, which is to say, a couple of days after I was asked to deliver the MacTaggart Lecture. Which makes it perhaps a little weird that I’m up here. I can’t quite believe I am here and – if I can just say hello to the elephant in the room – am aware I am not doing anything to broaden the TV Festival’s diversity. I can only assume we have ended racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia. I’d like to accept your thanks for the part I played in doing that. 

Even some people close to me seemed to think it was a bad idea my doing this lecture – and I can’t say I disagree. I haven’t been in any way disadvantaged, except maybe in the sense of feeling insecure and lacking confidence. I think we all have a bit of that. Whatever success I have achieved, three BAFTAS, an RTS award, a Grierson Trustees award, three BAFTAs, has been down to following my instincts and riding my luck, which has generally served me well, with a few exceptions… but we’ll get to Jimmy Savile in a minute. 

I speak not as an expert, nor as an insider, but as a frontline TV worker.  

And what I do have is a love of television. I care about good TV, watching it, trying to make it. So here goes. 

I’ve got to admit when I was told the Festival theme – ‘the Power and Passion of TV’ – my heart fell. Power and Passion. Really? It sounds like a book by a self-help guru. In fact, it is a book by a self-help guru. ‘Passion, Profit & Power’ by Las Vegas hypnotist Marshall Sylver who I featured in an episode of my series ‘Weird Weekends’ 23 years ago. It’s still available on BBC iPlayer. Possibly Marshall wasn’t available for the MacTaggart. He’s doing a show this weekend at the Las Vegas Marriott so there may have been a clash. The imp in me wants to resist the power and passion brief and say that power and passion are exactly what we have too much of, in TV and elsewhere, and make the case for detachment, froideur, humility, nuance. 

I see passion the same way I see anger and indignation, as a warning sign on the dashboard that you’re in danger of surrendering your critical objectivity. I don’t do good work when I’m passionate. And as for power, isn’t that what we’re supposed to resist? But in good conscience I also recognise the truth that power and passion are part of what we all feel in TV – the passion to make it, the power it holds – and that both of those qualities bring with them a set of responsibilities. 

We’ve heard repeatedly at the Festival about the difficulty facing many freelancers. It’s a crisis that speaks to an underlying truth. Many of us who work in the industry do it not because it pays well or offers a secure job – clearly it doesn’t always, though it should – but because of the passion we have to be part of that very special group of people entrusted with the most powerful artform ever known to humankind. More than radio, cinema, podcasts, theatre, more than books – though it pains me slightly to say it – TV powers our thoughts and imaginations, our politics and our culture. 

I could reference any number of examples to illustrate the all-powerful dominance of the moving image as it is consumed on televisions, laptops, phones. But we’d be here all night. So let me simply remind you that the last US president but one was a reality TV host on the US version of ‘The Apprentice’ whose presidential run, according to one source, was initially a negotiation tactic because he’d read that Gwen Stefani on ‘The Voice’ was being paid more than him and he wanted to leverage his position with his bosses at NBC. 

In the present day, the power of television, which was traditionally monopolised by legacy channels like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, has been augmented and expanded by the arrival of new platforms. SVODS, like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and apps like Snapchat, FreeVee, Tooley, Panko, Pippet and Wonka. 

Some of those weren’t real. 

Twitch, a platform where you can watch video gamers on their homemade channels livestreaming their gameplay, now enjoys consistently higher viewing figures than most US cable channels, around two million viewers at any time, across thousands of individual live streams, most with only a few hundred viewers. The arrival of new outlets has enabled a new political and cultural reality. The aforementioned Twitch was also used by many of the protesters who invaded the US Capitol on January 6 to livestream their antics, looking to drive traffic to their channels. In other words, the most flagrant attempt to overturn a Western democracy in our lifetimes was not just a TV event, but more accurately, at least in part, a made-for-TV event. Produced, directed and acted on television for a paying public of Twitch viewers. 

One of the most controversial celebrities – certainly for a time the most Googled man on the planet, as he likes to remind people – is a TikTok star. Andrew Tate’s fame rests mainly on his ability to make viral clips. He is a TV performer. A former ‘Big Brother’ contestant, he figured out how to game the algorithm of the well-known Chinese tech platform by offering financial incentives in return for reposts of his videos, in turn directing them to his subscription-funded Hustlers University. 

Speaking as a former TikTok star myself – I refer of course to the viral earworm ‘My Money Don’t Jiggle Jiggle, It folds,’ available for download on most music platforms – I’d like to think I know what I’m talking about. Andrew Tate is no more a plausible guru on masculinity than Jiggle Jiggle is a credible rap tune. And at least Jiggle Jiggle had a dance that went with it. 

The Capitol rioters, the rise of anti-vaxxers, deranged conspiracy theories about 5G masts – all of these have been fuelled by – and would have been impossible without – television, in its broadly defined form of video content.  

And, were all of that not enough, now, we find our beloved industry is on the verge of being besieged by robots in the form of deepfakes and AI. Hollywood writers are striking, among other reasons, because of valid concerns over Large Language Models cannibalising and regurgitating their plots and their dialogue, which, let’s be honest, sounds a bit like what some in Hollywood have been doing for years. 

If I’m honest, I find the new world we are in troubling and exciting in roughly equal measure.  I’m a journalist and a student of the human condition. Socially organised weirdness is my bread and butter. I am also, I like to think, an anti-elitist. I enjoy the insurgent Jacobin energy of the new class of programme makers. I am a contrarian and I appreciate seeing a complacent old guard discomfited by a grubby insurrectionary crowd of digital sans-culottes. But I also value truth and honesty and the rule of law. And I have a loyalty to the values of linear TV, and public service television, where for 30 years I’ve done most of my work. 

Surveying the mediascape, it is clear those of us who value legacy media and the thousands of wonderful programmes it’s produced in all its years of existence have our work cut out for us. Not just to keep people’s attention and preserve the broadcasters we love. But also, at the risk of sounding alarmist, to hang on to the whole post-Enlightenment project of social progress and the rule of law. 

And so, we face a choice. With so much madness around, it’s tempting to ignore what’s out there. To not amplify it. Hope it goes away. To not platform it. Avoid the risk.  

I think that’s wrong. Hence the theme of my lecture: the risk of not taking risks. 

I understand the urge to ignore. I have three sons and one of my precepts as a dad is to try to reward good behaviour and ignore bad behaviour. Much of the new world epitomised by the Trumps and the Tates is based on the idea of monetising provocation. It relies on pushing people’s buttons to get our attention. Spreading sexism, racism, homophobia, sometimes dressing it up as irony, or comedy, while promoting a bigoted agenda. They do this both for both fun and profit. 

The American journalist Andrew Marantz, in his book ‘Antisocial,’ has written about the ways in which the techniques of clickbait pioneered by outlets like Buzzfeed have been used by the far right to grow their visibility and push false narratives. We all know those clickbait listicles advertising “The real reason we don’t see Louis Theroux anymore,” or “What Louis Theroux looks like now will leave you speechless.” The manosphere and the alt-right have their own versions of these, deliberately promoting ludicrous political messages which they may or may not believe, knowing that they’ll draw traffic. “Women shouldn’t vote,” they’ll say. “Watch libs get triggered by truthbomb.” Marantz quotes a right-wing internet troll, Mike Cernovich, whose mantra was: “Conflict is attention, attention is influence.” 

In his book, Marantz suggests that rather than characterising what’s happening online as a debate over free speech, as many on the right do, what’s really going on is that rogue voices are being artificially amplified by algorithms designed to create traffic for tech platforms. Controversy is good for business. Thus, the debate around the availability of hate and misinformation online could be compared to debates around food and diet and the proper labelling of sugar and fat. As with junk food, so too with junk facts. People can consume what they like but we could all do with a little help being nudged towards healthier choices, rather than having the information equivalent of chocolate bars on a two-for-one offer stacked in our eyeline every time we turn on our phones.  

I understand all of this. I share the urge to switch off all the negativity. To turn one’s attention elsewhere. To not feed the trolls. To never go anywhere near the trolls. I understand the need to consider people’s wellbeing. To think through all the possible prejudices that may be contained in programmes. The impact of jokes and unconscious bias. All of the multiple ways in which a TV show can do harm. 

But it’s also true that there is a big difference between platforming and doing challenging journalism about controversial subjects. There is a strange new world out there that is growing stranger by the day. It’s our job to understand it, and for people like me that means going out to make programmes about it. I say this partly as a citizen, trying to maintain some viability for the civic project of having a free and civilised society, with all of us pulling in the same direction, caring for one another and funding each other’s healthcare. 

That would be nice. 

But my main aim is more selfish. I want to watch and make memorable TV programmes. I want storytelling that makes me excited and feel alive and less alone. I want to take the risk of going out speaking to people I profoundly disagree with and making documentaries about them. 

I came to risk-making television early, following a stroke of luck so life-changing that to this day I look back and marvel at how easily I could have missed my moment. 

It was 1994. I was 23, a print journalist working in New York. I’d been dreaming of making it in television. There was around then a great flowering of American TV. ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Seinfeld,’ ‘The Larry Sanders Show,’ ‘Frasier.’ These were series that were smart and funny, emotionally true, and free-to-air on a piece of furniture in your front room. 

A small part of me had started to nurse a hope that I might be able to write for television. It seemed a wonderful ambition: to create art that came straight into people’s homes. That wasn’t distracted by trying to “be art” but simply told stories that made people’s lives a little richer, a little more pleasurable. But the few small feelers I’d extended into the TV realm had gone nowhere. And then the magazine I’d been writing for went out of business. 

Some friends went to work for the documentary-maker Michael Moore. Michael had a TV show, a satirical magazine show, on NBC, which also went out on BBC Two, and was part-funded by the BBC. Michael’s BBC paymasters had apparently encouraged him to hire a correspondent from the UK. Never mind experience. He needed someone with a British accent. A few weeks later I was flying cross country, on assignment as a correspondent for ‘TV Nation,’ to film a segment about millennial sects, comparing their predictions regarding the end of the world. One group in Southern California was prophesying a mass landing of benevolent spaceships in 2001. Another, run by a fundamentalist radio pastor in Oakland, said Jesus would be returning later in the year, passing judgment on the wicked. 

The third was a two-man neo-Nazi outfit operating out of a trailer in remote Montana. According to them, come the end of times, all the races would be banished to different planets. They were disappointingly vague on when it would happen. After two hours, these two men, both wearing Nazi-style uniforms and racist to the core, appeared to have taken a shine to me. They might be happy to see me killed as a race traitor sometime in the future but, in the meantime, they seemed grateful for some company. I asked one of them whether, if the Black people’s planet turned out to be nicer than the white people’s planets, I could move over there. The atmosphere became tense for a moment. “There’ll be no racial mixing, no,” came the reply. Then worrying he might have been a little brusque, he added: “But you’ll have a place. You’ll have a place you’ll call your own.” 

It's amazing to reflect on how much followed from that first segment I did. The weird collision of emotional registers, hateful, playful, warm, dark, felt like a sweet spot for a kind of journalism that I wanted to do. It proved – not exactly a template, because a lot did change over the years in terms of tone and approach – but a jumping off point, combining a curiosity about the forbidden, a commitment to documentary values, real-life comedy, awkwardness, the unexpected, the psychologically uncomfortable. 

In being hired by Michael, I’d been given, without realizing it, the best possible start for the kind of documentary journalism I would end up pursuing. Michael was a man whose ambition was no less than world changing. An unapologetic democratic socialist he would often speak about his desire to see “change in my lifetime.”

Another of his catchphrases was, “Act as if you will never get another job in television.” In other words, do whatever it takes, burn bridges, piss people off. If you were arrested while making a segment,” he said, “take it as a good sign.” Michael’s most sacred belief was that we shouldn’t see ourselves as part of the establishment. The end goal wasn’t your next job or an award or an invitation to a celebrity party. We were warriors engaged in a war for justice. 

Perhaps more importantly, Michael saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. My nervousness, my awkwardness, the fact that I couldn’t easily hide my fear, that I couldn’t do pieces to camera, and that I looked like a scarecrow dressed in thrift store-bought jacket, all the qualities I’d thought of as weaknesses, he recognised as strengths. My incompetence, because it was honest and real, was a kind of positive. 

With Michael's support, I was able to follow a journalistic path that involved interrogating the taboo, the forbidden, the proscribed, using documentary techniques, that I didn’t recognise as documentary techniques because I’d never worked in TV before. I thought they were normal – long days filming with hand-held cameras, shoot the first hello for real, no lights, no tripods, no “noddies”, no “re-asks” – trusting that something gritty and unexpected and funny would come out of the encounter. I see this approach as commonplace now – on the segments of popular YouTube pranksters where the gritty and the real takes precedence over any formal TV grammar. But back then, on TV, it was radical and new. 

A couple of years passed. ‘TV Nation’ ended. Based on the success of my segments the BBC signed me up to do my own series, ‘Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.’ In essence, a long-form version of the segments I’d been doing, investigating worlds viewed as stigmatised or controversial: porn, gangsta rap, the far right, fundamentalist Christianity, and later, in documentary specials, on prisons, vigilantism, Nazis, gangs, sexual predators. All forms of organised madness. The worlds I covered were very different from each other. But what they all had were people following rules and norms that put them at loggerheads with the broader society – they were all doing something wrong. Involved in lifestyles over which there dangled an enormous “But why?” 

“But why have you moved up to Idaho to stockpile weapons?” “But why have you dedicated your life and career to having sex on camera, trusting your livelihood to the vagaries of a capricious sexual organ?” 

Often the stories made me nervous. They felt risky. Not because I was in danger physically, though there was occasionally a little bit of that, but because I was aware of the perils of being seen to give too much license to people who were peddling paranoia or tawdry sexual content, or in putting a human face on people who were more often viewed as, at best dubious, and at worst, degenerate. But it was also true that those shows that had real moral complexity to them were the ones that worked best. A show I did about the extreme edge of the Black Nationalist movement in New York. Another about the troubled and angry masculinity of the wrestling community in the American South.  

The less morally fraught episodes – the ones that were safer – haven’t aged so well. 

I’m going to spare you a long list of stories and people I covered in the years that followed… about cults, crime, prison, mental illness, celebrities, some of whom turned out to be criminals, like Max Clifford, and Jimmy Savile, and one celebrity-criminal, called Joe Exotic.  

Along the way, in my excursions into the offbeat cultures, I discovered a universal truth: that the weirdest thing about weird people is how normal they are. Wherever I went, I noticed commonalities: people I’d thought would be utterly unlike me, turned out to be far more like me than I could have imagined. They liked some of the same TV shows. Laughed at some of the same jokes. They wanted to connect, to let me know what they believed and what they were going through. And the weakness I thought I had, of wanting to be liked, turned out to make me a sympathetic listener and a sensitive interviewer. 

I discovered something just as unlikely: a career. A career based on being curious about those people who embodied my own shadowside. Making programmes which in turn viewers would tune in to watch. 

In exploring unsettling subjects, there was also a dividend I never expected, because I couldn’t see where the internet and social media were taking us. Those forbidden impulses were, even then, becoming the engine of online content - populism, tribalism, misogyny -  driving the culture through their unfiltered spread on the new media. And so, in exploring them back then - at the risk of sounding grandiose - I ended up predicting the future. 

It’s one of the bugbears in our industry that we chase headlines. Let me let you into a secret. The worst time to go after a story is when you’ve just read about it in a newspaper. We all do it. “Did you see the article in Metro?” Sometimes it can lead to a commission. Or a bidding war. But if, instead of checking the paper, you look into your twisted heart and figure out what you’re really curious about, you may find the news chases you. 

I’ll just take one story because it’s symptomatic of how our culture is moving, and how, with a little curiosity, and by taking the risk of pursuing stories on the margins, you can have the double pay-off of prognosticating where society is going but also, not insignificantly, making something people want to watch. 

In 1996, curious about the crazed world of the far-right in the West of America, I made a programme about the militia movement, people who believed there was a satanic globalist conspiracy to deprive freedom loving Americans of their guns and their liberty. Some were well-meaning eccentrics, some idealistic, some racist, some simply paranoid. Many viewed taxation above the county level as illegal. They hated Bill Clinton, who was then president. They preached of the need to be prepared to defend oneself, violently if necessary, against the incursions of the federal authorities and a possible takeover by the UN. 

On the furthest fringes were people like the radical attorney Linda Thompson, a former feminist and pro-choice campaigner who had drifted further and further to the right and was now a gun-rights obsessive. Thompson was so extreme she was calling for a march on Washington and a storming of the Capitol where they would mete out justice to the treacherous legislators. But most people in the movement viewed her as bonkers. That was never going to happen. 

I spent much of my time with a self-described “radical nut” called Mike Cain, who had moved up to a so-called “patriot” community Almost Heaven in northern Idaho. I stayed at his house, admiring his gun rack, and going on a morning patrol looking out for potential enemies, armed and ready for the UN. Mike thought the Federal Government was irredeemably corrupt. There was no US president he’d liked. He had stopped paying taxes and thought it likely he’d be gunned down by government agents in the end of days. But he was also kind of a nice guy and we struck up something like a friendship. The programme, titled ‘Head for the Hills,’ went out on BBC Two in 1998. Not that I care about ratings, but it got more than three million viewers on the night. It’s still on iPlayer, if you’re interested. In the years that passed, I got in touch with Mike from time to time, curious how he was doing. 

Mike didn’t get gunned down by the feds. Twenty plus years later, when I last spoke to him, he was alive and well and living in Texas. He’s about to publish his first novel. I always wondered whether he might have mellowed. But Mike is every bit as conspiratorial and apocalyptic as ever. The only difference is, he finally found a political figure he could get behind. The man who found nothing to like in any president you could name was fully supportive of the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Instead of Mike adapting his views, it was reality that did a 180, installing an anti-globalist disruptor in the White House, aligning with Mike where he’d always been. Come 2021 and Jan 6, even the fever dream of Linda Thompson and the storming of the Capitol came to pass. More than one thousand insurrectionists have now been arrested. 

It’s a truism that the growth of the internet has led to the metastasizing of false information, heretical content, conspiracy theories. 

I bought my first modem in 1993. It downloaded 2400 bits per second. It took about ten minutes to download a photograph of a naked woman. Don’t ask me why I know that. 

Far right content came in magazines. There was one called, fittingly, ‘Media Bypass.’ It arrived wrapped in a brown paper bag. This was for work, as I hope I hardly have to say. Now we live in a world in which similar content gushes into people’s phones and computers. Conspiracy theories that you had to travel to Idaho to hear in the nineties are promoted by social media accounts at the highest echelons of power. 

Human weirdness – by which I mean our most primal and darkest human impulses, the guilty secrets and desires we tend to hide and be embarrassed about – has come out of brown paper bags and cascaded over the digital ether. By taking the risk of uncovering it, anatomising it, challenging it, and making programmes that we hope are informative and entertaining, we have our best hope of understanding ourselves and forecasting the future. 

I mentioned Jimmy Savile. I made two programmes about him. 

The first, in 2000, called ‘When Louis Met Jimmy,’ was a character study of the aging deejay and charity fundraiser filmed over ten days. It was a depiction of a troubling and rather lonely figure, a man of surprising steeliness, prone to confessing scrapes he’d had with the police in the sixties, someone with no discernible love life, who was dedicating his remaining days to clinging on to his celebrity. The second film, made in 2016, four years after he died, and titled simply ‘Savile,’ was an attempt to understand how he’d escaped notice as a serial sex offender while alive. 

Much as I’d like to claim otherwise, that first film did not entail huge risk on my part. I remember I was nervous mainly because I thought he might be boring, that he was irrelevant and over the hill. It felt a little embarrassing making a programme about someone so past-it. There was some nervousness at the channel along similar lines. But there was enough of a suggestion of there being comedy in a faded star who seemed to lack self-knowledge, along with the macabre rumours to make us feel it was worth trying. The resulting programme was widely watched and well received. It showed another, more sinister side of a celebrity people thought they knew. 

Making the follow-up 16 years later was very different. The changes in the culture that resulted from the revelation of Savile’s crimes – as with Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein – had been seismic. I was among many examining their consciences to figure out if there was anything I could have done differently. In making a second programme, I wanted to do justice to the scale of the harm he had caused. That, in itself, felt like a lot of pressure. But alongside it was a further concern that was, if anything, more worrying. The outrage at his crimes was so convulsive that there was also an urge to depict them in ever more lurid terms. Allegations circulated that Savile had dismembered small children with Ted Heath at satanic rituals. That he’d trafficked children to VIPs. None of this had been credibly reported, but there were many who believed it might be true, and pushing back against the claims, making the case for a judicious weighing of the evidence, laid one open to charges of “minimising.” 

And so the high-risk approach, in this case, was, almost paradoxically, to take a considered and dispassionate look at Savile’s crimes. To make a film that took on the full measure of what he’d done and how he’d done it but that still maintained a forensic and questioning attitude, that refused to be wise after the event. It’s in the backwash of huge moral outrages because they are so emotive that truth often gets lost. Sometimes that’s where it’s hardest to hold your nerve and take the risk of remaining calm. 

It’s been fascinating and a little dispiriting but maybe not that surprising to see how the right and especially the far-right, even in America, have attempted to use Jimmy Savile, cynically, to tarnish the BBC. In the fever swamps of the Internet, Jimmy Savile has become a meme. A convenient and easy shorthand to discredit and besmirch the BBC and anyone who works there. 

It isn’t brave and risky to be inflammatory. What is brave is to not get swept along. Not to jump to conclusions, not to cast blame too broadly, not to pander to prejudice, to resist the easy wins of playing to an angry crowd. The risk if we don’t do that is even greater. We become no better than the trolls on social media and render ourselves irrelevant. I’ve followed my instincts. But that’s only been possible insofar as I’ve enjoyed the trust of commissioners and channel controllers. I look back at the programmes I’ve made and I’m amazed at how much latitude the BBC afforded me to pursue my interests. Whether it was spending time in a prison or at a legal brothel or in a maximum-security mental hospital for paedophiles. Our commissioning process, so far as I could tell, was this: We’d tell the channel what we were doing and then we’d do it.  

It’s the nature of actuality-led documentaries that you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get. There’s a leap of faith involved. The BBC took that leap with me many times. I’d like to thank the BBC for everything they allowed me to do. It’s hard to imagine having a similar arrangement anywhere else in the world. 

Given all of that, I broach the next point hesitantly and gingerly. 

Lately, there have been changes in the broader culture. We are, I’m happy to say, more thoughtful about representation, about who gets to tell what story, about power and privilege, about the need not to wantonly give offence. I am fully signed up to that agenda. But I wonder if there is something else going on as well. That the very laudable aims of not giving offence have created an atmosphere of anxiety that sometimes leads to less confident, less morally complex filmmaking. And that the precepts of sensitivity have come into conflict with the words inscribed into the walls of New Broadcasting House, attributed to George Orwell. “If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” 

And that as a result programmes about extremists and sex workers and paedophiles might be harder to get commissioned. 

A couple of years ago, I was making a film about the next generation of the far right, ‘Forbidden America: Extreme and Online.’ One of those we featured was the white nationalist internet personality Nick Fuentes who later found fame as an advisor to Kanye West after he went public as an anti-Semite. It seemed to me that there was a feeling in the air that we didn’t quite trust the audience to draw the right conclusions from seeing antisemitism and racism expressed on television. The fear – and I do understand it – was that some people might need help realising that racism and antisemitism are hateful and dangerous. Whereas I tended to see the veneer of charm that people like Fuentes can project as part of what makes him so troubling. And that to experience the twin effect of finding someone both hateful and charismatic was a powerful tension in the film and profoundly true about the times we live in.  

This, by the way, reflects something far bigger than the BBC, who after all gave me the opportunity to make the programme and put it on air. When we tried to find a home for that documentary in America there was a pervasive wariness. Buyers were worried. In the end, the series went out on BBC Select. I was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on CNN about the episode Fuentes featured in and she asked if I didn’t have concerns about platforming him. I can’t remember what I said. What I didn’t say, but should have, was that Fuentes’ nightly viewing figures on his digital channel were around the same as those for CNN’s recently launched and since discontinued streaming service, CNN+. Which is to say, Fuentes already has a platform, whether we like it or not, and we ignore him at our peril. 

I realise times have changed and that the raised stakes – the fact that the manosphere, the conspiracy community, the far-right have real power – means we should be on our mettle to report responsibly. But those raised stakes also show how important it is that we do report it. Not hide from it, or to report it in a way that feels po-faced, or which lacks nuance, or which lacks the confidence to understand its subjects rather than simply deplore them in exposés so heavy handed and clumsy that they end up undermining themselves. It’s been a long, strange road we’ve travelled in the last twenty years, from the old media landscape to the de-hierarchised media world we now inhabit where a racist with an internet connection can compete with a well-funded streaming service. 

Through the years my guiding light has been my own sense of curiosity and fear. Worry and fear are part of the process. If I feel queasy approaching a subject, I remind myself it’s a sign I’m doing work that is risky, weighted with difficult moral questions, and that I’m approaching them with a sense of responsibility. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is the meaning of taking risks. 

I was talking to the writer and rock icon Nick Cave on my podcast available exclusively on Spotify – I’ll stop making that joke now. I was making the point that we are, all of us, if we’re honest when we look into our hearts, quite revolting. If our minds were on display, with all their thoughts and wayward impulses viewable by anyone, we’d be quickly cancelled. And art that reflects the reality of our inconvenient and embarrassing emotions is what we need most. The power of art, Nick said, is “to challenge your ideas about things. It’s this troubling of the waters that is the self-evident value of art, and if we’re to put art through a kind of righteous sieve and take out all the unrighteous, what we’re left with is the bland and the morally obvious.” 

Looking around at the landscape of TV, where we have legacy channels competing with massive SVODs, I see a hard road ahead. We’re in a time of two parallel realities. The old world with our cherished values of “editorial policy” and balance. And a new digital frontier where anything goes. It’s a little like an Olympics event where half the athletes are allowed to dope. But I don’t despair. Because I believe in the long run, it’s the truthful, sensitive storytelling that will last. It is on us, as programme makers, those of us who care about great television to be brave about telling stories that are compelling and that can fight for people’s attention. 

Late in life I find I’ve somehow become one of the plonkers my younger self imagined himself arrayed against. A TV industry person. 

Three years ago I started Mindhouse, a production company, with my wife Nancy Strang and my colleagues Arron Fellows and Sophie Ardern. I’ve had the privilege of stepping back from my own on-camera output, which has coincided with my beard falling out and patches appearing in my hair due to possible stress-related alopecia, so that’s come at a good time. I’ve been able to work with amazing writers, presenters and producers who I won’t name because I’ll end up annoying anyone I leave out. 

For me, part of the pleasure has been empowering voices other than mine, people with different life experiences, who can tell stories I can’t, or tell those stories differently, and also collaborating with talented teams on documentary box sets - about snooker in the eighties, about Lockerbie, the Columbia shuttle disaster, the Jeremy Bamber case, and many others. Working, for the first time, on shows which I don’t present has given me the insight that I’m better at television than I thought, and also worse. It’s been a relief realising that I have something to contribute off-screen. It’s always the fear we presenters have that we are being humoured and tolerated as a price of making the programme. I’d like to think I’ve had some good ideas and given helpful input on some of our shows. My colleagues may disagree. 

I’ve also had my share of misfires, pitching series no-one is interested in. It’s maybe not that surprising given the time I’ve just spent talking about the importance of dark and troubling programme making, that some of my ideas are a little too dark and troubling. A three-parter called ‘ISIS: Inside the Horror State,’ which looks at the self-designated caliphate through the lens of its media production, has so far failed to find a home. A feature doc idea about the rise and rise of disinformation guru David Icke is, at time of press, also not commissioned.  

One of the ideas we’ve been working on for nearly four years, which has just been announced, is a feature-length documentary, directed by a talented Brooklyn-based director, Nick August-Perna. The film, titled ‘Tell Them You Love Me,’ is the true story of a white philosophy professor, Anna Stubblefield, and a young disabled black man, Derrick Johnson. Derrick’s family had always believed him to be profoundly cognitively impaired. Anna began working with Derrick, attempting to help him to communicate. Using a controversial technique, she unlocked incredible abilities in Derrick. Or so it seemed. 

And that’s where it gets complicated. What happened thereafter was either a love affair, or a predatory sexual assault. Or possibly something else, something stranger and more difficult to define. The film is exactly the kind of project I hoped I might be involved in when I set up Mindhouse. Precisely because it touches on so many tender spots in the culture. It is awkward and troubling. It suggests that doing good and doing harm can overlap – that in trying to do the utmost good, we may end up doing the most harm. Or perhaps, more radically, it suggests that our categories of good and harm are too simplistic to do justice to how the world really is, and that the real problem is in the oversimplified polarities with which we umpire the most subtly complected moral problems. 

After finishing it, we submitted ‘Tell Them You Love Me’ to film festivals. It made some of them nervous. Several turned it down. Naturally, I was disappointed. But I suppose I haven’t been surprised. That, after all, is the nature of risk-taking. It’s not for everybody. If it were, there would be no risk involved. 

There is risk in taking risks. For programme makers. For channels. 

From working so many years at the BBC, and still making programmes for the BBC, I see all-too-well the no-win situation it often finds itself in. Trying to anticipate the latest volleys of criticisms. Stampeded by this or that interest group. Avoiding offence. Often the criticisms come from its own former employees, writing for privately owned newspapers whose proprietors would be all too happy to see their competition eliminated. And so there is a temptation to lay low, to play it safe, to avoid the difficult subjects. But in avoiding those pinch points, the unresolved areas of culture where our anxieties and our painful dilemmas lie, we aren’t just failing to do our jobs, we are missing our greatest opportunities. For feeling. For figuring things out in benign and thoughtful ways. For expanding our thinking. For creating a union of connected souls. 

And what after all is the alternative? 

Playing it safe. Following a formula. That may be a route to success for some. It never worked for me.  

I’ve experienced success far greater than any I could ever have imagined by being lucky, and, yes, privileged, by working hard, and by being strangely me. Being given the space by higher-ups, producers, commissioners, to follow my instincts. The creative urge is like a panda having sex. It can’t be pressured into production. The still small voice of creativity is too easily drowned out. It’s easy to tear down an idea. It’s easy to lose touch with what you enjoy, what makes you laugh or sit up and pay attention. But given space, and a little encouragement, you might just find you’ve made a little panda baby.  

Taking risks can mean failure. It’s an act of faith that someone else will be excited by the same things as you. Especially if you’ve never seen something like it on TV before. But I’d rather fail on my terms than succeed on someone else’s. And the risk of not taking risks is something worse. Not just failure, but a kind of loss of integrity. A mimicry, that is a denial of oneself. A forgetting of the melody of one’s own soul. 

Which is why, in my domain of documentaries at least, I don’t overly worry about a takeover by AI. The future in which we are all controlled by robots, who farm us so they can fuel the matrix with barrels of human tears. I say this not as an expert on AI. But as an expert on humans. We’ve all seen the amazing results AI can produce. In a few years it may be able to write a passable sitcom or action movie. Or a MacTaggart. Maybe an excellent one. Maybe one better than this.  

But what it won’t be able to do is take risks. Because risk involves danger. And there’s no danger for machines. Risk involves real feeling. The possibility of humiliation, embarrassment, failure. Humans experience all those emotions and more. As a species we are flawed and as individuals we are doomed. “A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” We’re fucked up. And therein lies our strength. We connect over the frailties we have in common. We feed on the recognition of the common lot of human weakness. And when we recognise something real, there’s no substitute for it.  

There is nothing on Earth like TV – the low bar of entry to make it, the vastness of its reach. A small child is bitten on his finger by his baby brother. He is filmed by a parent with a phone. Hundreds of millions of people watch the clip and feel a little better. (Looking at what is, when you think about it, a physical assault. Though not a very serious one). The power of TV is godlike. To connect us with each other through daring and unflinching depictions of heroism, kindness, fear, cowardice – the complete gamut of the human experience, most powerfully when it is most true, most beautifully when done with sensitivity and intelligence, aspiring to the quality of art. 

What an opportunity, if we have the courage to take it. 

A story should have a beginning, middle and an end. Not necessarily in that order. 

I’d like to open by saying how honoured I am to be asked to deliver the MacTaggart Lecture. 

I am aware of the illustrious company I join in speaking here today and following in the footsteps of David Olusoga, Michaela Coel, Jack Thorne, Dorothy Byrne. I am Louis Theroux, and I am very happy to be here. I hope you enjoy my lecture.