Louis Theroux Weird Weekends with UFOs

Louis has a close en- counter with a community of hardcore UFO believers in the South West of America - but not even an illicit foray into the ultra top secret Area 51 military base and a garbled message from the planet Koldas can answer all his questions. Louis theroux’s calm, humble and ordinary approach to documentary making has captured him a cult following over the past few years on BBC2. Starting out with Weird Weekends he travelled the world seeking out the most obscure and obsessive sub cultures imaginable. He has more recently moved onto the “when Louis met…” series of interviews where he immerses himself in his subjects lifestyle and gives us a much truer picture of them than we have ever seen before. The success of his documentaries has proven that the public cannot get enough of the darker (and sometimes plain oddball) side of life and the unique way in which Louis Theroux brings this to the screen. For me he is one of the freshest documentary makers around and I would challenge anyone not to enjoy his programmes.

Louis Theroux likes weird people, which is just as well. The gangly presenter or “weirdo correspondent”, as he calls himself, is returning to TV screens with a second series of his Weird Weekends. In his last series Theroux scoured the American fringe for oddballs, meeting porn stars, UFO-watchers and obsessed survivalists. Most interviewees seem to melt in the presence of his polite and sincere questioning but it is often hard to see how he keeps a straight face.

Louis Sebastian Theroux (born 20 May 1970) is a British broadcaster holding both British and US citizenship, best known for his television series Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends and When Louis Met… Theroux was born in Singapore, the younger son of the American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux and his British first wife Anne Castle. His elder brother is the writer and television presenter Marcel Theroux. He is the cousin of American actor Justin Theroux. Brought up in the UK, he holds dual US/British nationality. His last name is French-Canadian and originates from the region around Sarthe and Yonne in France. Theroux was educated at Westminster School (where he was a friend and contemporary of the comedians Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish). He then went to Magdalen College, Oxford where he gained a first class degree in modern history.

His first journalism job was at Metro Silicon Valley, an alternative weekly newspaper in San Jose, California. In 1992 he was hired as a writer for Spy magazine. He got his break in television working as a correspondent on Michael Moore's TV Nation series, for which he provided segments on off-beat cultural subjects, including Avon ladies in the Amazon, the Jerusalem syndrome, and the attempts by the Ku Klux Klan to rebrand itself as a civil rights group for white people. When TV Nation ended he was signed to a development deal by the BBC, out of which came Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. He has guest-written for a number of publications including Hip-Hop Connection and he continues to write for The Idler. On 13 May 2001 Theroux won the Richard Dimbleby Award for the Best Presenter (Factual, Features and News) at the British Academy Television Awards for Weird Weekends. He won it again on 21 April 2002, for his series When Louis Met…. His first book, The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, was published in Britain in 2005. In this book, Theroux returns to America to find out what has happened in the lives of some of the people he featured in his television programmes since he last saw them. He lives in the London district of Harlesden with his girlfriend, Nancy, with whom he has 2 sons, Albert and Fred.

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