The Socrates Of The BBC

Harry Mount was at school and university with Louis Theroux but never realised quite how clever – or worried – he was

In his new memoir, Louis Theroux says people are often shocked to find he’s the same in the flesh as on TV.

He certainly is – and he’s been much the same for 30 years.

I was the year below him at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford. And he’s pretty much unchanged, at the age of 49. Then, as now, he was gentle, polite, sardonic, ironic, bespectacled and deeply curious.

There’s always been an in-built comedy in his delivery and choice of words. During our interview, over lunch at Soho’s Academy Club, he is asked what vegetables he wants. He says, in that familiar, wry, deadpan, polite way, ‘I love a courgette if it’s done right. It’s quite a high-risk vegetable.’

I remember him, 30 years ago in the college bar, politely asking why I always went on holiday to Italy.

‘Surely you should keep on trying different places to find somewhere better? Wouldn’t it be terrible to find, aged 90, you’d been going to the wrong place?’

Then, as now, he was a modern Socrates, softly asking questions that exposed inconsistencies in your opinions. Because of that friendly, confiding manner, you end up, like his hundreds of TV interviewees, unburdening yourself of your deepest, most real thoughts. When I turned off the tape recorder, I found myself being Therouxed – responding to his thoughtful questions and happily revealing hidden feelings about my personal life.

Because he’s always asking questions on TV – he says he has ‘an urge for invisibility and escape’ in his documentaries – it’s a shock to hear him talking at length, and making long statements. The conclusions I drew from those statements were how clever – and worried – he is.