Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life And Strange Times In Television Quotes
"Deprivation and narrowness bring their own compensations."
"The hours of watching... were an education of a sort, the beginning of an understanding of storytelling."
"A kind of Stockholm Syndrome set in and I fell in an ambivalent love with my captor."
"My voice had recently broken... offering opinions about the Valois kings of France in a voice that went up and down like a broken radio."
"My relationship with Sarah continued, with breaks and intermissions, over the next twelve years."
"I was too young and too immature to know how to handle."
"I was a latecomer to Spy, like someone who mistook the timings of a wild party."
"The magazine managed to be simultaneously switched on and unstuffy and brainy."
"I was probably the idea behind it – to make them likely to work harder."
"I felt overawed but also oddly as though I was enacting a drama of myself."
"I've worked at TV Nation. But it was all a salutary apprenticeship – I was learning, without realizing it, skills and techniques that I would rely on through the course of my TV career."
"The white people are my family. I love 'em, but it doesn't mean I hate anybody else. Hating people is stupid."
"If you don’t have a benevolent dictator you have a tyrant."
"One day it’ll happen. We’ve all fought wars before. But one day it’ll happen."
"There's a balance of ‘normal’ questions and sillier satirical bits of business."
"For the show to work it needed first and foremost to be funny."
"It was my lack of the conventional qualities of a TV presenter – smoothness, self-assurance, maturity, good looks, half-decent wardrobe – that marked me out."
"I began to think what a shame it was that such rich material would have to be whittled down to an eight-minute segment."
"But just his keeping me on board felt like a huge endorsement."
"I was conscious of wanting to move away from my ordinary life, my upbringing, London, my parents, and that even the BBC represented something too close to where I’d come from."
"I felt pleased with how it had all gone. I felt something real – almost magical – had taken place."
"Contracts made me tense: they made everything too real and I just thought about the pressure of having to fulfil them."
"In hindsight, this strikes me as a bizarre thing to do."
"I had enough sense to rule Jerry out of contention for the show, but not enough to wonder if there might be a problem with the concept itself."
"The interventionist, high-concept dimension felt ballsy and brave – like we were real TV makers as opposed to documentary chroniclers of a slightly dull but worthy sort."
"But that Christmas episode. What was that about? I sat watching it with a friend and I’d built it up to him and it just . . . oh dear."
"It’s easier for me, as a single man, to say, 'I don’t like children' because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt."
"I have people on tape admitting that I worked for Mossad, which I can’t talk about myself, and talking of knocking out Egypt’s radar system due to my intervention."
"I never had many more dealings with Sarah. I wished her nothing but the best."
"You only needed to look at his teeth to see that hygiene wasn’t his strong suit."
"He looked into the camera, saying, 'He’s on the ropes! He’s on the ropes!' in a way intended to take control of the moment."
"The real participation is the emotional connection."
"That’s your perception. That’s your reality."
"I am a dying cockroach because I haven’t got the will to win!"
"You’ve let yourthelf down with that quethtion."
"I had an inkling it was probably a fool’s errand."
"Sometimes good work arises from the absence of other options."
"It was as though she passed into an alternate state of effortless motion."
"It felt like a metonym for the world’s disadvantaged and overlooked."
"It’s not part of who you are. It’s bullshit."
"You get to carry on doing what you do. I haven’t had a night away from my kids in three years."
"I’m supposed to count myself lucky that I’m allowed to keep doing a job."
"But all of it is in here." He pointed at his own head.
"It is a privilege to be able to document some of the most intimate and harrowing moments of people’s lives."
"Accept that life is unbearable and awful for many people at least some of the time."
"Look on the dark side and make the best of it all."
"I am a journalist, not a social worker. I am there to get the story."
"I am fascinated by the awfulness that life throws at us."
"By bringing out the story, I hope to spread truth and understanding."
"Sometimes I have the sense that I am trying the patience of the audience."
"A subject should only earn its stripes by being engaging, watchable – and, yes, enjoyable."
"Was I still seen as a TV piss-taker? Was my brand toxic to contributors?"
"Occasionally I’d recall a story in the Arabian Nights called ‘The Historic Fart’."
"Forced to engage more seriously with UK ideas, my mind turned to subject areas that exist in a more extreme form in the UK than in the US."
"I wasn’t seriously thinking of visiting the area – too dangerous."
"The nurse in charge of detox asked if he could walk and he hobbled around for a minute or so with the help of a stick."
"There is something in the colourless prose of the reports that gives an added power to the stories."
"His body was racked with the pain of withdrawal."
"It felt like a very personal sort of vindication."
"It is hard to overestimate the amount of paranoia and anxiety that surrounded our Jimmy Savile film."