Yep, this is gonna be a problem for us down the road. It was people like this who Bin Laden came from. He fought as a surrogate for our country in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. It's also people like this who founded the death squads which killed civilians in El Salvador. This isn't gonna fix the problems in Iraq, it will end up making a very bad situation that much worse.

reylor, you submit the best shit ever. i want you to be the surrogate mother to my bastard children! if you were a chick, that is.

They were interesting shows. I’m not a big fan of these shows that make a derisive comment on the people they are interviewing and I think Louis Theroux (and Nick Broomfield in film) were the first sign of the nightmarish reality shows that were to come. However, compared to the sneering tone taken to contestants on The Apprentice, Survivor or Big Brother (whether they deserve to be sneered at for agreeing to go on such a show in the first place apart!), it is strange to be able to look back on Louis Theroux’s shows nostalgically – at least he was interviewing people the public were interested in knowing more about in the case of these When Louis Met… docs, or of cults, crazies and strange sub-cultures in his Weird Weekends programmes. I was interested by the way I was never sure whether I found Louis endearing in his curiosity or whether his naivete was an act, and I think his subjects felt the same way. I think a more important thing is to think that Louis gave his subjects ample rope with which to hang themselves!

He is a particularly good comparison to Nick Broomfield in the sense that their films are much more about their reaction to the people and places they visit than they are about the actual things they are supposedly documenting – not that their subjects are not important, but the presence of Theroux or Broomfield and their reactions are really the primary focus and makes them in a way an audience surrogate where we are exploring the situation with them (and in a more difficult way we are also being given clues of what reaction is expected of us as viewers by the way we see Broomfield and Theroux reacting). This is perhaps best shown in the Theroux documentary which follows him trying to get an interview with Michael Jackson, which he eventually doesn’t get – that infamously went to Martin Bashir – though Louis does get an outside view of the baby dangling incident.

The When Louis Met… programmes were full of pathos (the same pathos Ricky Gervais was tapping into when he had Les Dennis as a guest star in the first series of Extras), since most of the subjects were entertainers from a past television generation: the magician Paul Daniels and his assistant (and wife) Debbie McGee who had a high profile magic show in the 80s on the BBC which I remember watching. They were kind of shown up when David Copperfield became huge in America – somehow seeing the (relatively) ugly Daniels performing middling magic tricks seemed very old fashioned after seeing Copperfield walking through the Great Wall of China or making the Statue of Liberty disappear etc, and I think the BBC felt that too since they dropped the show soon afterwards despite his show still getting good ratings (and ratings the BBC would kill for today – in the tens of millions). Then the vogue for debunking magic tricks occurred which destroyed his act anyway.

I remember seeing Jimmy Savilles ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ show in the mid-80s, where kids would write with requests such as wanting to ride a monster truck or meet a celebrity etc which Jim then ‘fixed’. It is just difficult to watch the programme now in these more cynical times without a feeling of watching a dirty old man with an unhealthy interest in children which is probably why the show stopped. Not that Saville ever expressed any such interest, it is just the society has sadly become more distrustful of men and children, and there isn't the possibility of such a programme being shown now without those kind of thoughts popping into the audiences heads!

Chris Eubank, while ostensibly famous as a boxer, was only ever familiar to me from his comical television appearances, which had grown fewer over the years before this Louis documentary was made – probably as he realised that the audiences were laughing at him and his affectations rather than with him.

And I actually saw Keith Harris and Orville the Duck perform on stage in the late 80s – they were very well loved at the time, but again it was perhaps a more innocent gentle humour that didn’t really work as the world changed.

Neil and Christine Hamilton are the odd ones out from the group as they only became famous because of Neil’s accepting cash payments for asking question in Parliament in the early 90s and then being spectacularly defeated in 1997 when New Labour came to power. They were basically just opportunists hungry for publicity compared to the other participants who weren’t adverse to getting back in the limelight but had their limits. They were also minor figures by the early 2000s as well – it is just that they had much briefer fame and hadn’t done anything to be particularly proud of or to be fondly remembered for anyway! (Perhaps making them the earliest examples of people ‘famous for being famous’, ready to do anything to keep their profile in the media up)

I hope so too - I miss my surrogate Amiga (almost as much as my first computer: the Commodore 64!)

From Youtube page:
Harry Harlow, American research psychologist, was responsible for some of the most controversial experiments to have been performed in animal laboratories.
On his 'Rape Rack', disturbed female monkeys were forced to breed against their will. In the 'Pit of Despair' baby monkeys were hung upside down in total darkness for up to two years. And with the 'Iron Maiden', infant primates were confronted by a placid surrogate mother that began suddenly to tear at their flesh.
So what motivated Harry Harlow to conduct such disturbing experiments? Experiments that made Harlow the 'poster boy' of the animal rights movement in the United States. Bizarrely, the answer is love. Harry Harlow's work was an attempt to understand the nature of love, particularly that between mother and child.
According to Harlow's defenders, it is work we benefit from today. Defenders maintain that Harlow revolutionised and brought warmth to the way we parent infants. That he influenced crucial policies which operate in children's homes, social service agencies and the birthing industry in Britain and throughout the world today.
Can cruelty teach us anything about love?
First aired on More4 in the UK on 4th December 2005.