27-04-2025
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Louis Theroux: The Settlers on BBC2: Theroux's bumbling gaucheness is wearing uncomfortably thin...
Mae West made her final movie, Sextette, when she was 84. She stars as a movie queen so irresistible that an entire squad of athletes are desperate to seduce her.
'I do the role I always do,' she told an interviewer. 'I do Mae West. I've kept my looks.'
Louis Theroux is turning into Mae West without the wigs. Aged 54, he's still doing the schtick that launched his career in the 1990s, the faux-naive bumbler with an air of boyish puzzlement. And it's wearing uncomfortably thin.
'You've come armed, but we're so friendly,' he teased a twitchy Israeli radical with a sub-machinegun slung over his back, as he toured Jewish outposts on the West Bank in The Settlers.
For a ghastly moment, I was afraid he was going to use Mae's famous line from the Broadway play Catherine Was Great: 'Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?'
That sort of jejune flirtiness worked wonders with eccentrics such as Christine Hamilton and Debbie McGee on When Louis Met..., but it had no effect on the belligerent Zionist evangelists. Like an increasing number of people, they were immune to the Theroux charm.
Daniella Weiss, a veteran campaigner for increasing Israel's territory, became so tired of his pretence at gaucheness that she placed both hands on his chest and shoved him hard. Her aim, she explained frankly, was to provoke him into shoving her back — so she could claim he'd physically attacked her.
If he was as unworldly as he likes to make out, Louis might have fallen for it. Instead, he shot her a hurt, bewildered look like a puppy that's just had its nose smacked.
A deep streak of cynicism lies under his charade. His interviewees are carefully chosen, to reinforce the BBC narrative that Israelis are the oppressors and Palestinians their victims.
Weiss is a crackpot, who believes Jewish settlers should be rushing into the Gaza Strip to establish tarpaulin homesteads amid the rubble. Aside from all the other arguments, the fact that this would be suicidal, inviting barbarous reprisals by Hamas, doesn't appear to bother her.
While Louis's camera team was following her car in a military convoy, she veered away and made a break for the Gaza border. Israeli soldiers intercepted her, but when Louis caught up, her eyes were sparkling with manic glee: 'I wanted to show the rabbis that Gaza is not something beyond reach.'
By contrast, his main Palestinian spokesman was the avowedly non-violent Issa Amro, a long-time activist who advocates peaceful protest and has denounced Hamas terrorism.
Every aspect of this documentary, and Amro's involvement most of all, will have been scrutinised in minute detail by BBC lawyers and spin doctors. They can't afford a repeat of the disaster earlier this year, when the teenage narrator of a film about children in the Gaza Strip turned out to be the son of a senior Hamas official.
Louis isn't naive enough to make a mistake like that.
