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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Desert Island Discs

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Factual: Life Stories

Castaway guests share the soundtrack of their lives.

Eight tracks, a book and a luxury: what would you take to a desert island? Guests share the soundtrack of their lives.

BBC Radio 4 LW

Desert Island Discs: Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux

BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs, Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux, film-maker, shares the soundtrack of his life with Lauren Laverne.

Louis Theroux shares the eight tracks, book and luxury he would take with him if cast away to a desert island. With Lauren Laverne.

Louis Theroux is a television documentary maker. He has received two BAFTAs and a Royal Television Society Award for his work which includes the series Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends and When Louis Met…

Born in 1970, and brought up in south London, he is the son of the American writer Paul Theroux and the BBC World Service radio producer Anne Castle. He was privately educated at Westminster School and read History at Oxford, graduating with a first. He moved to the USA where he was introduced to the American documentary maker Michael Moore and started making segments on unusual subcultures for Moore’s show TV Nation. He was given his own series – Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends – by the BBC in the late 1990s and, after three series, he went on to present two series of When Louis Met…, which included Neil and Christine Hamilton, Max Clifford, Chris Eubank and Jimmy Savile. 

Since then, he has made dozens of documentaries, many of them in the USA. In 2016, he revisited his encounters with Jimmy Savile in the wake of Savile’s death and the surfacing of allegations of child sexual abuse. The same year, his only feature-length film, My Scientology Movie, was released. His most recent documentaries dealt with sexual assault on American campuses, mothers with post-natal mental illness, and escorting.

BOOK CHOICE: Remembrance of things Past – Marcel Proust 
LUXURY: 40,000 piece Jigsaw puzzle
CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: “Heaven on their Minds” from the album Jesus Christ Superstar

Presenter:  Lauren Laverne
Producer:  Cathy Drysdale

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