AWARD-WINNING documentary maker Louis Theroux has warned that fewer people are making risk-taking shows for fear of offending people.
Speaking in the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, he said there were less people willing to make shows about individuals or groups who might spark outrage.
Louis, 53, has built a career on the back of interviewing everyone from sex monster Jimmy Saville to far right fanatics in the US.
He said: “Lately, there have been changes in the broader culture. We are, I’m happy to say, more thoughtful about representation, about who gets to tell what story, about power and privilege, about the need not to wantonly give offence.
"I am fully signed up to that agenda. But I wonder if there is something else going on as well.
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"That the very laudable aims of not giving offence have created an atmosphere of anxiety that sometimes leads to less confident, less morally complex filmmaking.
“And that the precepts of sensitivity have come into conflict with the words inscribed into the walls of New Broadcasting House, attributed to George Orwell.
“If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“And that as a result programmes about extremists and sex workers and paedophiles might be harder to get commissioned.”
He added: “I realise times have changed and that the raised stakes – the fact that the manosphere, the conspiracy community, the far-right have real power – means we should be on our mettle to report responsibly.
“But those raised stakes also show how important it is that we do report it. Not hide from it, or to report it in a way that feels po-faced, or which lacks nuance, or which lacks the confidence to understand its subjects rather than simply deplore them in exposés so heavy handed and clumsy that they end up undermining themselves.
"Through the years my guiding light has been my own sense of curiosity and fear. Worry and fear are part of the process.
"If I feel queasy approaching a subject, I remind myself it’s a sign I’m doing work that is risky, weighted with difficult moral questions, and that I’m approaching them with a sense of responsibility.
“Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is the meaning of taking risks."
He added: “Playing it safe. Following a formula. That may be a route to success for some. It never worked for me.”
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