Louis Theroux and his big, sexy brain are coming to Australia in January 2020 and it’s arguably the best thing to happen to our country in recent memory.

The British documentarian announced on Twitter that he’ll be doing a series of live shows in Australia and New Zealand, hosted by Julia Zemiro – perhaps the luckiest woman in the world.

Exciting news! I’ll be doing a series of live shows in Aus and NZ in Jan 2020. Really looking forward to it. Please come! More info here: https://t.co/Nnj0r4Zb3F

— Louis Theroux (@louistheroux) June 5, 2019

Louis Theroux Without Limits will see Theroux live on stage in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland, in a two-hour show that explores the behind-the-scenes secrets of his most famous encounters, as well as an intimate look at what he’s learned from experiencing some of the world’s most bizarre subcultures.

While tickets are yet to go on sale, you can sign up to join the waitlist to access the exclusive presale on 18 June. Tickets officially go on sale on 24 June.

It won’t be the first time Julia Zemiro has spent time with the 49-year-old, having hosted him as a guest on her ABC series Home Delivery, which walks people through their former lives. The episode saw Zemiro take Theroux back to where he grew up in South London, and the time he spent at the prestigious Westminster school.

Over the course of his 20 year career as a documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux has immersed himself in some of the most bizarre and confronting modern subcultures. He’s spent time with porn stars and wrestlers, neo-Nazis and serial killers, and has created a unique brand of journalism by approaching them all with unmitigated curiosity.

What tends to strike viewers most about Theroux’s approach to his subjects is his ability to establish empathy and rapport with anyone. It’s this skill which then allows him to challenge those individuals – who are usually met by the media with pure outrage – in a manner unlike any other journalist. He asks the hard and important questions, awkward as they may be, with the genuine intention to understand.

In December 2017, I interviewed Theroux ahead of his three-part Dark States series, which explored opioid and heroin addiction in Huntington, sex trafficking in Houston, and murder in Milwaukee.

Watch the trailer for Dark States. Post continues after video.

At the time, I asked him whether there was anything in his career, or a documentary he’s made, that he wishes he could go back and do differently.

“You know I wish I could go back knowing what I know now and confront Jimmy Savile, you know, while he was alive, while I was making the program,” he said.

Jimmy Savile was an English TV presenter and radio personality, known for hosting Jim’ll Fix It, a show that granted the wishes of a number of viewers (usually children) each week, and Top of the Pops, the iconic BBC music chart show. In 2000, an episode of Theroux’s series When Louis Met… aired featuring Savile, who was 73 at the time. He had been accused of paedophilia and sexual assault, but at the time of Theroux’s documentary, the allegations had been vehemently denied by Savile, who even took legal action against some of his accusers.

After Savile’s death in October 2011, hundreds more allegations were made against him – the scale of which police described as “unprecedented”. In 2013, it was reported that 214 of the allegations made against him would have been criminal offences had they been reported at the time. It was also found that sixteen of those who said they had been raped by Savile were under the age of consent (16), and four were under the age of ten.

Of course, Theroux’s failure to bring these allegations to the forefront of his own documentary a decade earlier was simply the result of Savile’s crimes not yet being common knowledge, but it seems Theroux still regrets not pushing Savile harder when he had the chance.

“I think we’d all as a society in Britain… it would’ve been massively healthier, more salutary for his victims and the wider community to see him having to face in court, an investigation, the consequences of what he’d done,” he told me.

“But sadly, I was never able to do that.”

Louis Theroux Without Limits will likely see Theroux share similarly candid thoughts about his work over the last three decades.