A British broadcaster holding both British and US citizenship, Louis Theroux is best known for his television series Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends and When Louis Met…He is the son of travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux.

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LOUIS Theroux’s porn name would be Sir Lance A Lot. That’s his actual porn name if he was in a movie, not his porn name based on any first animal companion/mother’s maiden name/first street name party formula.

(Fluffy Gineroi if you must know.) Louis’s been offered a role in a movie – Anal Witness IV I think it is – and Sir Lance A Lot would be his name. I’m thinking it will require nudity. Or Anal Witness IV might be the one where he plays a park ranger and has to walk fully clothed into a room full of appreciative young guys and warn them of some imminent danger, I can’t remember now, I didn’t write it down at the time because I was too busy watching Troy.

Troy is a straight guy who acts in porno movies with other men. A pay-for-gay. He’s one of several gifted professionals we meet tonight in Louis Theroux’s Porno. I also liked JJ, who if he wasn’t making movies would be back in the military. And on balance he’d prefer the first one, he says. He won’t do any weird stuff though – nobody obese, no old people . . . JJ looks about 14. Someone refers to him as “the kid” at one stage and I didn’t know if that was his nickname or what. He seems quite sweet, they all do. “You seem all right, you seem well-adjusted,” Louis remarks to one woman, who comes back with: “Yeah, well it took me a long time to kick the heroin.”

Still, at least she would’ve had the income to fund it – the demand for pornography is huge, they’re just churning out the titles: Anal Witness IV, Wide Open Spaces, Sperms of Endearment . . . that last one is from an episode of The Simpsons, I just added it for our amusement.

But the sex industry is really the only place apart from modelling where women make more money than men. There’s a bit where a boss from Vivid Entertainment, a large production company, walks Louis through the office and past a wall of photos she calls the hall of fame . . . Louis asks where are all the men, and she looks at him and goes: “There isn’t any, sweetie.” As one industry veteran puts it, there are more astronauts in the world than there are working male performers. In one four-hour stretch Troy made about $1500. Don’t ask what he had to do to get it. And it’s not a job everyone can handle. Troy says the pressure can get so bad for some of them they commit suicide or go off and live in Idaho.