When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.
What is the worst job you have done?
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
What song would you like played at your funeral?
Death & what remains
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
There was a period in the early 2000s when I had been doing celebrity profiles and thought I’d lost my way creatively.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 November 2018 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 229 →
Rory Kinnear
English actor
It’s a toss-up between organising a new filing system at Hammersmith & Fulham social services and relying on tips in the least popular restaurant in London to get through drama school.
Craig David
British singer
Selling double glazing.
Mo Farah
British track and field athlete
I have worked in McDonald’s.
More from Louis Theroux
View profile →To have made a career in TV while being nervous by nature and incapable of doing a piece to camera.
I don’t think I’ve ever been close to death but I am a nervous flyer, especially during turbulence, so there have been many times where I’ve felt that I was.
To everyone who has been out with me and had to deal with my lack of emotional maturity.
You suddenly get what people are talking about when they talk about being in love.
The Weird Weekends theme music: Mini Skirt by Esquivel.
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- How does a new work begin for you? 63 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you do? 46 answers
- What is the part of your job that people would be surprised is most of your job? 41 answers
Also answered this
Jon Sopel, Robert Peston, Caroline Lucas, Keir Starmer, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem
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