Career
From 2000 to 2002, Theroux presented a series of documentaries for Unreported World.
In 2004 he presented The End of the World as We Know It part of the War on Terra television series about climate change on Channel 4, for which he was chosen as presenter precisely because he originally knew nothing about the subject. He initially considered all environmentalists were opposed to technological progress. But during his research he became convinced that we face a global problem, on a scale so serious that an expansion of nuclear energy is probably the best solution (choosing the lesser evil). He reached this conclusion partly via the subjects of several interviews, amongst them Gerhard Bertz of insurance agency Munich Re, who indicated that in the past 20 years payments for natural disasters have increased by 500 percent. During another, with Royal Dutch Shell chairman Lord Ron Oxburgh, a PR assistant intervened to curtail the conversation, apparently because Oxburgh's negative views on the consequences of current oil consumption were considered detrimental to the corporation's image.
In March 2006 Theroux presented Death of a Nation on More4, as part of the The State of Russia series. In the programme he explored the country's post-Soviet problems including population decline, the growing AIDS epidemic and the persecution of the Meskhetian Turks. During interviews in the programme he spoke simple Russian.
On 28 September 2008 he presented Oligart: The Great Russian Art Boom on Channel 4 about how Russia's rich are keeping Russia's art history alive by buying, and exhibiting domestic art.
In March 2009, Faber and Faber published Far North, a future epic set in the Siberian taiga.
On 16 March 2009, Marcel Theroux presented In Search of Wabi-sabi on BBC Four as part of the channel's 'Hidden Japan' season of programming. Marcel travelled throughout Japan trying to understand the aesthetic tastes of Japan and its people.
In 2012, Theroux presented a documentary for Unreported World Series 23, on the subject of street children in Ukraine.
Read more about this topic: Marcel Theroux
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)