A warm and gusty afternoon in Sydney’s Chinatown. Todd Sampson is looking for a restaurant that no longer exists.
“This is roughly where it was,” he says, gesturing at Dixon Street, where he and his future wife, Neomie, went on their first date. It was a dumpling joint. The waiter described one particular dumpling as a “combination”, he recalls.
“A combination of what?” Sampson wanted to know. He smiles and shakes his head. “Her reaction was basically, ‘I don’t know about this guy.’”
Neomie is Burmese, Sampson is Canadian by birth but has lived in Sydney for more than 20 years carving out a career first in advertising, then television. Their children, Coco, 19, and Jet, 16, are, he says, “50% Canadian, 50% Burmese and 100% Australian”.
“They love coming to Chinatown,” Sampson says. “But they prefer it at night; and they’re not telling me what they are doing.”
Chinatown is quiet in the afternoon. A few tourists drift past; a delivery trolley rattles over the paving. Decorations for lunar new year are going up. A noble-looking horse rears up on its hind legs (a light fixture) for the new year of the fire horse, and multicoloured lanterns sway overhead in the wind.
As we walk, Sampson seems both at ease and slightly apart from it all – watchful, curious.
Most Australians know Sampson from panel shows such as Gruen and The Project, and from his immersive, science series Redesign My Brain, BodyHack, Mirror Mirror, and Life on the Line, in which he used his own body as the experiment.
Now, in his new ABC series Why, he steps further into the unknown, meeting doomsday preppers with guns and bunkers, praying in a UFO-worshipping church, getting cosy with a serial sperm donor (more than 150 children), and questioning Base jumpers risking death in order to “live more”.
“I’ve cried with more people on camera than off,” he says. “Probably more than with my own family.”
We turn toward a small Japanese tea shop ahead. “Let’s go in,” Sampson says. The weather is getting drizzly. He orders grapefruit and mango drinks for us both and we sit at a tiny round table.
Over the drinks, I ask what drove him to create Why, the series he writes, produces and hosts.
“I choose to talk to people at the edges,” he says. “The idea is to drop viewers into these worlds and show how normal ‘strange’ people are. Under every extreme group there’s a human need, often [for] belonging.”
He says his wife and family don’t watch his shows. “Neomie once told me she has better things to do than watch me play out my childhood fantasies on TV. I like that at home my TV work doesn’t exist.” He smiles as he says it, almost relieved.
Sampson has turned himself into a human laboratory for television. He’s been shot at underwater, walked a high-wire between skyscrapers, attempted Houdini-style escapes and embedded himself with elite fighters and remote tribes in pursuit of the limits of body and mind. He has also climbed Mount Everest alone (with a Sherpa). Is he an adrenaline junkie?
“No. People find that hard to believe, but I don’t feel it as adrenaline any more,” he says quietly exhaling. “I don’t chase a thrill. I think I’m driven more by curiosity and, deeper than that, worthiness. Trauma early in life, being close to that ‘fire’, can send you chasing things. I think a lot of the people I film are chasing, too: love, belonging, worth.”
Sampson briefly explains he comes from a family with a history of addiction and no education. “My mum was an addict and suicidal, and it got her in the end. So I’ve always felt a bit on the outside. I think I like being on the outside with people who are on the outside. The crying on camera I’m talking about, it is intimacy without risk. I get to be deeply in their world, and then I get to walk away. It’s easier.”
Later he mentions his mother worked in KFC and his father worked on the factory floor of Coca-Cola. His older sister was raised as his cousin. He says this working-class background gave him a starkly different worldview to British TV documentary maker Louis Theroux, whom his work is often compared to. Theroux was raised in a world of media and privilege; Sampson was not.
“People compare my style to Louis Theroux’s. I’m flattered, but we come from very different worlds. I don’t come into these communities looking down on people. If anything, I’m looking straight ahead or slightly up. Sometimes I wonder if they know something I don’t.”
Sampson listens closely, gives his full attention, never glances at his phone. There’s a lightness to him; he carries no bag.
This light touch makes it easier for him to embed. In Why, he hangs out with Ari, a New York City maths professor and serial sperm donor. Ari’s sense of belonging appears to come from a desire to help others. “He doesn’t do it for money; he’s helping people who can’t afford IVF,” Sampson says. “But the real why emerges when we meet his conservative Orthodox Jewish father, who says, ‘I just didn’t give him enough love and attention.’”
In another episode, Sampson embeds with American doomsday preppers. Families who worry about unbreathable toxic air, cyber-attacks and deadly viruses coming from the city. They are armed with fully loaded guns. “With preppers, the shared human need is control – or at least the belief in control in an uncontrollable world,” he says.
“I argue that we’re all preppers to some degree: if you carry an umbrella because you thought it might rain, you’re a prepper. The real question is: when does preparation become paranoia?”
Sampson notes I have a raincoat with me. “You are a prepper,” he says.
We finish our drinks and walk outside towards Paddy’s Markets. Sampson tells me the UFO worshippers he met were “incredibly loving, gentle people”. “Their practice centres around praying into a box filled with crystals and magnets, sending that energy to a spaceship. There was a back room – supposedly where it ‘goes to the ship’ – which we weren’t allowed to film.
“When I joined in the prayer it weirdly felt good, which gave me cult vibes afterwards – but again, it made me think about what faith and meaning really are for people.”
Sampson is not religious, but he says he was also not uncomfortable moving into those worlds.
“When I film, I try to let go of everything and just be in it. It felt performative, sure. But that’s true of most organised religion – symbols, rituals, collective singing, kneeling and praying together. I don’t believe in any of it, but I found it no less believable than many mainstream faith practices.”
Moving slowly through crowds in Paddy’s Markets, he glances over the merchandise: wigs, umbrellas, tiny USB fans, trinkets for lunar new year. “Who buys all this stuff?” he asks, bemused.
Sampson is quite a lot taller than almost everyone in here, but I still manage to lose him in the crowd. When I find him, he doesn’t make a thing of it. No one recognises him, this time. “I get recognised, but in Australia people don’t usually come up to you.”
He yearns for another adventure. “I spent 20 years dreaming of Everest and training for it,” he says. “When I finally reached the summit, all I wanted to do was get down. Most people die on the descent. I remember saying ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’, not sure who I was talking to, then thinking, ‘get out of here.’”
He has since learned he has a fear of heights and an “extreme optimism bias”. “That combination pretty much sums up my life!”
“I’m ready for another adventure straight away if it came up,” he says. “It’s not about risk, it’s curiosity, and that deep-seated insecurity from my upbringing. Those two forces drive my work.”
Todd Sampson’s Why premieres on ABC and iView on 24 February
