How to describe How to With John Wilson? The titular documentarian had a go himself, way back in a 2021 episode of the show: “It’s kind of like, uh, memoir … essay … um. It takes place in New York.”
Wilson, armed only with a handheld camera and his interpersonal awkwardness, roams his home city capturing offbeat, hilarious or disturbing images of the urban everyday, chatting with New York’s oddest people and adding incidents from his own eccentric existence. Then, with a wise skill belied by all the ums, ers and ahems he refuses to edit out of his narration, Wilson knits all of the above into half-hour meditations on the loneliness and silliness of modern life.
As an interviewer, Wilson makes Louis Theroux look like Terry Wogan; as a cinematographer, he has the sideways eye of arthouse legends like Patrick Keiller and James Benning, but with more of a slapstick vibe. Whether his show is the most profound on TV is arguable; that it is one of the funniest is undeniable.
First up is Wilson’s guide to finding a public toilet, in which we learn that a process that has taken place in the past two decades in the UK began in New York in the 1970s: the steady closure of freely accessible restrooms, as private companies take over public spaces and make them hostile to ordinary citizens.
This assessment of the politics of city living is more polemical than most of Wilson’s work, though he still finds room to include shots that are crudely amusing and delightfully odd. For the former, a young creative in a hurry, whose bow-legged gait unfortunately makes him look as if he urgently needs the loo; for the latter, two people trying to decorate a pavement with toilet paper, applied dead straight along the kerb and stuck down with bathroom sealant. Why are they doing that? We’ll never know. How to … captures myriad such fleeting mysteries every week, as well as persistently celebrating the sheer filth of a city that never stops. (Wilson finds and films a truly incredible number of urine-filled bottles in gutters.)
Not only is How to … not actually a how-to guide, it also tends to deviate from even the vaguest interpretation of the theme promised by the episode’s title. Previously, an instalment on scaffolding was really about commitment; an episode about wine-tasting was ultimately concerned with social anxiety; and a lesson on how to improve your memory was about memory, but in the sense of coming to terms with one’s past and realising how useless our former selves can be to us.
How to Find a Public Restroom pivots away from toilets with a little less elegance than some of Wilson’s thinkpieces, but is rescued by his sense of adventure and talent for turning up fantastic oddballs. First, he bums a ride upstate with a gang of peppy brunchers on their way to see a gig by the electronic duo Odesza; then, unbelievably, a lone woman in a battered camper van agrees to let him accompany her to the Burning Man festival. When Wilson asks her about the toilet provision there, she assures him that there is, rather charmingly, a “polethra of Porta Pottis”, an utterance that has stuck in my mind so firmly that I now struggle to recall the word “plethora” and may just say “polethra” instead from here on.
With his talent for finding fascinating outsiders confirmed once again, Wilson moves on, in the second new episode, to the noise of New York – prompted initially by a visit to the doctor to have wax removed from his ears. The montage that follows, of the city sounds Wilson can supposedly now tune into, is the show at its most comedic, as screeching, hammering, revving, shouting and a parping brass band are interspersed with the bewildering poetry of eavesdropped conversations. “Oh my god,” says a woman dining alfresco with a friend, as Wilson’s camera lurks 10ft away, “every time I go to the Rockefeller Center, Valerie, I can’t help but remember when I had my gallbladder issue.”
After a jaw-dropping tour of some New York apartments where tenants pay reduced rent because of cacophonous noise problems, Wilson wanders off again, ending up in the quiet of Green Bank, West Virginia, where the lack of a 5G signal, due to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope being in the area, means it’s home to the “electrosensitive community”.
They’re catnip to Wilson, but he never has a problem locating fodder for this glorious anomaly of a programme. Weird, wonderful humanity is everywhere Wilson goes.
• How to With John Wilson was on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and on Binge in Australia.
• This article was amended on 10 March 2024. Green Bank is in West Virginia, not Virginia, and its observatory houses the world’s largest steerable radio telescope, not the world’s largest radio telescope.
