No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone off on an earnest quest to investigate a touchy subject and reached his conclusions only after the most extravagant of brow-furrowing. There is, however, a perhaps unexpected twist: the resulting programmes are rather good, creating the impression – or even reflecting the reality – of a man determined to get to the often dark heart of the matter.
For a while, it did look as if the programme’s main appeal might be as a comedy of liberal discomfiture
In the past, Azhar has applied his methods to such issues as the long-standing effect of the Satanic Verses controversy and why British Muslims joined Isis. On Wednesday he used them to tackle what at first sight appeared a less obvious cause for concern – the increasingly strange behaviour of Kanye West, or ‘Ye’ as he prefers to call himself these days.
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