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.

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.

One of the programme’s trickier tasks was to persuade us that a rapper saying weird things is something we should be properly worried about. After all, to the untrained eye, it might just seem that people like Azhar were perfectly happy when Ye was spouting the usual highly questionable left-wing stuff, but are now having a fit of the vapours at him making an album called Jesus Is King, proclaiming his belief in family values and apparently approving of Donald Trump.

For a while, in fact, it did look as if the programme’s main appeal might be as a comedy of liberal discomfiture. (Think Justin Trudeau in blackface with his arms around some hot chicks.) But only for a while – because before long two pretty damning facts were firmly established.

The first was that, as aggressions go, Ye’s certainly aren’t micro. Appearing on a talk show hosted by the frankly bonkers Alex Jones (the one who thinks the US government is turning frogs gay), he explained that ‘the Holocaust isn’t what happened’ and that ‘Hitler had a lot of redeeming qualities’ – remarks that achieved the rare feat of being too right-wing for Jones. He’s also keen on the idea that the Jews control America.

The second was that such statements are neither as ignored nor laughed off as most of us might wish. Last October, ‘Kanye was right about the Jews’ was displayed on the video board at a college football game in Florida – a sentiment echoed in graffiti across America. Less theoretically, Jews beaten up by gangs have reported its members egging each other on with the words ‘Do it for Kanye’.

The most obvious solution to the problem with Ye is that he should take his medication for the bipolar condition he’s been diagnosed with. Sadly, this seems unlikely. At one point, Azhar visited the California church Ye is known to attend. There, he met a bloke called Mark living in the car park who claims (I fear plausibly) to be Ye’s campaign manager for a 2024 presidential bid that will presumably spread his ideas more widely – and who took a stern line on Azhar’s suggestion that his boss could save America a lot of bother by popping some pills. ‘That’s Satan!’ Mark yelled by way of reply. ‘I rebuke that in the name of Jesus, because God doesn’t like sorcery.’

The Trouble with KanYe was possibly overlong, with Azhar continuing to agonise about what it all means even after he’d proved what it all meant. Nonetheless, this remained a programme that managed simultaneously to make our eyes pop and our hearts sink.

By coincidence, the following night ITV brought us another music documentary with a similar structure. In Secrets of the Bay City Rollers our man with the archive clips and the worried expression was Nicky Campbell, who was a teenager in Edinburgh in the mid-1970s when the Rollers were the city’s biggest export, duly inspiring ‘levels of excitement not seen since the Beatles’ (the pop-adulation equivalent of ‘the size of Wales’).

But from there the mood soon darkened as Campbell turned his attention to their manager Tom Paton. Of course, it’s not unknown for successful pop managers to owe part of that success to sharing the sexual preferences of their young and female target audience for pretty teenage boys. Paton, though, went well beyond the fancying stage.

Granted, Campbell was possibly more surprised than we were to learn of Paton’s relentless abuse. Even so, his spelling out of chapter and verse made for a devastating watch, as Roller after Roller spoke of what they’d suffered. Or at least those who are still alive did – because some of them had to rely on the testimony of their understandably outraged families.

Maybe saddest of all in a desperately sad programme was the story of lead singer Les McKeown, whom Paton repeatedly raped, and who died of the long-term effects of drink and drugs in 2021.