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Louis Theroux: By Reason of Insanity (Sunday, BBC2) concluded with an attempt to chart the almost infinitely subtle gradations between sanity and insanity, trying to pinpoint the moment when criminal actions shade into clinical symptoms. On these impossible judgments rest such things as competence to stand trial – meaning the difference between a punitive, finite prison term and a rehabilitative but potentially lifetime stay in hospital.
The most shocking case was 25-year-old Dean’s. He had sexually assaulted his mother when he was 18. While his doctors were enumerating his behaviours and diagnoses – bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, manipulative, on top of his childhood attention deficit and oppositional defiance disorders – she laid out on the kitchen table her son’s school photos for Louis. In them you can see his eyes darken over the years. Did she see it, too, Louis wondered. She did. But in this last year she thinks he is seeming to care more about other people. She sees better, you suspect, the boy he was.

This series may have been Theroux’s finest hour (or two). His gift for perfect neutrality was never more necessarily or carefully deployed, nor his lightning ability to locate the question we all want to ask and frame it in a way that demands the truth without antagonising or browbeating his interviewee. All are treated with respect and left with their dignity intact. Masterful, and oddly beautiful.