What do Chelsea Manning, Dame Joan Collins and the singer Raye have in common? No, this isn’t the fiendishly difficult connections round at your local pub quiz; it’s the line-up of stars brought under the microscope for the second season of BBC One’s The Louis Theroux Interviews, in which the bespectacled beanpole applies his trademark wit and acuity to another dizzyingly eccentric array of celebrities.
Over the course of five 40-minute interviews, Theroux probes the lives, both professional and personal, of Collins, Manning, and Raye, as well as boxer Anthony Joshua and singer Pete Doherty. There was undoubtedly a time when the material here would’ve been a mere spoke in the wheel of a Weird Weekends episode (when Theroux visits the Finchley boxing gym where Joshua threw his first punches, it feels like a strand of a larger conversation about contact sports, masculinity, or head injuries) but for once, the journalist is not drawing on a large canvas – these are simple, linear interviews with quite-famous people.
