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Movies & TV

18th Nov 2018

Louis Theroux’s powerful new documentary is ‘one of the most difficult’ features that he ever made

Paul Moore

Louis Theroux

It airs tonight and looks extremely emotional.

Given the gravity of the subjects that Louis Theroux has covered in his distinguished career as a broadcaster, it must take an awful lot for a topic to make it onto his list of the most memorable documentaries that he was worked on.

While the Weird Weekends format showed us the more playful and comedic side of Theroux’s personality, he’s more than capable of capturing some heartbreaking moments of raw drama and emotion.

For example, his examination of how drug addiction – crystal meth and opiates respectively – have torn apart the cities of Fresno, California and Huntington, West Virginia was absolutely fascinating.

After returning to our screens in Love Without Limits, Theroux’s Altered States series will now focus on terminally ill patients who are choosing to end their own lives.

In Choosing Death, Theroux heads to California, where residents can now take home a lethal overdose as long as they are terminally ill, of sound mind and strong enough to administer their own prescribed dose.

During the documentary, Theroux is invited into the family homes of those who want control over the decision to end their own lives but he discovers that when you have complete autonomy over your own death, choosing the right time is not such a simple decision.

He also meets a group who provide information about how to die to those who don’t fit the legal criteria.

With them, he meets a woman planning to end her life long before what would appear to be her natural time, raising complex moral and legal questions about how much control we should have over our own deaths.

In his own words, “for us, it was one of the most difficult as a team that we’ve taken on, from the stand point of wanting to do things correctly. I mean, the stakes couldn’t really be higher. Someone potentially is taking his or her life.”

Choosing Death airs on BBC2 at 21:00.