BBC announces new Kanye West documentary and podcast

The BBC has commissioned a documentary and podcast exploring “the rollercoaster life and career” of Kanye West.

The project, which currently has the working title of We Need To Talk About Kanye, will air on BBC Two. It will be fronted by the investigative journalist Mobeen Azhar, who previously made an award-winning documentary in 2021 about Britney Spears‘ conservatorship, The Battle For Britney. 

Per a press statement by BBC’s media centre: “Unfolding against the backdrop of Ye’s 2024 election campaign, and at a time when his behaviour has sparked outrage and a re-evaluation of his place in popular culture, this one-off documentary follows Mobeen as he attempts to understand the complex journey that led Ye to become one of the most famous and creatively successful artists of his generation. But more recently, to condemnation and notoriety.”

An eight-part podcast series, The Kanye Story, will accompany the documentary. Each episode will bring on guests “who can bring an insight into Kanye’s life and dig deeper into his place in culture; starting with the early stratospheric success to the condemnation of later years”.

A transmission date for the documentary has not yet been confirmed but will be announced “in the coming months”.

Elsewhere, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an international NGO, released a report earlier this week that linked West’s recent spate of anti-Semitic remarks to 30 different hate incidents in the US.

“These incidents — which include vandalism, banner drops, targeted harassment and campus propaganda distributions — demonstrate the ongoing influence of Ye’s conspiratorial, bigoted rants,” the ADL wrote in the report.

It continued that “immediately following Ye’s antisemitic comments” which included “inflammatory tropes about Jewish power and Holocaust denial”, the slogan ‘Ye is Right’ surfaced online in hashtags and anti-semitic accounts.

West’s spate of anti-semitic comments began when he tweeted that he was going to go “death con 3 [sic] On JEWISH PEOPLE” back in October.

The rapper was recently declared ‘Antisemite Of The Year’ by the watchdog group StopAntisemitism, and has been widely condemned by many figures in the entertainment world, as well as several political figures and organisations that represent Jewish communities.