When it comes to the human heart, what shocks other people tends to elicit in me little more than a shrug. Almost nothing, it seems, is beyond my imagination or emotional flexibility; I grow less and less capable of passing a certain kind of moral judgement with every year that passes. But perhaps there are, after all, limits to my understanding. Listening to a series of incandescent young women describe their intense fascination with Charles Manson – a diminutive creep with a small and tedious mind, dirty fingernails, and sadistic impulses it would have been possible to spot from Mars whether you were on LSD or not – I felt nothing but bafflement. At this point, I think I might more easily fathom quantum physics than grasp why they would once have followed him to the ends of the earth.
Most “astonishing” documentaries rarely are that. But Manson: The Lost Tapes (9pm, 27 September) really is disquieting: a trip and a half of purest horror dressed up as social history (Jefferson Airplane’s accusatory anthem “Somebody to Love” – “your mind is so full of red” – has never sounded more sinister). In two parts, it comprises a series of rediscovered interviews with Manson Family members conducted by the documentary maker Robert Hendrickson, while Manson was awaiting trial for the murder of the actress Sharon Tate and nine others in 1969; and two contemporaneous interviews with former Family members, Dianne Lake and Catherine Share.
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