A question mark in a documentary title always suggests a last-minute hedging of bets. In the case of Lost Boys? What’s Going Wrong For Asian Men, the undermining effect is heightened by a question mark that seems to be in the wrong place – Lost Boys: What’s Going Wrong For Asian Men? would surely have been better.

Fortunately, the contrast between title and content was stark. Part of the BBC’s Big British Asian Summer season, journalist Mehreen Baig’s investigation into the challenges facing young British Asian men was unflinching and specific. She didn’t speak of Asian men generally, but of British-Pakistani men. Even more specifically, she meant those young men who, like 70% of British-Pakistanis, trace their roots back to the Mirpur district of Kashmir. I can see all that would be hard to sum up in a programme title.

Baig provided an object lesson in how to tackle an immensely sensitive subject head on. First, know what you are talking about. A British-Pakistani herself, Baig is a former state-school teacher with considerable experience of the problems facing young Asian boys. Second, speak directly to the community concerned, for it also knows what it is talking about.

In Bradford, where a fifth of the population is Asian, British-Pakistani boys suffer by reputation – they are thought of as “groomers, terrorists and drug dealers”. They also face grinding deprivation. In the 1950s, when a new dam flooded the farms of Mirpur, thousands of displaced young men came to the north of England to work in the mills. But the mills are now gone. Of Pakistani men now employed in Bradford, one in four is a taxi driver. Seventeen-year-old Luqman has been working since he was 13 – sometimes juggling three jobs at once – to help his mother make ends meet. The temptation to deal drugs is ever present, but he resists it. “At the end of the day, we have to remember that we’re Muslims,” he said.

The boys also tend to suffer from a certain isolation, living at home for longer and attending segregated schools. Nav, 27, found university a huge cultural shock. “I had to talk, and meet people called David and John,” he said. Unable to cope, he left after his first term.

Baig did not shy away from the opinion – held by her father and other, older immigrants she met – that many of these boys are simply spoiled. Treated like princelings at home, they are reluctant to fly the nest even when they are in full-time work (to be fair, the young men she interviewed did not disagree with this characterisation).

The most intriguing aspect of Baig’s investigation was the extent to which these hardships do not affect Asian men outside the British Mirpuri community. The Gujaratis who fled Uganda with nothing in the 1970s prospered quickly, and assimilated more readily. Their young male descendants have inherited a legacy of entrepreneurial flair, not to mention money.

There was a lot to absorb here. But that question mark in the title was certainly undeserved: informed, thorough and provocative, Baig’s report was full of hard answers.

Maharajah Duleep Singh in 1875.

Also part of the Big British Asian Summer, The Stolen Maharaja (BBC Four) traced the story of Duleep Singh, the last Maharaja of the Punjab. In 1848, the 10-year-old Singh was already on the throne, but he was soon deposed by the British, separated from his mother and removed to a remote outpost under the guardianship of an army surgeon. He made the long journey from imprisoned child to English aristocrat, all while barely having a say in the matter. It is a fascinating tale if you don’t already know it. I didn’t.

Recently unearthed archives contain his adolescent letters, and show him to be ever the devoted ward (“I hope that you will not look at my mistakes in writing and spelling”). At 16, he was taken to Britain, where he met Queen Victoria, who proclaimed him “extremely handsome”. The 1857 Indian Rebellion prevented his return home. He built the sprawling Elveden Hall in Suffolk with cash from the India Office, and joined the Prince of Wales’s hunting set. Then the money ran out. Refused permission to return to his ancestral lands, he ended his days in Paris, plotting an Indian invasion with a soldier of fortune who was actually a spy. For much of his life, he lived like a king, but he was always a pawn, cruelly used and readily sacrificed.