Celebrity travelogues: we have all seen too many of them, so we know the form. Pretty shots from drones and cute animated maps introduce us to a series of locations where people of interest are hailed and well met, while places and their history are summed up too briefly, and glib conclusions about whole countries are drawn with a smile. Oti Mabuse: My South Africa (BBC One) does have a lot of the tics and cliches of the genre but, because of where we are and who we are with, its sweet cosiness is deceptive.
Mabuse is a professional ballroom dancer who won Strictly Come Dancing in 2019 with Kelvin Fletcher, and was then part of one of the show’s loveliest glories by repeating the feat with Bill Bailey the following year. My South Africa, then, is what you might call a “this is where” doc, in which an elite athlete or artist – both at once, in Mabuse’s case – returns to their roots. This is where they were born, this is where they discovered they could do the thing you know them for, this is where they won their first trophy.
