The rise of Reggie
On TV since he was 8 years old, British presenter Reggie Yates has grown up into a serious documentary host, Grant Smithies writes.
How does it feel, I wonder, to be so pretty? To be so compact and perfectly proportioned. To have such perfect features, such smooth skin, such pillowy lips. If I had a face like Reggie Yates, no doubt people would be lining up to point TV cameras at me, too.
‘‘Thank you for the compliment,’’ says Yates from his London home. ‘‘And we can go on a date any time you’re available. I don’t know if anyone’s ever called me pretty before.’’
Oh, believe me, they have. Mostly women, I imagine. Because Yates appears in their living rooms nearly every week, his beauty beamed into their homes by the BBC. I picture half the nation sighing and having what used to be called ‘‘unclean thoughts.’’ I imagine them saying to each other ‘‘Damn! He’s so pretty!’’
Yates has been a fixture on British television since he was 8, appearing on the Disney Club kids show before joining Desmond’s, one of the UK’s first sitcoms to feature a predominantly black British cast.
He has since hosted music chart show Top Of The Pops, fronted umpteen game shows and reality series, and conquered radio, anchoring prime-time music shows.
Somewhere along the way, Yates also found time to act on Doctor Who, supply the voice for crime-busting cartoon rodent Rastamouse, and direct a couple of award-winning short films.
Now 33, he is what’s known as ‘‘bankable talent’’, so the BBC has found a steady stream of highprofile vehicles for his skills, to the extent that Yates is now a huge star in his homeland.
Over here, he’s less familiar, but that’s about to change. In recent years, Yates has had a makeover as a more serious documentary maker, and a raft of his shows have been picked up by TVNZ’s DUKE channel.
‘‘Yeah, and it’s exciting to think those shows are gonna be screened way down there,’’ he says, his accent pitched halfway between BBC elocution training and the tough north London housing estate where he grew up, the son of immigrants from Ghana.
‘‘As you say, I started doing television as a kid, so I’ve made all my mistakes on screen. The spotty teenage phases, the bad wardrobe choices – I did all of that on camera. So there’s a whole generation of people who have been on that journey with me in the UK, and these documentaries feel like a natural progression of that journey.
‘‘I’ve reached that time in my life when I’m asking deeper questions. I’m not a million miles away from being a grown-up married man, and this feels like the information gathering part of my life, before I pass on the things I’ve learned to by own kids.’’
The Guardian claims Yates has helped ‘‘reinvent the documentary for Generation Y’’ as a younger, hipper version of Louis Theroux, able to present meaty topics in a fresh way that appeals to younger audiences with little appetite for more traditional, fact-heavy docos.
‘‘I was quite reticent to make documentaries at first because I had no experience in that world. Why would the audience accept me as the face of challenging topics like poverty in Africa or gun violence? But every excuse I put forward was precisely the reason the BBC wanted me to do it.
‘‘We’re so used to seeing a suited journalist turn up in these challenging, scary environments, offering a thesis and presenting information to prove that thesis. But I seem a lot more normal and real world, and I’m more open to being wrong. My approach is to learn, on camera, about each issue alongside my audience.’’
The BBC commissioned Yates to front a series of youth-oriented programmes investigating teen gangs in Britain and South Africa, and far-right youth groups in Russia. Another series called The Insider finds him interviewing inmates in a Texan jail, and tagging along as the Mexican army tracks down drug cartels.
In Race Riots USA (Duke, December 21, 8.30pm), Yates travels to Ferguson, Missouri, a year on from the 2014 police shooting of unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.
‘‘As a young black man, I can’t help feeling that if I lived here, it could have been me,’’ he says in the show, noting that the relationship between the Missouri cops and local black teens is as fractious as ever.
There are outbreaks of bleak comedy. Local police regularly issue ‘‘manner of walking’’ infringement notices to ghetto youth seen striding along with a gangsta-style ‘‘pimp roll’’, and young men can also be fined if their trousers are riding too low. Yates points out that his own jeans are technically in breach of this bylaw.
Starting the same week, Yates’ Extreme Russia mini-series runs over three Mondays from January 19. We’re treated to grim visions of modern Soviet society, meeting homophobic politicians, neoNazis, child-model scouts in Siberia, and stubbly Moscow hipsters who nonetheless pledge unwavering allegiance to all things Putin.
Yates attempts to interview young white power demonstrators who tell him that in an ideal world, black men like him would all be rounded up to ‘‘burn on a cross’’. He listens to his abusers with impressively calm curiosity, keen to understand the roots of their hatred.
‘‘People often stop me in the street to talk about that Russian series. Some of the scenes were so confrontational, viewers felt really worried for me. But I’m not trying to pretend I’m some sort of hard nut; I wear far too much moisturiser for that. To be surrounded by young people spewing so much hate, that wasn’t intimidating to me, it was sad. We live in an age where information is everywhere. At any time, just using my phone, I can find indepth info about history, science, religion, whatever. So to meet young people who’re part of a generation with that level of access – it just makes me sad when they’re so deliberately ignorant.’’
There’s still something a little INCONGRUOUS about watching Yates in settings like these. Calm, stylish, impeccably dressed, it’s mildly alarming to witness his immaculate tailoring and perfect cheekbones moving through the crack-infested streets of Chicago’s south side, or parked in a dogchewed armchair in the worn-out houses of some of his interview subjects.
But Yates is unfailingly open, interested, unpatronising. People tell him their stories and you see him on the verge of tears, unable to keep up any semblance of PROFESSIONAL distance as he hears about a mother’s only son being shot down in the street, or meets a mortuary assistant who’s terrified SHE might come into work one DAY AND find her own child on the slab.
‘‘When I meet someone, I’m
‘ My job is to let people express their beliefs, no matter how disgusted I might be by some of those beliefs.’ REGGIE YATES