PICK OF TODAY’S TV

OTI MABUSE: MY SOUTH AFRICA, 9PM, BBC1

FORMER Strictly pro Oti Mabuse (pictured) returns to the homeland she left a decade ago for a deeply personal travelogue that stays mostly on the light side, but doesn’t completely avoid South Africa’s dark past and the problems it currently faces. Oti heads straight home, to Pretoria, where we meet her truly inspirational mother, Dudu. After a very long hug — mother and daughter are so sweet together — it’s clear from whom Oti got her drive and ambition, and we see the very room where she took her first dance steps. Oti’s final destination is Cape Town, some 1,000 miles away, but she makes a series of stopovers first. At Sun City, we see grainy footage of little Oti dancing in the under-12 Latin competition there — she and her partner are the only black competitors. The ghost of Apartheid still lingers, of course, but Oti finds hope for the future, even in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township, where poverty, violence and drugs are a way of life. There, a dance troupe provide ‘a glimpse of joy and love and expression . . . this thing that you just can’t buy.’ And, thanks to Oti and her natural, infectious optimism, your overriding impression of South Africa will be one of joy and love.