Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
STRICTLY STAR
Some 500 miles from Strictly’s glittering ballroom, overlooking the Sound of Mull, there is a pile of logs stacked outside Hamza Yassin’s remote Scottish village home, waiting to be chopped.
It’s a task the rugby playing, cabertossing strongman will manage with little more than a flex of his artful little finger, most probably.
Then the once relatively unknown wildlife-cameraman-turned-strictly’ssurprise-ballroom-whizz will no doubt turn his attention to chopping his friends’ and neighbours’ logs, too.
He usually offers to help, they explain gratefully, when he’s not off filming with a frost-encrusted face in Arctic wildernesses.
This is the man who has fashioned one such log into a barbell for a little light exercise, and excels in the local Highland Games with the caber, hammer and shot put, after all.
But if we’re learning one thing about Hamza, who moved to this remote location 11 years ago, as this year’s Strictly dances on, it’s to expect the unexpected.
He may be built like a rugby union front-row forward, brave polar bears and fling his petite dance partner Jowita Przystal into the air like a yo-yo, but that’s not the end of the Countryfile and Cbeebies presenter’s hidden talents.
“He is also a bit of a Gok Wan,” explains his neighbour and friend Gayle Richardson, giggling hard.
“Any time I’m going on a night out or buying clothes I will often take a selfie and send it to him. If I can’t decide between two or three outfits he will say, ‘Wear this, not those shoes’. And you know what, he’s always spot on.
“I’ll come and do a twirl for him and go, ‘What do you think?’ He has a natural eye for it.”
But Gayle, 47, who has known Hamza since he first moved to the village on the peninsula of Ardnamurchan in Lochaber, and lives right next door, is very familiar with his strongman side, too.
Long before Jowita experienced the gaspinducing “dead lift” during the pair’s sensational salsa, Gayle was told to “plank” and was thrown into the blue sky outside their homes. It was just a regular Sunday five years ago. Hamza thought it would be fun to try.
“It’s a bit of a signature move,” Gayle reveals. “I was joking with him he wouldn’t be able to lift me so he was like, ‘Of course I can’.
“So we gave it a go. He said, ‘OK, you have to keep really still and don’t laugh’.
“So he lifted me up and I started giggling and just crumbled, but he just caught me. I was heading for the ground, he didn’t let me fall!”
Gayle and some of the other villagers travelled to watch Hamza in the live show when he performed said salsa.
“As soon as he lifted Jowita up we all nodded to each other because we knew what was coming next,” laughs Gayle.
She adds: “He’s a fascinating guy. There are so many strings to his bow. He’s super strong but super sweet.”
Jowita will definitely agree, after mics picked up the overwhelmed cameraman telling her “You’re amazing, you’re amazing” after his 38 point-scoring American Smooth last weekend.
Hamza, 32, was born in Sudan and grew up in Khartoum, but moved to the UK when he was eight along with his siblings and doctor parents, after the family was invited here by the Royal College of Medicine.
They lived first in Newcastle, then Northampton, and Hamza studied zoology at Bangor University, then gained a masters in biological photography at Nottingham.
He made the surprising decision to move to such an isolated location after