Clive Myrie’s African Adventure evaluation – an exquisite present packed stuffed with enjoyable, pleasure and hope | Tv

After a long time as a BBC journalist and – latterly – one of many company’s best-known information presenters, chances are you’ll nicely affiliate Clive Myrie with extra critical endeavours. Indeed, it was a bit of jarring to see him – just some hours earlier than presenting the newest Trump-flavoured bulletin final Tuesday – reclining on the One Show couch to advertise his newest travelogue, declaring himself “a warrior god”. As unlikely as this recent-ish pivot might sound (he beforehand introduced Clive Myrie’s Italian Road Trip in 2023, and the Bafta-winning Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure in 2024), I’m right here for it. As a chronicler of cultures, Myrie is faultlessly enjoyable and keen, and his African Adventure isn’t any exception. This sequence of 10 half-hour episodes set in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Morocco is infused with pleasure and hope, whereas additionally not totally adopting a fingers-in-ears method to among the larger points affecting the continent – be it environmental considerations or well being inequalities.

We kick off in South Africa, a spot Myrie is aware of nicely from his time posted there as a international correspondent for the BBC. He catches up with a former colleague, Milton Nkosi, and the pair replicate on the tales we have a tendency to listen to concerning the nation. The information, says Nkosi, “is not wrong, but it can be one-sided”. Their episode in Soweto is a stupendous factor: a corrective to a few of these harder tales concerning the nation and its largest township, which additionally acknowledges its advanced historical past. Myrie was, he says, impressed to get into journalism within the first place by the tales he noticed on the information again house in Bolton about apartheid. Now, all these a long time later, he finds himself having lunch with Nkosi and Ndileka Mandela, Nelson’s eldest granddaughter. They replicate on Mandela Sr’s humanity, and Myrie appears genuinely touched to search out out that – by probability – they’re even consuming the good man’s favorite meals (braised oxtail, for those who have been questioning).

South Africa is filled with enjoyable: “Banksy who?” says Myrie, as he grabs a twig can and helps artist Senzo Nhlapo with some avenue artwork. Mucking in is the theme of the entire sequence, in truth, whether or not he’s cooking an enormous pot of bunny chow, a South African dish with Indian roots (“I feel like I’m rowing a boat in the Oxford and Cambridge boat race,” he says, the stirring proving a problem) or serving to out at a craft centre in Durban supporting girls with HIV/Aids (“maybe in about six months,” he says, wanting down on the minuscule a part of a beaded pin he has managed to finish, “I would have a South African flag”). Whether it’s trapeze classes or jazz drumming or dancing to the nation’s thriving amapiano dance music, you completely can not fault his enthusiasm.

As talked about, the sequence doesn’t draw back from among the harder points affecting Africa. The strongest a part of the sequence are the episodes filmed in Ghana, the place Myrie covers a lot floor – up to date and historic. As the kid of Jamaican dad and mom who got here to Britain through the Windrush period, Myrie knew he had West African descent as a result of transatlantic slavery. Here, he visits the huge fortresses the place enslaved folks have been held: “I’ve spent my whole life reporting on the inhumanity of human beings to fellow human beings,” he says, “but this is personal.” He can also be welcomed by the Fante folks in a naming ceremony that may be a pure delight to observe, and he’s thrilled together with his new sobriquet: Papa Kojo Abaka. As for the up to date, the deeply troubling challenge of textile waste (a lot of it from the west) leads Myrie to go to the Or Foundation in Accra, masters of recycled trend who make him a fetching outfit from sportswear that might in any other case have ended up polluting the nation’s seashores. He meets folks with ingenious concepts for fixing the continent’s largest issues, together with a startup whose AI-powered chatbot goals to offer Nigerians well being recommendation on the go, amid a worrying scarcity of docs (staggeringly, we’re informed, round a 3rd of all maternal deaths the world over happen within the nation).

The Morocco episodes really feel most like a standard travelogue, however they’re nonetheless numerous enjoyable – even when Goat Milking with Clive Myrie does have a contact of the Partridge about it, as an concept. Really, although, it is a great sequence which exhibits that the much-maligned movie star journey present will be instructional, informative and actually shifting (and, crucially, that locations apart from Italy can be found). And with a lot extra of Africa to see, right here’s hoping they provide him a number of weeks off from the information once more quickly.