Clive Myries African Adventure Review A Wonderful Show Packed Full Of Fun, Joy And Hope

Myrie is great company, getting stuck into everything from street art to milking goats and having tea with Nelson Mandelas granddaughter but he is incredibly moving, too. More soon please! After decades as a BBC journalist and latterly one of the corporations best-known news presenters, you may well associate Clive Myrie with more serious endeavours. Indeed, it was a little jarring to see him just a few hours before presenting the latest Trump-flavoured bulletin last Tuesday reclining on the One Show sofa to promote his latest travelogue, declaring himself a warrior god. As unlikely as this recent-ish pivot might seem he previously presented Clive Myries Italian Road Trip in 2023, and the Bafta-winning Clive Myries Caribbean Adventure in 2024, Im here for it. As a chronicler of cultures, Myrie is faultlessly fun and eager, and his African Adventure is no exception. This series of 10 half-hour episodes set in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Morocco is infused with joy and hope, while also not entirely adopting a fingers-in-ears approach to some of the bigger issues affecting the continent be it environmental concerns or health inequalities. We kick off in South Africa, a place Myrie knows well from his time posted there as a foreign correspondent for the BBC. He catches up with a former colleague, Milton Nkosi, and the pair reflect on the stories we tend to hear about the country. The news, says Nkosi, is not wrong, but it can be one-sided. Their episode in Soweto is a beautiful thing: a corrective to some of those more difficult stories about the country and its largest township, which also acknowledges its complex history. Myrie was, he says, inspired to get into journalism in the first place by the stories he saw on the news back home in Bolton about apartheid. Now, all these decades later, he finds himself having lunch with Nkosi and Ndileka Mandela, Nelsons eldest granddaughter. They reflect on Mandela Srs humanity, and Myrie seems genuinely touched to find out that by chance theyre even eating the great mans favourite food braised oxtail, if you were wondering.