Former Strictly favourite Hamza Yassin wants to find love - and shares his struggles with racism

“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t party. I didn’t understand people at uni going drinking, becoming absolutely mortal then waking up the next day saying, ‘I don’t want to go to the lecture because I’m hung over.’ We calculated back then that every lecture was costing us roughly £300, so why spend £300 lying in bed recovering from a hangover?”

He delivers this message of temperance not with any finger-wagging disapproval, rather a sense of bewilderment that anyone would choose shots over shearwaters. “It just seems like a waste of time. Get up and go out into the countryside.”

It’s a lifestyle mantra that’s served him well. Apart, of course, from exuberant spins beneath the Strictly glitterball (he won the show in 2022), the countryside is where he’s happiest, and where he is today, talking in the shade of a Scots pine, his calf-length hair tucked beneath a floppy green canvas hat and resting on a stout hazel stick carved 15 years ago when working as a ghillie’s assistant.

His description of this period of his life – indeed pretty much the whole of his life in the UK – is a reminder of just how remarkable his personal journey has been. Arriving here from his native Sudan as an eight-year-old with only a handful of words of English (“please, thank you and pizza and chips”), the learning challenges that came with being diagnosed with severe dyslexia, through to sleeping in the back of a car for nine months while learning the fieldcraft skills he’s deploying on this balmy summer evening at the RSPB Arne Nature Reserve in Dorset.

He’s fronting a night-time sequence on the elusive nightjar for a UK-based wildlife series, Hamza’s Hidden Wild Isles, though he insists it’s nature who’s the star. “I’m not a celebrity, I’m just the dude who has fallen in love with Mother Nature. She’s my second love after my mother.”

The bond between son and mother is clear. It was her ambition that provided him with the passport – both literal and metaphorical – to the life he now enjoys. Working as a gynaecologist in Sudan, she was invited to the UK to take a job in the NHS. “My mum said I can’t go without my husband [also a doctor] and they said bring your husband along as well. They came here to make sure everything was right – that the NHS was giving them jobs – then a year later they sent for us.

“They worked [on rotation] in Newcastle, Whitehaven, Carlisle and then we ended up in Northampton, where they still work very happily today. But it meant that every six to 12 months, we were changing schools.”

That would be hard enough for any child, let alone one with limited English and, as yet, undiagnosed dyslexia. Within a few months he says he was forming fluent sentences that teachers could understand. But his reading wasn’t developing at the same speed as his speech. It led to some teasing and bullying, though he dismisses any lasting impact. “That’s just children, isn’t it? My schooling was beautiful and I will be for ever grateful for it.”

It wasn’t until his parents arranged for him to attend the independent Wellingborough School and he came to the attention of a teacher called Mrs Strange that the penny dropped. “I remember Mrs Strange saying, ‘Hamza I think you’re dyslexic.’ I remember crying and saying, ‘When’s the wheelchair going to arrive?’ She said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘You said I was dyslexic, which means I’ll be paralysed and in a wheelchair.’ And she said, ‘No that’s disabled, Hamza. It means it’s hard to read and write.’”

The diagnosis was liberating. With strategies in place he sailed through exams that otherwise he would have found impossible. “I had a reader and a scribe in exams. Someone would read me the question, I would verbally tell them the answer and they would write it down. That’s the beauty of a teacher understanding that I wasn’t dumb. She’s the incredible person who figured how dyslexia is a superpower.”

It’s a word he drops into our conversation frequently, though real-world challenges remain his kryptonite – travelling around London, for instance: “I remember being told to take a certain Tube line and change at Paddington, and I said: ‘Hang on, there are ten stations beginning with P. Which one is Paddington? I couldn’t read the map. I needed help.”

Such support improves the further north you go, he says with a smile. Which is doubtless one of the reasons he ended up living in a village on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, the most westerly point of mainland Britain. “I saw my first ever minke whale there, a golden and white-tailed eagle and pine marten, so I knew this was the place to make my home. I was 20 at the time.

“I told my parents that I lived in this beautiful, quaint cottage on the west coast of Scotland – in reality I was living in the back of my car for nine months. I would park the car at the ferry port and there was a sign saying ‘No overnight parking’, and I would reverse the car back up on that sign so I would block it and I would get up every morning before the first ferry arrived at 8am.

“There was a toilet nearby, there were showers at the camp site. If I wasn’t hiking the hills filming, I was doing odd jobs for local people. I became a gardener; I cleaned houses for money; I chopped logs; I would move furniture – anything that allowed me to stay there.”

Did the freezing weather never make him yearn for his native Sudan? His reply tells you much about his mindset. “No, because I thought the cold would make the barn owls want to come out and feed – there was always a positive side to everything.”

Alongside his developing ability with a camera, he was also learning new skills. “I worked as a ghillie on a shooting estate where they would cull the deer, which I didn’t mind because deer need to be culled. If you have too many deer you just get a billiard-table landscape. Even though I’m anti- shooting – I want the wildlife to flourish. I was skinning and did a bit of butchery. But for me the main goal was to one day be a cameraman.”

Which brings us back to the here and now and RSPB Arne. As we talk, his attention is constantly distracted by birds flying above. He takes pleasure in being able to identify them, mostly using their Latin names. How, if he still has difficulty reading, has he learnt those?

“I just listened to the old guys at RSPB reserves and heard them using the names, so I memorised them. It’s a communal language. Does it make me a geek? Yeah, probably. But then a geek is what I aspired to be.”

A geek who just happens to be black with dreadlocks – uncut for 23 years, washed twice a week, taking up to five hours to dry. “That was me just rebelling against my mum. Every three weeks we would get a new haircut – number two on the top, one on the side. It’s now part of me, I don’t notice it’s there.”

Others do, so has he encountered any racism? “Hell, yeah!” is his instant response. He recalls being stopped by police when driving his mother’s car back in Northampton. He accepted the stop with equanimity.

“A young guy with dreadlocks presuming he smokes weed,” he says of the likely police rationale. “Ring my mum if you want to know who the car belongs to,” he remembers telling them. “I was polite. Yes sir, no sir, absolutely.”

Other race-based observations are more subtle. “People see me walking into an RSPB reserve and you know they’re thinking: ‘He’s lost.’ You can see the look on their face. I don’t need to bang a drum about it, just show and lead by example.

“The people who say, ‘I don’t see colour,’ I say BS. You do see shades, though, and I’m a different shade. I’m not hiding behind it. It’s actually a power for me to be able to show people no matter what walk of life you come from, you can do the thing you love. Go and break the stereotypes. For me, experiencing racism didn’t affect me one bit. Yeah, I felt it. Yeah, it was stupid. Yeah, it was a sad day – but what am I going to do about it? I can sit and doom and gloom about it or I can go about my day and prove them wrong. Sweet. Let’s do the latter.

“Racism is a thing. It will continuously happen and I worry for the young children who will suffer it, but my nieces and nephews who are mixed race will know that if Uncle Hamza did it, why can’t I?”

Right now, as darkness descends, Yassin is proving his point as he and a five-strong crew film the newly arrived migrant nightjars as they feed on insects on the wing. Yassin has two cameras trained on him while he peers into a third that has the capability of filming in the dark. The rest of us swivel blindly while he describes sightings of the swooping birds, the distinctive rise and fall of their call piercing the heathland silence.

It’s the kind of solitude that Yassin clearly craves. Tomorrow he turns the camera on ants who, he says, are “cooler” than humans, then he’ll be heading back to Scotland and the people he calls his “family away from family”.

“They got me standing on my own two feet. If I had to write an email to the BBC, for example, they would check it for me. I have people looking after me. This is the beauty of a small community, you have to rely on each other for everything. Whereas people in the cities don’t know who their neighbours are, I can go through the whole village and tell you their names and their kids’ names and what illnesses they have,” he says, referencing work he did during Covid delivering medicines to locals.

He still chops logs, gardens and lifts heavy furniture for the 150 people who live in and around the village, but is all this extracurricular activity replacing something that’s missing in his life? “I would love to find someone, but I’ve lived alone since I left uni, so I’m quite content in my own company. Not to say that I’m a loner, I just get on well with myself. But yes, I’d love to share a life with somebody – blonde, tall, short, I really don’t care – somebody who just has a joy for life.”

His own joy is expressed with unfiltered passion and a childlike sense of wonder. In the first episode, he actually sees the beauty of nature through the eyes of children as he takes his nieces (then eight and 10) to observe badgers emerging from their sett. The joy in their eyes as the animals playfully romp will doubtless moisten yours – it’s one of the feel-good TV moments of the year.

In fact, much like the solace provided by The Blue Planet in the aftermath of the horror of 9/11, this series feels like it’s arriving on our screens at just the right moment. Each seasonally themed episode is a tapestry of short films that are soothing, contemplative, at times deliberately quite slow. There’s a beguiling sequence of nothing but Dawn Chorus birdsong – reminding us of just how rich both countryside and city are with wildlife, much of it hidden – though some in plain sight, and often cherished by local enthusiasts (look out for Nigel, a tearful adder-lover).

Yassin’s hope is simple. “If you see someone enthusiastically caring for the natural world, you might say, ‘I wonder what I can do to look after my local patch.’ That’s my aim, that’s my goal.”

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Hamza'a Hidden Wild Isles begins at 6:15pm on Sunday 12th October on BBC One and iPlayer.

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