Award winning filmmaker Reggie Yates travels around the world investigating big issues such as gun violence, racism, gay rights and addiction.
From Cape Town to Chicago, London to Moscow, Reggie explores controversial topics and goes on a journey through the extremes of life all over the world. In the last five years, Reggie has become synonymous with critically acclaimed documentaries. His films include the BBC Three Extreme series including Reggie Yates': Extreme Russia, Extreme South Africa and Extreme UK. Reggie was awarded Best Presenter for the critically acclaimed Extreme Russia at the Royal Television Society Awards, Best Factual Programme at the Edinburgh TV Festival, and Multi-Channel Programme at the Broadcast Awards. Year of Production 2014 - 2017.
South Africa The White Slums
Episode 1
In the first episode, Reggie spends a week in South Africa's largest white squatter camp, Coronation Park, outside Johannesburg. South Africa has a white population of approximately 4.6 million and during apartheid the racist political system elevated them into a privileged position. Today, however, white youth charities claim that up to 48,000 of them now live below the poverty line, with many shacked up in small, makeshift camps, although these figures remain hotly disputed.
But behind the headlines lies an uncomfortable question: are young white South Africans now the ones being discriminated against by being on the wrong side of affirmative action? And if so, will black and white ever be truly equal in South Africa?
Year of Production: 2014
South Africa The Millionaire Preacher
Episode 2
South Africa is a country devoted to God, and Pentecostal 'Megachurches' are booming. But as well as conventional priests and bishops, thousands of young people follow self-styled prophets. Reggie spends a week with one of the most controversial and colourful of them all, Prophet Mboro. In a world of witchcraft, exorcisms and heavily armed guards, Mboro is adored by the thousands of followers in his megachurch and renowned as much for his dancing as the 'miracles' he performs.
Reggie has already rejected African Pentecostal faith once in his life and now he tries to discover whether a multimillionaire king of bling with 30 flash cars can really be a messenger from God. But the deeper Reggie digs, the more conflicted he becomes - until he starts to confront some truths much closer to home.
Year of Production: 2014
South Africa Knife Crime ER
Episode 3
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and the Cape Flats outside Cape Town are now the epicentre of violent crime in the country. Reggie spends a week in a new district hospital in the fastest growing township, struggling to cope with the victims of these attacks. On any given weekend, the young doctors deal with up to 100 stabbings and assaults and 80 percent of those admitted are under 25.
By living and working with the doctors and patients, Reggie tries to find out why it is almost inevitable for young men, just like him, to get into violent scrapes here. It is a journey that leads him into the heart of the township and the conflict.
Year of Production: 2014
Russia Far Right and Proud
Episode 4
Reggie travels to Moscow to meet some of the country's most dangerous people - the nationalists. Reggie immerses himself in a world where patriotism and loving your country is becoming the norm, one with very dangerous consequences.
He trains with knife-wielding far right nationalists, talks to the young artists who idolise Putin, and confronts teenage neo-Nazis who believe that if you're not white then you have no place in Russia. Reggie also meets the non-Russians who live in fear of persecution and hears horrific stories of those who have survived vicious racist attacks.
Year of Production: 2015
Russia Teen Model Factory
Episode 5
Reggie examines the unsettling world of teenage modelling in Russia, where young people, and their parents hope good looks will lead to success. Reggie joins international scouts as they board the Trans-Siberian railway and cross Siberia looking for the freshest new faces.
Reggie meets girls as young as 13 as they parade in bikinis, hoping that their stunning looks will get them noticed. In Novosibirsk, Siberia's capital, he visits some of the city's 26 modelling agencies and schools, where children as young as five are learning how to walk, pose, apply make-up, and diet.
Year of Production: 2015
Russia Gay and Under Attack
Episode 6
Reggie finds out what life is really like for young people in what has been described as the hardest place in Europe to be gay. He travels to St Petersburg for Queerfest, a ten-day arts and culture get-together for the LGBT community. Reggie spends time on both sides of the battle lines - with the Queerfest team as they face the daily fight to keep their festival open, and the homophobes who want to see it closed.
He also meets stab victims left for dead by homophobes, and activists who are still fighting back who show Reggie how Putin's repressive laws make it almost impossible to protest without risk of arrest.
Year of Production: 2015
UK Gay and Under Attack
Episode 7
In the first film, Reggie is shocked to discover that, for young black and Asian gays and transsexuals, their harshest critics - and persecutors - often come from their own communities, or even their own families.
Whether it's young Muslims threatened with exorcism, or West African Christian parents ostracising their own gay kids, religion plays a part in the story. But Reggie also wants to find out why so few gay men of colour are visible at events like Gay Pride, given the special cultural problems they already face.
Year of Production: 2016
UK Dying For a Six Pack
Episode 8
Reggie investigates the extreme ways in which male body culture is impacting on young British guys - from extreme exercise to invasive plastic surgery and even steroid abuse. As Reggie embarks on his own challenge to get into shape, he asks what it's all for and follows the story from a private hospital in Istanbul to a lock-up in the Midlands and beyond.
Year of Production: 2016
UK Men At War
Episode 9
.Reggie meets the angry young British men who think feminism has gone too far - and some of the women who have felt their wrath on an internet tailor-made for anti-feminism and trolls. He meets young guys espousing men's rights at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and the underground movement of male separatists of MGTOW (or Men Going Their Own Way).
Reggie also encounters infamous self-styled pick-up artist Roosh V, who dishes out advice on how to have more sex with women - but doesn't seem to like them very much.
Year of Production: 2016
USA Life and Death in Chicago
Episode 10
Reggie examines the impact that gun violence and police brutality continue to have on the citizens of Chicago.
Against the backdrop of unprecedented gun violence, Reggie Yates travels to Chicago to investigate gun crime in President Obama's adopted hometown. In the year of filming this documentary, there were 468 murders in 2015. With many of the victims being young African-American men, who was to blame?
Reggie hears first-hand the accusations of police brutality, but after attending the aftermath of a shooting and funeral of a young black man, he comes to realise an even bigger problem is that the majority of killings are perpetrated by young black men living in Chicago's poorest neighbourhoods.
Year of Production: 2016
USA Race Riots
Episode 11
Reggie speaks with citizens of Ferguson, Missouri, where the police shooting of an unarmed black teen sparked outrage and activism.
A year on from the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, Reggie Yates examines the position of African-Americans in US society.
Brown's death, in addition to other incidents of police brutality, shocked the world and led to sustained rioting in Ferguson. Reggie visits the small town in America's Bible Belt and discovers that the death of Michael Brown have politicised a new generation of young activists. He seeks to find out from the citizens of Ferguson whether the community can ever be healed. Reggie looks at new police recruits being trained but goes on to discover how African-Americans are still being discriminated against.
Year of Production: 2015
Australia Addicted To Ice
Episode 12
Reggie examines how the drug ice, aka crystal methamphetamine, has devastated the lives of countless Australians.
Reggie travels to Melbourne to find out why Australia's second city is facing such a dangerous epidemic of the drug known as ice.
A brutal and allegedly drugs-related murder leads Reggie to a halfway house full of addicts. He meets two other users from different ends of society who are about to enter rehab and embeds himself in the local police force to understand the scale of the epidemic.
Year of Production: 2017