Ben & Denise Reedy

After 35 years travelling around Africa and over 90 visits to Nigeria I was so disappointed by this show. Yes, Michael is his usual modest and charming self but the producers kept him in fear so you could sense his stress with frequent mentions of danger. Ostentatious security is never a good idea, it merely attracts attention. Better to move around discretely and trust in locals for your safety. The producers are graduates of the BBC school of wokeness, wheeling out a collection of carefully-vetted and bizarre local guides with only one unplanned encounter with a genuine feisty market woman in Benin. No Africa show would be complete without touching on slavery but in line with the woke doctrine of censorship the guide omitted to mention that it was Africans who sold their neighbours literally down the river, that it was Britain who first abolished slavery and that over a thousand British sailors died in naval skirmishes enforcing the ban on other nations. So many fascinating aspects of Nigeria were ignored in favour of over-long sequences of cheap, easy spectacle - too long on the sport of polo but no mention of the Lebanese who love polo and contribute so much to the business and social life of Africa. So sadly the show was an over-staged disappointment suffering from lazy reliance on common clichés.