Moment 33 - Reggie Yates on How Self-Awareness Changed His Life

00:03When you look at your career, you are a tremendous outlier in terms of the journey you've taken and what you're doing now. That's very kind, thank you. And then you trace it back and go, you've came from a council estate not too far from here. For you to have gone on that journey and achieve the things you have, I always think there must have been certain factors in those early years that made you take a different course to those friends that might still be on the estate now.

00:30It might have been, you know, we talked a little bit about values there. It might have been, you know, I don't know, something someone said to you, an experience you had, or just the conditioning, whatever it is. But my question is, do you know what those factors were that made you an outlier? I mean, you sound as though you've done a lot of work on yourself and in the little bit that I know about you. Well, this is it. I get to meet people and ask. So I learn so much from these kinds of answers.

00:54Right. And I've made documentaries for over 10 years. So it's the same thing. You know, you learn so much from your environment. if you're willing to drink in the information. And I just, in thinking about between therapy and also being present in moments like this, you know, yes, there are cameras, but I'm having a conversation with you and I'm learning from you. And that certainly was the case in 10 years of making films, you know, for the BBC.

01:19So when it sort of comes to me looking at how I've become the person that I am and how my journey has played out the way that it has done, And it's an amalgamation of different moments and instances, but fundamentally it comes down to a desire, even as a kid, to understand and be aware. And it's progressed into this idea of being present and understanding the moment that you're in and why you're there and taking as much from the moment as possible.

01:47So as a child, I would always ask questions and I was far too aware of my environment for my own good. so for instance i'll i'll never sort of forget going to my friend kieran's oh no yeah it was kieran buckley's house i went to kieran buckley's house in barnsbury and um uh my mom was very protective so she wouldn't let me play at friends homes i know you know how that goes and i went to kieran's and i was in the garden and he had this massive massive beautiful islington garden with several trees in it and i asked him how come you got a park at the back of your house and his mother sort of overheard and laughed a bit and it stayed with me and he's like it's not parts of my god what are you talking about come on free it in you're in gold mate and then you play this game you don't think about it and then i remember going back to my council estate and looking at the the one tree that me and cory used to climb and think i don't have what he has why is that and then you start to think about these things and then start to understand class and where you are and even so far as the area you know i started to really recognize the power of my walk to school, even as a kid, before I got to secondary school, I was like, this is really

02:57weird. Like I live in a borough, Islington in North London, that has everything from council estates with immigrants and white working class, right the way through to multimillion pound houses. And I lived on a road called Liverpool Road, which is such a, it's such an important road that I haven't only, I've only become aware of how important that road is to my journey in recent years so i lived at the holloway end of liverpool road and liverpool is a long road that runs through islington and at the other end is angel and angel gentrified years before holloway did holloway is a very different place now and they had a waitrose they had a sainsbury's and you had these gorgeous massive townhouses and you know if you deviated off liverpool road you'd be in barnesbury and there were these beautiful little villagey roads and holloway was where the people that i grew up around lived and you had these estates you had every kind of madness you can imagine happening on my estate like i remember my first the first time i saw a machine gun was in my estate at like nine years old when the police were raiding a flat on my floor because there was all kinds of craziness there when you're just playing on the balcony on your estate on on the floor that you

04:07live on and you got armed police there you know let alone the other times that you see other weapons or you see other things happen um and those walks that i would go on where i would be like wow the bit that I live in versus the bit that I'm walking through versus the bit that I'm going to to go to school I know what bit I want to live on so I better start thinking about how I'm going to get to that bit of the road it's so fascinating you'd say that and it took me in my head back to back to my own experiences being a kid and this really vivid memory I have one day of looking up at the sky and seeing a plane and then looking down at my street and thinking I wonder if all of these families this is what they wanted from their life and then the plane for me was the juxtaposition between a family going on holiday.

04:48I'd never been on, like other than coming from Africa, we'd never been on holiday. So I was thinking, oh my God, people are going on holiday. And then I look down at my street and I look up again and I see this plane. And a lot of people will have that, but it takes a different mind to then think, I want to be on the plane. I want to be at the other end of Liverpool Street. But then also I have some idea about how to get there. Or maybe you didn't have an idea about how to get there, but maybe just the, I mean, I don't know if you believe in that manifestation, just that I want to be there.

05:17So I'm going to make decisions over the next 10 years in that direction. Right. Well, my journey is super weird, right? Because from the age of eight, I was a working Hector. So I was constantly reminded about my difference just by being present and by being aware, even as a child. So it didn't take much for me to realise you're not like your friends, Reg, because you're currently working while they're at school and you've been allowed time off school to work.

05:42So straight away, you're like, okay, I'm a bit different. and this is a bit of a weird situation to be in and then you look around and there's 100 people on set and you're the only black person both in front of all behind the camera and you go okay wow um i'm not like any of these people here and the conversations that you hear about what people did on the weekend or where they're going that even or even conversations about wine like little things that people take for granted culturally nobody drinking wine in my house you know i mean like chaleur was a big deal you know um going to sainsbury's was a big deal like we used to walk to dalston with backpacks to go and buy meat and tin tomatoes and carry them back because we never had a car what does that do to you though when you're on set everyone else is a different skin color and they're talking about things that you're not familiar with in terms of like let's be honest like class yeah right absolutely what does that do to you and does it put a chip on your shoulder does it make you more ambitious does it make you think fuck i'm out of place i'm an imposter yeah Yeah, well, it could have put a chip on my shoulder and I'm incredibly thankful that it didn't.

06:41What it did do was make me so hungry to create an environment where I could feel comfortable. And what that progressed into was understanding that it's going to take me a while to get to the point that I'd like to be at. Therefore, it would be and become my responsibility to create that for someone else, to create that for another eight year old me or 15 year old me. and I feel incredibly proud that I'm able to do that now because I recognize the power of it and regardless of those moments of feeling out of place or uh being sort of feeling as though you know your class is being is being waved in your face like I told this story the other day to a friend of mine who's I'm godfather to his child he's one of my good good good friends uh Sam Wilkinson he's a director who I made a lot of my documentaries with and um he's got my gorgeous little godson in his hands, little Teddy, and we're chatting away. And I was telling him a story about being at this primary school in Islet and where you've got kids from estates and kids from quite, you know, affluent homes, all in the same school. And at lunchtime, you had these kids with Thundercats lunchboxes and these incredible sandwiches and Kit Kat minis, all the things

07:47that I never had in my house, you know, you're sort of looking at tinfoil that hasn't been used 50 times. And you're like, oh my God, they're throwing the tinfoil in the bin. What the hell, what the hell is going on? They're not being made to fold and put it back because you could use it for dinner tomorrow anyway so you're like taking all of that in and every lunchtime i'll never forget um pat god bless her uh the head dinner lady uh this big lady big lady um would walk out and she'd go free school dinners and all the kids that were on free school dinners used to have to stand up and go and get your food and it sort of broke you a little bit as a kid because your mates were just a bit like oh my god can you imagine and i told this story to sam and he started crying and Sam started crying I think not because well I think he felt a little sad for little mini me but he also as a father imagined his son in that position and I'm sure we'll get onto family and fatherhood and stuff but I you know I realize how much fatherhood has softened a lot of my friends and also has made me very sort of cognizant of my journey and also just how important my childhood was in shaping who I've become We'll be right back.