Reggie Yates and I are sat “two hundred steps,” by his estimation, from the Finsbury Park flat he was brought to after he was born. Two hundred steps in the other direction is the pirate radio station, Freek FM, which changed his life. We are very much “in his manor,” as he puts it. It’s appropriate, then, that he exudes charismatic, local-lad magnetism. You sit down with him, shake his hand, and he’s on, alert, engaged; make no mistake, this is a man wired to have time for you.
But, of course, an inviting aura is something anyone who’s grown up with Yates as a screen presence would expect by default. He has plied his trade, for the past two decades, sat in the chair my buttocks are currently warming: from his earliest presenting gigs on Top of the Pops through to The Voice and, more pertinently, his myriad on-the-ground documentary works with the BBC, he has tended to be the one asking the questions. Depending on which generation you belong to, you might remember some of his earliest work – on Grange Hill in 2002, or a full decade before, in the Peckham-set Channel 4 sitcom Desmond’s, when he was eight.
After a life spent in front of the camera, his upcoming feature-length homage to London’s garage scene, Pirates, marks a novel step behind it. Set across a hectic New Year’s Eve in 1999, the air electric with hopefulness boded by the new millennium, it follows three eighteen-year-olds – Kidda, Two Tonne and Cappo – as they desperately try to get into the hottest party of the night. It’s an 80-minute hoot, percolating with love for the era and deep reverence for the up-tempo records that defined Yates’s adolescence (think old-school hits by the likes of Wookie and So Solid Crew). Filmmakers often mine their lived experiences for their first directorial outings, and Yates’s debut is no different. None of the characters are explicitly based on him, but they are notionally inspired by the people around whom he grew up: “The people I went to drama club with, the people I went to school with, the people I sat next to at football – my world is piled into this film,” he says.
It was in the vicinity of his manor, appropriately, that he got his serendipitous start. “Right up the road from here, there’s a drama community group called the Anna Scher Theatre,” Yates explains. It was a charitable foundation, so for two pound fifty a lesson, his mum had somewhere to send him off to after school. Conveniently, the theatre – whose alumni includes the likes of Daniel Kaluuya and Naomie Harris – had an agency attached to it. So if a kid showed enough promise – or, “if you were big enough to show off,” as Yates puts it – they could be picked for professional auditions. His first? Desmond’s.
Music, adjacent to performance, has always percolated through his creative expression: he recalls how, in secondary school, he had the “coolest” art teacher who would let him and his mates play their own mixtapes. “We’d all be there just bopping, painting and drawing, or doing whatever it was, and the music would shut us up.” At 17, he got his start with Freek FM, “where Dreem Teem started, where DJ EZ started, where Heartless Crew started. [Garage] was our ska, it was our punk,” he says. “You had no choice but to be into it because it was the sound of the moment.”
He’s reluctant to call it a pinch-me moment, but the first time he realised he had a unique relationship with “the thing that me and my friends are obsessed about” came when he interviewed the Spice Girls. He was 12. “They were like, ‘Oh my goodness, you’re so cute.’ And they were just a bunch of normal girls at the beginning of this incredible journey,” he recalls. His sister’s reaction, a massive pop fan, was as effusive as you might expect. “And you just kind of go, Oh yeah, this thing that I do, that I enjoy, is a big deal to a lot of people.”
You don’t think about that in the room, though. We readily deify the stars – the clue’s in the name – but people seldom live up to the intimidating veneer of celebrity when you actually sit down with them. Yates, unsurprisingly, agrees. “It’s just human-level shit, you know. The only time I ever got starstruck was when I met Ian Wright.” Hold on – he’s an Arsenal fan? “Two hundred steps!” Right, of course. “I’ve got no choice. That’s my local club, it’s where I grew up.” We veer from the lofty nature of superstardom into a conveyor belt of subjects far more important – namely Mikel Arteta (“He’s come good”), Emile Smith Rowe (“Grown into himself”), the January transfer window and how he’ll miss the upcoming match against Liverpool because he’s hosting a BFI screening for “this bloody movie that I’ve directed, what a wanker!”
While the World Cup in the summer was largely cause for celebration, the Three Lions’ performance was marred by racist backlash after three Black players – Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and finally, Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka – missed successive penalties in the final shootout against Italy. Yates was watching the game with a full house, “and I have a very broad spectrum of family and friends in terms of racial background,” he says. “The entire room, when the boys stepped up, went, ‘Uuuuugh.’ There were a couple of friends of mine who are not Black in the room, who were like, What? They’re great players. And then it was explained to them what would happen if they miss. It’s just that weird thing of existing while Black – you know what the parameters are of that, particularly when it comes to moments like sport.”
Arsenal, both the institution and the lion’s share of fans who form its tribe, immediately formed a protective shield around Saka on his return. The club has always had a special history with London’s Black community, Yates reflects. “Like I said, the only person I’ve ever been starstruck over is Ian Wright, because he was 100 per cent himself when he was wearing that shirt, or when he would bomb about in Islington. There was something really special growing up in an environment where you can have icons who look like you,” Yates says. He’s never met Saka, but he “respects him so much, he’s amazing.”
In 2014, as part of his Extreme documentary series, Yates went to Russia, finding a state embroiled by far-right extremism, racism and dogged homophobia. The episode on the nation’s anti-queer prejudice was released in the wake of the “gay propaganda bill,” their contemporary equivalent of Section 28, being signed into law by Putin. Granted I was young, but it was moving, nevertheless, to see someone with no obvious skin in the game taking the issue head-on, and the question of why has stuck since. So I ask him. He takes a beat, conjuring a measure of genuine sincerity. “The truth is, there are so many things that if you grew up in a city like London you’re confronted with on a regular basis that you end up caring about, be that racism, or homophobia, or whatever,” Yates says. “Because I live in a city that is a beacon for the liberated in a lot of ways. And when you see people challenged on who they are, for no reason other than… somebody’s stuff, somebody’s projection of what normal looks like, it’s frustrating.”
He calls back to growing up around theatre kids, and in drama schools where unashamedly being oneself was encouraged – to be transparent, even, was an obligation. But he also grew up in London when it was in the throes of the AIDS epidemic, and his mum was on the front lines. “My mother worked in health promotion when I was a kid, and a huge part of what she was doing was AIDS awareness,” Yates says. “I was 10 years old wearing an AIDS awareness badge to school, not because it was the cool thing to do, but because it was what was happening in my life. My mum would have meetings in the lounge with 15 men from different gay groups. They were talking about what they were dealing with, and I’m just there listening.” He didn’t make the Extreme films, then, because the subject was in the zeitgeist: “I made [them] because I give a shit.”
And now, with Pirates, Yates finds himself in transition, stacked with lofty ambitions: to direct a film every year for the next few, at least. “I don’t have kids, I’m not beholden to anyone but myself,” he notes. He’s a perennial hard worker: even with decades of work across the media industry under his belt, he still qualifies the current moment as “where I should be grafting, to really learn my craft and do as much as I can.” As a director, he’s far from a dogmatist, professing a belief in the strength of collaboration. “It just shows to me, like, his level of determination and hard work, I think, how much he helped us,” says Reda Elazouar, who plays Kidda. “His work rate is amazing – in-sane. This guy has five hours sleep and he’ll come to set so energised,” concurs co-star Jordan Peters (Two Tonne).
I won’t ask him the obvious question – Hollywood? – but I’m intrigued to know what the best-case scenario would be five years from now. “Well, just being given license to tell stories I believe in to the highest level possible. That’s essentially what it is… I know that’s quite a broad answer,” he says. It’s quite a bloody broad question, to be fair. Either way, even if he’s open about his artistic aspirations, he’s reticent to predict what’ll come next. “Every time I’ve tried to predict what’s going to happen, I’ve been really wrong,” he says. “I’m just open to whatever the man upstairs has planned for me.”
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