Oti Mabuse has always been an early bird. “I’m absolutely horrible at night. I always tell myself that when I get home from work I’m going to work out. Then I just get in bed and watch Married at First Sight,” she laughs. But having an early morning Saturday magazine series – Oti Mabuse’s Breakfast Show, which airs live on ITV1 at 8.30am – is testing her.
“I always said no to coffee, but I used to be desperate for a nap halfway through the day. I’m too old for that.” Thank God, then, that she recently discovered caffeine. “But I can only have one. If I have too much coffee, please believe that it’s going to be a party.”
Mabuse, 32, is best known as a dancer and former Strictly Come Dancing pro. But she has dreamt of presenting all her life. Stints on the judging panels of The Masked Dancer UK and Dancing on Ice have proved she has the charisma and knowledge to hold a programme together, while fronting series like ITV1 musical dating show Romeo and Duet and BBC One documentary Oti Mabuse: My South Africa demonstrate her range. This is a woman who can both coax nervous singletons to serenade one another in a flashy entertainment format and dig into her own emotional depths for a raw and personal film.
Her inspiration hit her when she was just nine. “There was this girl on TV in South Africa, Sade Giliberti. She presented a kids’ morning show called YOTV. I remember her so clearly – what she looked like, how she spoke. She was always in the back of my mind. I thought, ‘One day that would be such a great job.’” So why didn’t she pursue it? In short, she was too good at dancing. “I focused on dancing because I knew I could be amazing if I worked hard at it. It was my thing,” she says. “I was scared as well. I was a dancer and an engineer” – Mabuse studied civil engineering at Tshwane University of Technology – “not a presenter.”
The daughter of a lawyer and a teacher, Mabuse started dance lessons aged four, following in the perfectly choreographed steps of her older sister and Strictly judge Motsi. She won eight national championships and represented South Africa at the World Championships before moving to Nuremberg in 2012, where she met her dance partner (and husband of nine years) Marius Iepure. Just three years later, she landed jobs on Let’s Dance, Germany’s version of Strictly, and on the UK series, splitting her time between the two countries for two years until she moved to England full time.
Mabuse had never told anyone about her presenting ambitions until she joined Strictly. “Kevin Clifton asked me what I wanted to do in my first week on the show and I told him I wanted to be the best,” she says. “But he said, ‘No, what do you really want to do?’ He was the first person I shared my goals with – he probably won’t even remember the conversation – and he told me I could win Strictly and do my own thing. I’ll appreciate that advice for ever.”
Eight years later, and Mabuse is five weeks into her Saturday morning series. In her own words, Oti Mabuse’s Breakfast Show is “silly, fun and lighthearted – it’s not deep” (something ITV could do with at the moment, given the tension over This Morning).
She’s performed a heels dance routine (as it sounds, this is literally a dance style performed in high heels) with Kimberly Wyatt, learned how to juggle with Al Murray and Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed and, last week, shared TikTok beauty tips with Peter Andre (who was dubious about the idea of rubbing a banana peel on his face). She also has a go at the Saturday morning TV tradition of cooking, with the help of chef Shivi Ramoutar. Or at least she attempts to. “I’m terrible in the kitchen,” she says with a laugh.
The series reflects its host’s effervescence and boundless positivity – something that often feels missing on television these days, I suggest. But Mabuse disagrees. “It’s not that no one is positive, but you can never have enough of it,” she says. “Lifeis so hard. When people are working Monday to Friday or they’re working many hours in the hospital or at work, it’s really difficult. To be able to have programming that makes you relax, makes you laugh or smile or just be able to escape is always good.”
Mabuse had a ready-made audience for her series – she is a Strictly Come Dancing legend. Of the seven celebrities she danced with, one (Danny Mac) came second and two (Kelvin Fletcher and Bill Bailey) won. Alongside Aliona Vilani, she’s one of two professionals who have taken home the Glitterball Trophy twice, and is the only dancer to do it twice in a row.It’s n o wonder fans were upset when she announced her departure last year, but Mabuse can’t understand why.
“How many times did I have to win before people started to hate me?” she jokes. “I love the show. It means everything. I was so proud to be a black woman who was showing that young women are ambitious, that we have strategy and soul. That we are vulnerable and we cry and we care. I had a big responsibility of how I portray African women. Yes, we have curvy bodies. We look completely different. We sound completely different, but we can do it.
“And then I did it. I did it all before I was 30. My goal was to come on to Strictly and win it. Mission accomplished.”
Mabuse’s fearless ambition is infectious. But she isn’t universally adored and she (or, rather, her outfits) caused quite a stir during the Dancing on Ice final in March, with viewers on social media calling her outfit “inappropriate” for a “family show”.
Others accused her of “upstaging” host Holly Willoughby and pointed to a rift between the two (sound familiar?).
“That definitely doesn’t come from us,” Mabuse says. “She’s always made me feel loved; she is a beautiful soul. I don’t know where that sort of thing comes from. Women on television are always encouraging each other. We really are friends – I’m close with Alex Scott, Judi Love, AJ Odudu, Alison Hammond – and we all stick together. There’s an influx of talented, charismatic, vivacious women.”
Depressingly, having the public comment on your body appears to come with the territory and Mabuse is far from the only woman subject to misogynistic scrutiny. In fact, during the last series of Dancing on Ice, the judge spoke out in support of Love Island star and competitor Ekin-Su Cülcüloglu, who was chastised online for her barely there costume. “It is so exciting to be part of a show that gets complaints,” she told Graham Norton on his BBC chat show at the time. “I thought the outfit was really sexy.”
As for the “weird” fixation on her own body during the final, Mabuse thinks it’s funny – to a point.
“I don’t even think about these things until someone points it out,” she says. “I was like, ‘Why are people looking at my boobs?’ But this is my body, this is what I look like. I’m healthy. I’m happy. I have good friendships. I’m smart, I’m ambitious, I want to go places. I’m a good person. That should be enough.”
Oti Mabuse’s Breakfast Show is on ITV1 every Saturday at 8.30am
