ROLAND WHITE: Being wealthy can be tricky, said the billionaire’s son. Cue small violins 

Brian Cox: How The Other Fifty percent Stay

Rating: ***** 

Oti Mabuse: My South Africa

Score: *** 

Actor Brian Cox’s introduction could have appear straight from the lips of Alan Whicker. ‘My journey starts,’ he said, ‘in the playground of the tremendous wealthy.’

The distinction amongst Whicker’s World and Brian Cox: How The Other 50 % Live (C5) is that the Succession star also found time on his journey to meet the tremendous poor.

Cox grew up in poverty in Dundee. His father ran a grocery store, but died when the actor was 8, leaving his spouse and children with just £10. ‘Being plunged into poverty has an effect on me to this day,’ he explained. ‘Money is incredibly a great deal my personal individual demon.’

Actor Brian Cox’s introduction could have appear straight from the lips of Alan Whicker. ‘My journey commences,’ he mentioned, ‘in the playground of the super rich’

Likely back to Dundee, he fulfilled two cleaners who struggle to spend the charges. Their tales afflicted him so a lot that he ranted at the crew, wondering regardless of whether they ought to even be filming.

‘It’s particularly distressing,’ he explained, his eyes comprehensive of fury.

He wasn’t so offended on conference the tremendous abundant — additional bemused. An face with great prosperity can normally be baffling.

Billionaire phones tycoon John Caudwell gave Brian a tour of his Mayfair house: 15 bedrooms, swimming pool and an aquarium beneath the eating desk.

All the neighbouring houses are owned by fellow billionaires, and largely stand empty.

Caudwell, himself from a very common qualifications, reported at one particular level: ‘I just hope I have accomplished my occupation so properly that my young ones will not get much too a great deal grandiosity.’

Cox grew up in poverty in Dundee. His father ran a grocery store, but died when the actor was eight, leaving his family members with just £10

As Cox pointed out, they had been sitting down in the lavish cinema of a residence value £250 million.

Not even Caudwell’s most important home, by the way, but a pied-à-terre — grandiose won’t come much grander.

Potentially he is right to fret. Staying showered with dollars from an early age is just not constantly a bowl of Fortnum & Mason cherries (with the stones taken off by an obliging underneath butler).

The son of a Nigerian billionaire, interviewed as he was getting equipped for a new fit, instructed Brian: ‘You continually have to uphold that graphic of coming from income, which can be extremely draining.’

Is that the sound of very, incredibly very small violins we can listen to?

Oti Mabuse: My South Africa (BBC1) turned out to be extra like South Africa: My Oti Mabuse. It was less about the country of her delivery, and a lot more about the former Strictly dancer and her loved ones.

The star of the clearly show was Oti’s mother, who started a nursery school in a township around Pretoria mainly because she desired to keep little ones off the streets.

There was a incredibly relocating instant when mother and daughter danced together on the quite ground the place Oti learnt her initially methods. We also met Oti’s aunt, doing the job at the roadside flower stall that was set up to increase money for the faculty.

Below apartheid, lifestyle for the family was unremittingly difficult. Oti’s father recalled getting rounded up at the age of 11 and pushed in governing administration vehicles to newly recognized black townships. There were being no precise homes, just rows of tents.

Oti also achieved South Africa’s initially black feminine wine grower, a previous cleaner who struggled on a wine course due to the fact it was taught in Afrikaans, which she did not recognize.

But she is now so profitable that her wine is stocked in Oti’s closest grocery store in London. She did not even like wine at very first: ‘It was the most awful factor I ever had’.

But providing plonk certain beats a lifetime of mopping it off the flooring.

Perception of the 7 days: The Crown: Powering The Lens (Sky Arts) provided a useful idea on how to imitate the King. Dominic West, who performs Prince Charles in the recent sequence, recommended: ‘Keep your mouth shut, retain your tooth shut — that completely sort of helps.’