He’s the gentle giant with the infectious grin who melted millions of hearts on Strictly Come Dancing and now fronts some of the BBC’s biggest wildlife shows. But Hamza Yassin, the 6ft 8in Sudanese-Scottish cameraman and presenter, has just dropped a bombshell that left even his closest friends speechless: for nine brutal months he was secretly homeless, sleeping in a battered old car in the Scottish Highlands while chasing his impossible dream.

“I’d park in lay-bys, wrap myself in every coat I owned, and wake up with ice on the inside of the windows,” Hamza revealed in an emotional new interview. “Some nights the temperature dropped to minus 17. I’d eat cold baked beans straight from the can because I couldn’t risk lighting my little gas stove; someone might see the flame and move me on. I told no one. Not my family, not my mates. I was too proud… and too scared.”

The 34-year-old wildlife warrior was 23 when he made the life-changing decision to leave everything behind and move to Ardnamurchan, one of the most remote peninsulas in Britain, armed only with a second-hand camera, a biology degree, and a burning passion to film Scottish wildcats: Britain’s rarest mammal, with fewer than 100 pure-bred individuals left in the wild.

“I had £200 in my bank account and no job,” he laughs now, though there’s still pain behind his eyes. “Rents were insane, even back then. So I bought a 15-year-old Vauxhall Astra for £400 and turned it into my home. The back seats folded flat; just about. I’d curl up like a giraffe in a suitcase.”

By day, Hamza worked any shift he could get: barista, waiter, cleaner, anything to buy fuel and memory cards. By night, he’d drive into the forest, hide from passing headlights, and pray the car would start in the morning. Frostbite, loneliness, and the constant terror of being discovered gnawed at him.

“There were nights I cried myself to sleep,” he admits. “I’d ring my mum in Northampton and lie through my teeth: ‘Yeah, the flat’s great, Mum!’ Meanwhile I was brushing my teeth with a bottle of water in a petrol station toilet.”

But it was in that freezing car that everything changed.

One bitter January morning, after another sleepless night, Hamza spotted paw prints in the snow. He followed them for miles until, through his lens, he locked eyes with a creature most experts believed was already extinct in that part of Scotland: a pure Scottish wildcat, fierce, striped, and utterly magnificent.

“I whispered, ‘Hello, beautiful,’ and started filming. My hands were shaking so much I could barely hold the camera.” That footage, shot on a £300 second-hand lens while living in his car, became the first confirmed evidence in decades that wildcats were breeding in the area. It changed conservation history.

Word spread. The young man living in his car was suddenly being invited to present at conferences. BBC Scotland came calling. Springwatch offered him a guest spot. Then Countryfile. Then Planet Earth III. And in 2022, the same man who once couldn’t afford heating became the bookies’ favourite to win Strictly Come Dancing, lifting the glitterball with Jowita Przystał while the nation fell in love with his gigantic heart.

But Hamza never forgot where he came from.

This year, in one of the proudest moments of his life, he stood in the Cairngorms National Park and opened the cage door for five Scottish wildcat kittens, born in captivity and now released into the wild as part of the Saving Wildcats project he helped champion.

“Watching those kittens vanish into the heather, I thought about 23-year-old me freezing in that car,” he says, voice thick with emotion. “I was trying to save them, but really they saved me. They gave me a reason to keep going when everything said give up.”

Today Hamza lives in a cosy cottage in the West Highlands with his partner (he still keeps that old Vauxhall Astra in the driveway as a reminder). He’s fronting major new series for the BBC and Channel 4, and his children’s book about a lost wildcat cub is already a bestseller.

His message to anyone sleeping in their car tonight? “Hold on. The worst chapter can become the best part of your story. I went from cold beans in a lay-by to releasing Britain’s rarest animal back into the wild. If I can do it, trust me, so can you.”

From rock-bottom to releasing wildcats and lifting glitterballs, Hamza Yassin’s nine months of hell forged the man the nation now calls a hero. And that battered old Astra? It’s not just a car. It’s the vehicle that carried a dream all the way to triumph.