South Korea's newest celebrity took an unusual route to the nation's TV screens — years spent working his way up through the ranks of North Korea's diplomatic corps, followed by months secluded in the custody of the rival South's spy agency.

Since his release, Thae Yong Ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to London, has spent the first week of the new year speaking on South Korean variety shows, joking with fellow defectors and espousing South Korea's line that the North Korean government he once defended is unstable and doomed to fail.

In a further propaganda coup for Seoul, the gregarious Thae, newly granted South Korean citizenship following his high-profile August defection, is embracing life in the capitalist South as a public figure.