Frank Gardner

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2005

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the BBC's Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner. For 10 years, he has been the BBC's expert on the Middle East - always authoritative and insightful, his analysis is based on first-hand knowledge of the region - after years spent studying Arabic and living and working in the Middle East.

But in June last year the reporter became the news. He and his cameraman were attacked by gunmen while they filmed in Saudi Arabia. His colleague was killed, he was shot six times and left for dead. Incredibly, he survived - though with devastating injuries. Now he is paraplegic - he has some feeling and movement in his legs above the knee but none below. He uses a wheelchair for most of the day though remains determined to walk some of the time using callipers and a walking frame. Nearly a year after the attack he returned to work - continuing to analyse the terrorist threat and trying to explain the circumstances behind it - he is, he says, busier than ever.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Third movement of Concerto No 2 by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: A Passage to India by E.M Forster Luxury: A solar-powered buggy

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a journalist for the past 10 years he's been a familiar figure
0:35.2	on radio and television explaining and analyzing the world of the Middle East.
0:39.7	Then last year the reporter became the story. While filming in a suburb of
0:44.6	Riyadh he and his cameraman were attacked by gun men. His colleague was killed and
0:49.3	he was left for dead. But today he's back in the world of journalism that his would-be
0:53.9	assassins were determined he'd leave forever. Confined in the main to a wheelchair,
0:58.7	he's once more a regular figure on our news bulletins, once again delivering his careful
1:03.6	commentaries. This is a determined man who arrived at his present career
1:08.1	after he'd absorbed the world of Islam by living in it, worked as an investment banker for nine years and then taking himself
1:15.2	off to journalism school.
1:16.9	I want my life back, he says.
1:19.0	It's never going to be the same as it was before, but I'm determined to make the most of it. He is the BBC
1:24.3	security correspondent Frank Gardner. Frank, none of us anticipates having our
1:29.1	spirit tested in quite the way that you have. Have you discovered depths of determination in you that you never knew you had?
1:35.4	I've had to, Sue. I mean there are really two choices when you're made suddenly paraplegic.
1:41.2	You can lie in bed and feel sorry for yourself and say,
1:44.4	I don't feel like doing physio today, I can't be bothered, or you can get up and try to
1:49.3	think positively to think, okay if I really work on this perhaps I can build something up from
1:54.9	the muscles that I still have got in my upper legs
1:58.0	but the problem with it is that it's
	...

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