Professor Jason Arday Guest Edits Today
Best of Today
BBC
4.0 • 837 Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2023
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Professor Jason Arday is our latest Christmas guest editor.
This year he was appointed as one of Cambridge’s youngest ever professors. A significant accolade by any measure but even more so when you consider that Professor Arday was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay aged just three and didn't learn to speak until he was eleven or read and write until he was eighteen.
He uses his programme to look at improving adult literacy and he speaks to the head of Universal Music UK about championing neurodiversity in the workplace.
Professor Arday also indulges his passion for 90s music with a discussion including Blur drummer Dave Rowntree and as a fan of a sharp suit, he champions the tailoring industry.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.3 | Hello, welcome to best of today. |
| 0:07.6 | I'm Nick Robinson, and at this time of year, the programme is always edited by a guest. |
| 0:13.0 | We hand control, not at the news, of course, but of all the other bits, to someone we think would bring a different perspective, would make us think. |
| 0:22.2 | No one more so, capable of doing that, than our guest editor this morning, Professor Jason Ardo, who's in the studio with me. |
| 0:29.2 | Morning, James. |
| 0:29.6 | Oh, good morning, Nick. |
| 0:30.6 | Now, I can sum up your story with a couple of numbers. |
| 0:34.8 | The youngest black person to be appointed professor at university |
| 0:37.5 | at the age of 37, number one, |
| 0:41.8 | but couldn't read or write till the age of 18, number two. |
| 0:47.8 | That in itself is an extraordinary story. |
| 0:50.6 | Just fill in the gaps. |
| 0:52.4 | What were the hurdles you had to overcome? Oh, that's a good question. So the hurdles that I had to overcome, |
| 0:58.7 | so I had literally thousands, tens of thousands of hours of speech therapy from the age of three to 15 and then |
| 1:06.4 | learn to read and write from 18 onwards. And it's kind of been really a hell to scale. So that's |
| 1:12.4 | kind of arrived at that point. It happened to me and I can't explain to you how I ended up here. |
| 1:18.5 | But your mum had a diagnosis that you had something called global development delay in autism. |
| 1:23.8 | Yeah, she did. So she did have that diagnosis. And I think it was a very difficult time for her because in some respect she, I think she mourned a lot of what, you know, could have been at that time because the diagnosis was so bleak by the professionals. But the one thing she never gave up on was this sense of hope. And she was really wedded to this idea that, you know, |
| 1:45.0 | he will do something because I will make him do something. |
| 1:48.0 | And that has been at the heart of the guest edit. We're going to hear lots of the reports |
| 1:52.0 | that you've been doing, the people you wanted to hear from, just in a sentence, tell us, |
... |
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