Taking a Frank look at life with disability
Being Frank: the Frank Gardner Story BBC2, 9pm
ON June 6, 2004, BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner and cameraman Simon Cumbers were ambushed by Al-qaeda gunmen while reporting on growing terrorist activity in Saudi Arabia.
Simon was killed outright and
Frank was hit in the shoulder and leg.
As he lay in the dust, a figure stood over him and pumped four more bullets into his body at point-blank range.
One of the bullets hit his spinal nerves and at the age of 42 he was left partially paralysed in the legs and unable to walk. He has used a wheelchair ever since.
Fifteen years on from that horrendous attack, Frank continues to travel the world reporting for the BBC after returning to his role covering stories in danger zones in 2005.
However, he says he has never got used to his paralysis.
In an interview with The Big Issue last year, the 59-year-old Londonborn journalist and Army Reserves Major said: “The wheelchair is just a platform to whizz me around.
“But sometimes I see pictures of myself and I realise that’s what I must look like to other people. Because I look out of myself, not at myself.
“So when I see a photograph I think, God, that’s me in a wheelchair. How weird. I just can’t see myself that way.”
In this deeply personal new film, he talks with considerable candour about the challenges of suddenly becoming disabled and confronts the effects it has on his day-to-day life, personal relationships and the way he views himself.
He wants to understand the way that others have responded when they have suddenly become disabled without warning or expectation of it.
In a series of extraordinary encounters that will change the way he – and the viewers – feel about disability, Frank meets a young woman whose spinal cord was damaged in a climbing accident, a military couple whose marriage has been affected by injury, and a young man living with paralysis as a result of a diving accident.
Keen to show us the truth about “Being Frank”, the film doesn’t shy away from the harsh reality of his and others’ disabilities.
Travelling to report from the Colombian rainforest, he addresses the frustration of being somewhat dependent on others and living with his physical and emotional hardships.
However, the film also celebrates Frank’s warmth and humour, and takes a look at the extraordinary life he continues to lead today.
We see how Frank’s attitude to his disability is changing and how it hasn’t stopped him getting involved with things he likes – he still goes scuba diving and is honorary president of the Ski Club of Great Britain.
“I’ve changed since the first few months after I was shot,” he added in last year’s interview.
“I was seven months in hospital, I had 14 surgical operations. I was shot to pieces. That was a low time. I just thought, well that’s it. Life as I know it is over.
“But I worked really hard in the gym and I started to get my strength back. And I found there’s something oddly liberating about a near-death experience. I just stopped sweating the small stuff.”