It is 16 years since BBC correspondent Frank Gardner and his cameraman Simon Cumbers were ambushed by al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Gardner was shot six times and paralysed, his cameraman, killed. Now, he has gone behind those headlines to expose the things about disability we never talk about.
«I want people to see the iceberg beneath the surface,» Gardner says of his new BBC documentary, Being Frank.
«People look at somebody in a wheelchair, like me, and they probably think ‘poor guy, I wonder if he needs a bit of help?’ What they don’t see is all the stuff that we have to deal with beneath the surface.»
Gardner, 59, a fluent Arabic speaker, spent years living and working in the Middle East. He was a student in Cairo before working as a banker in Bahrain. He turned to journalism in his 30s and is now the BBC’s security correspondent.