Peter White Meets Jane Cordell

I wish I’d known about this earlier. For anyone else who missed it, it will be repeated at 9.30pm today, or it’s available now on BBC iPlayer.

Peter White returns with the highly-acclaimed series which poses the questions about disability which other programmes are too embarrassed, or too politically-correct, to ask.

In the first programme he interviews the Foreign Office high flyer Jane Cordell, who had a diplomatic posting to Kazakhstan, her second overseas posting, revoked when officials ruled that her deafness made it too expensive to send her abroad.

She tells Peter that her disability makes her particularly attuned to social situations, reading body language and picking up on everything, from the way people clench their toes to nervous movements which might signal suspicion: “When I walk into a room I pick up immediately a sense of what the atmosphere is – whether there’s going to be a rapport with the speakers and what’s going on. You read people’s faces, their gestures, you can pick up messages that possibly people who aren’t deaf couldn’t.

“I always went into it with an open mind, believing that the more straightforward barriers presented by not being able to hear can be fairly easily overcome. But then I’m an optimist.”

Jane talks about her musical childhood and how in her twenties she coped with the realisation that she was gradually losing her hearing. But this did not deter her from pursuing her goals, although it’s acted as a good filter when it came to prospective partners: “It was possible to tell a lot about people by how they reacted to my disability and I used this as a good way to test whether someone was worthy of my friendship.”