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BBC Appeals For Veterans With Hearing Loss Due To Their Service

I’m a BBC researcher/camera operator currently working on See Hear, the BBC’s programme for the Deaf and Hard of hearing. I have worked for the BBC for 15 years on a wide variety of programmes.

We would like to broadcast a special Remembrance Day episode of See Hear on November the 9th and are keen to find personnel or incident related stories relating to deafness in conflict or the military. At the moment our remit is quite wide, as we can sort through the various replies and then decide which to follow up. However we are looking either for people who have suffered serious hearing loss due to military action/service or people who were born deaf but have been able to serve in some way during one of the nation’s conflicts.

This does not have to be in the military as such, but can be in civilian back up role such as Fire Watching, Munitions Production, Land Army, Nursing, Driving or any of the other myriad roles that need filling during times of conflict. In fact anything to do with war or conflict, in either the 2nd World War or more recent action in Ireland, Falklands, Iraq, Kuwait, the Balkans etc etc  would be of interest to us if it involves deafness or hearing loss.   

Please initially do a brief synopsis of your story and either email it or post it to me using the details below. I can then contact you to look into it in more detail if we wish to follow it up. PLEASE REMEMBER to put on your contact details, email, phone, and address.

In general we have 3 categories of possible story we are looking for, although I am open to anything that involves deafness and has a relation to conflict:

1) Personal stories relating to why your hearing was damaged and how you dealt with the change in life after the damage had been done. For these stories you would have to be available to film an interview with us about your story. We are particularly interested if the story can be backed up with any pictures (or even archive home movie film) and it relates to some form of military action.

2) We are thinking of doing one story relating in general terms to how the M.O.D. have dealt with hearing protection over the years and what effect your work in the military had on your hearing. Anecdotal evidence I have come across so far seems to show that there are a great many ex service personnel with hearing problems caused by their time in the military. I would stress that the veterans included need to be able firmly link their hearing loss with their service work or accident from a professional medical perspective. “I’ve got a bit deaf as I’ve got older and it must be due to watching 200 Harrier take offs/firing machine guns without hearing protection”, is quite probably true, but we would need some level of medical involvement to prove that if we were going to move forward with filming.

3) People who were born deaf but have served their country in some way during conflict or been caught up with the conflict. We would be particularly keen to find, for instance, a deaf evacuee as this must have made the already difficult and stressful process of evacuation even harder.

John Lakey
Level Nine
BBC TV
The Mailbox
Birmingham
B1 1RF
Ph: 0121 567 6603
M: 07740 463196
john.lakey@bbc.co.uk