Frank Gardner - Out There - The Royal Hall

Dangerous places. Wild adventures. One extraordinary life.

Frank Gardner is the BBC’s Security Correspondent. He has also kayaked among icebergs in Antarctica, met mountain gorillas in Rwanda and filmed a raid on a Colombian jungle drug lab on his phone. And yes, in 2004 he was shot six times in Riyadh.

It didn’t stop him for long. Frank’s message is simple: a catastrophic, life-changing injury doesn’t mean the fun stops.

In this one-man show, Frank tells the story in full. How a City banker with fluent Arabic became the BBC’s first full-time Gulf correspondent. The day that changed everything, and what he found on the other side: “something oddly liberating about a near-death experience.” The determined, often funny road back. And the life since, the spy novels, remote places and some very unlikely adventures, much of it told through his own footage and photographs.

Then the world as he sees it now. After decades reporting from the Middle East and beyond, he cuts through the headlines to what is really going on. The news moves fast, sometimes within the span of a single tour, so don’t expect every night to be quite the same.

Finally, it’s your turn. In a live audience Q&A, ask Frank anything, from spy novels to the state of the world.

Funny, candid, eye-opening and uplifting: this is the story only Frank Gardner could tell.