The Rev John Brown, father of our new prime minister, wrote, in a sermon in Kirkcaldy, shortly after 16-year-old Gordon lost all sight in his left eye following a rugby accident: “Blindness is surely one of life’s sorest handicaps. Those who are deprived of sight miss much. They cannot gaze with wonder on hills and wayside flowers.. . or stars twinkling in the heavens.”

Forty years on and Britain now has its first partially sighted premier since Gladstone in the 1890s. This shows that blindness, whether whole or partial, does not impede a political career.

There is a triumphant example on Radio 4 this afternoon (FM only, because long wave has cricket) of how that applies to poetry as well as politics. Visions of Paradise considers Paradise Lost, which John Milton wrote years after he went blind, about 1652, and, through the presenter, Peter White (a man blind from birth), discovers what impact the poet’s loss of sight had on both his monumental work and his own life.

The portrait that emerges, after White has met Tom Paulin and other dons, and learnt of next year’s quatercentennial Oxford exhibition, Citizen Milton, is partly one of epic defiance: Milton defied pain (there are awful details of 17th-century eye treatments, one of which involves a needle and thread), as well as the critics who regarded his condition as divine punishment.

The greatest poem in the English language seems pierced with images of sightedness and blindness: “darkness visible”, “doleful shades”, “celestial light”, “bright effluence of bright essence increate”. At the end there are those “wandering steps and slow”, as Adam and Eve leave Eden. Though it ponders the relationship between blindness and Milton, the programme may make some listeners ponder the relationship between blindness and broadcasters.

White is a phenomenon – raised on a Winchester council estate, learning to read Braille with both hands simultaneously (a rare gift), receiving school prizes from the Queen Mother and TS Eliot – but there are others. There is the crisp political reporter Gary O’Donoghue; the creator of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend, who was on Radio 3’s The Verb talking about her cigarette addiction live on Friday night; and the admirably outspoken early breakfast host on BBC Radio Cleveland, Mark Turnbull.

And there is now even a station specifically for blind listeners – Insight Radio, in Glas-gow, which grew on the internet (one of its shows won a silver Sony this year) and is now on FM.

I don’t know if one can generalise about blind broadcasters any more than, say, deaf musicians, but they have to be unusually tenacious and masters of near-miraculous computer technology (which, for example, turns e-mail into speech).

In terms of blind people as a whole, they also have one other matter to contend with that the rest of us happily take for granted – DAB radio sets, of which there are now more than 5m and whose scrolling texts are a visual godsend for most users but wretchedly unhelpful if you are unable to see them.

I do not know what the solution is, but it would be strange indeed if the new generation of radios were to be less than friendly to those who rely on them most.

paul.donovan@sunday-times.co.uk

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