SED*8 Magazine

Words//Juliet Rudman

“She should be dead anyway, shouldn’t she?” An ex said this to me after finding out that my disabled sister had been in intensive care. This extreme and careless remark coming from an essentially nice person is indicative of the problems of ignorance surrounding disability. Although this is clearly a ridiculous example, it is to some extent understandable that people so often have the wrong idea about disability. We’re not taught about it at school and many people lack any kind of knowledge or experience of it.

Studies show that the biggest factor in attitudes is whether or not people are closely related to a disabled person and it’s clear there is a need for some kind of public debate. This is the responsibility of the media: providing a widely-accessible platform on which disabled people can represent themselves.

Earlier this year an attractive young presenter called Cerrie Burnell was given a job fronting a show on Cbeebies. Cerrie has a slight but visible disability; she was born without one of her hands. Cerrie said in an interview with the BBC that she hoped that her appearances on Cbeebies would help parents to raise the issue of disability with their children. It is important that there are figures like Cerrie out there who welcome the natural inquisitiveness of children to discover and ask questions before they form any kind of solid assumptions. Unfortunately her appearance has brought to the light the fact that it is not children but adults who have a problem with disability. The channel received several complaints from parents that Cerrie was ‘scaring their children‘. Instead of wanting their children to understand difference these parents seemed to want disability brushed under the carpet. No doubt these same people spend their Decembers writing to pantomimes to complain about the terrifying dwarves used in their productions of Snow White.

Image// BBC

One of television’s most impressionable outlets, the reality TV show, has begun to incorporate disability beyond the usual ‘freak show’ documentaries about the world’s tallest or shortest people. The production company Endemol took the first tentative steps with Pete Bennett in

Big Brother 2007 and Geoff Armstrong in Shipwrecked of the same year.

A benefit of reality TV is that it forces viewers to see disabled people as no different, no better or worse than anyone else. Whilst Pete did well and went on to win the show, ADHD sufferer Geoff became an outsider in the game and ended up leaving early.

The shows managed to raise certain points about disability. It is important with some less obvious or lesser known illnesses such as Tourettes Syndrome and ADHD that people are aware of them in order to understand that there can be medical reasons for some behaviours. Pete was a well-liked character who managed to raise the status of Tourettes.

Disabled contestants provide a means for people to ask questions or to gain understanding of disability. They also gives young disabled people a role model, or even just a sign that they too can make it past the misconceptions and barriers that they may feel stuck behind. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. In an interview with the BBC’s

Ouch website Pete said that although his Tourettes made him who he is, when he was younger it had disabled him as he ‘didn’t know how to handle it.’

There are also shows that deal with the disabled specifically. Recently there was Britain’s Missing Top Model, a show that sought to challenge the ideal ‘body beautiful‘. Coming up later in the year Gok Wan seeks out disabled contestants for his latest series of How To Look Good Naked and the last series of X Factor featured a young singer with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism.

There have been criticisms of this kind of programming focusing on contestant’s disabilities. BMTM has been accused of being a ‘freak show’ and Simon Cowell’s project Britain’s Got Talent was recently accused of exploiting a woman with learning difficulties. As with the blind eye that often seems to be turned to racism towards Muslims there are some kind of prejudices which appear to be deemed acceptable. There are Facebook groups named anything from ‘midgets rock’ to ‘midgets freak me out’. Even though I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by disabilities there was a time when I thought that dwarves had been invented for fairy stories, but once you’ve left primary school and have some experience of the world outside of Disney and school dinners then you should be able to come to terms that some people are quite short.

On the other hand, people with disabilities, especially in the context of the media, can sometimes be said to exploit their condition for material gain; is there any harm in this, and is it no more heinous than a woman exploiting her sexual desirability to curry a man’s attention? This is a question raised a lot with disabled comedians; is it acceptable for them to use their disability to get laughs and if so does that mean it’s okay for everybody else? It seems to be an easy question, of course it’s okay to use your situation for comedy, that’s what most comedians do. If an able-bodied comedian dedicated the same amount of time to the subject it probably would be offensive; just as Chris Tucker can make jokes about growing up in a black neighbourhood in a way that wouldn’t seem as funny if Ed Byrne said it.

In my experience there are two main problems with the way people react to someone with a disability. These are either to overreact and create an awkward situation, or to under-react and pretend not to notice the disability or even ignore the person altogether. This second point is the major problem with the media in its coverage of disability. So often, fear of offending people means that whilst there are disabled characters in programs, their disability is virtually invisible; as if programmers lack the confidence to approach the surrounding issues. Blindly ticking off a certain quota of one-dimensional disabled characters is more insulting than having a character react, and be reacted to, in a realistic way.

Consider Eastenders; since Phil’s son Ben arrived on the scene his hearing aid has been virtually unmentioned. The child is played by a hearing actor and the whole thing was a pretty pointless exercise in box ticking. A couple of years down the line and Eastenders are finally ready to tackle the disabled story line with the birth of Billy and Honey’s daughter Janet. The story was well researched, with Billy and Honey’s words coming straight from the mouths of real parents of disabled children. It challenged the notion that parents automatically know what to do and how to feel when a disabled child is born. The point was reiterated that disability is not something that happens to certain people, it can happen to anyone at any stage in their life. The characters took viewers on an important journey of understanding.  The show has also recently introduced the character Adam Best who uses a wheelchair, he is played by David Proud an actor born with spina bifida. In conjunction with Equity and Spotlight, the actor’s union, the BBC is launching a directory of actor’s with disabilities in the coming months.

Understanding disability should not be seen as just a job for the PC brigade. We should consider that disability as it is known today only began with the industrial revolution and cities were built up in the vision of the able-bodied. When companies cite unreasonable costs for altering their businesses, we must think about the fact that it is only since society was made this way that disabled people have been discriminated against. Refusing to build a ramp for cost purposes is tantamount to putting a sign on the door stating “no blacks, no Irish, no disabled”.

Decades after discrimination was deemed socially unacceptable, this kind of invisible prejudice is still going on. For people to accept the adjustments necessary to give disabled people the same rights as everyone else they need to understand in the first place that they are needed.