A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

usually involve blind characters being required to face up to their situation and come to
terms with it in one way or another.
Klobas gives a summary of The Hunters, an episode of The Little House on the Prairie, first
aired in 1976:
164
When Pa Ingalls is injured in an accident, daughter Laura must depend on an old
blind man to help her find aid... The Hunters presented a blind character as one
unable to cope with a serious situation, Laura acted as the non-disabled catalyst as
she told Shelby he had to help. The strong-willed child was in control. Her fear for
her father‟s life drove her. Shelby demonstrated extremely poor judgement when he
took on the chore of attempting to find the way out of the mountains since he
admitted he hadn‟t been far from the cabin in years. The action of going out
seemingly restored some long-gone confidence as Shelby later indicated he wished
to join Ben trapping. The Hunters subordinated a blind man to a small child.
Shelby‟s helplessness was self-inflicted due to an inability to accept his limitation. A
mountain man who had to live by his wits was devoid of judgement without his sight
– or so this piece suggests (Klobas, 1988:44).
I include this extract to illustrate the way in which disability, as a role invalidating the
subject position of people with impairments while simultaneously validating the subject
position of people identified as unimpaired, is produced within the texts of TV drama.
Klobas‟ view that disability is rarely far from either the small or big screens is supported by
Paul Darke, who expresses surprise that the frequent appearance and use of impaired
characters within TV and film has not been noted and defined in terms of what he names a
normality genre:
Abnormality is used in cultural imagery to define the parameters of normality, not
vice versa; it creates the simulacrum through which most apparently „normal people‟
live their lives. Thus, there is a coherence, I feel, to disability imagery that has been
ignored through a failure to see the role abnormality plays in creating normality;
through creating the illusion of normality out of the apparent reality of abnormality
(Darke, 1998:183).
Within normality dramas, Darke suggests, physical abnormality represents disorder and
chaos so that order and stability can be created as the story moves towards its conclusion: