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

„thereby providing both entertainment and a simple resolution to the highly complex social
„problem‟ of abnormality and disability‟ (Darke, 1998:184).
Echoing Klobas and Darke, and drawing on Cumberbatch and Negrine‟s 1992 study Images
of Disability on Television, Colin Barnes remarks that:
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Disabled people are rarely shown as integral and productive members of the
community, as students, as teachers, as part of the workforce or as parents. This
feeds the notion that disabled people are inferior human beings with little to offer the
community... In TV films and dramas, for example, they represent less than one and
a half per cent of all characters portrayed.... Disabled people seldom appear in non-
fiction programmes apart from those dealing solely with disability. Moreover, there
are no disabled newsreaders, weathermen and women, or presenters of
documentaries, and disabled people are hardly ever seen on chatshows in discussions
about subjects which do not relate directly to disability (1994:44).
Describing her own early experiences as a „real‟ disabled person on TV, Lola recounts that:
we got… erm, we used to be on the telly ourselves … we were occasionally featured
in documentaries and … erm … all kinds of strange little programmes about the
work of Dr Selma Muller and so on, and … again, I remember that as being … first
of all, always about how you were being made to walk… (l.2:102ff.)
While Lola describes experiences that occurred forty years ago, it is apparent from Sarah‟s
comment above that this kind of representation of disabled children and adults is still
prevalent.
Roshni recalls a time when she was invited to take part in a Radio Four programme:
...one incident that I remember very, very strongly was that a producer who I‟d never
worked with before from Radio Four phoned me and asked me if I would take part
in … a radio feature they were making … erm … and I … can‟t remember the title
of this, but it was something really shocking, like … erm … Feel an Elephant or
something … and this was based on … I‟m sure you know where this is going…
this was based on the parable of four blind men who each felt an elephant but felt
different parts of the elephant‟s anatomy, so when they were asked to describe an
elephant‟s texture and size, they each described it in a different way… but an
elephant is nevertheless an elephant, regardless of whether you find its trunk or some