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

debate the choices that are displayed, but care has gone into ensuring the radical option will
not be heard. Taylor and Harris also note that:
186
...essentially empty, tautological and vacuous media content can still be fascinating
in an absorbing rather than revealing sense. It produces much interpretive activity
(the focus of cultural populism), but from a critical perspective this activity reflects,
rather than challenges, cognition‟s enervation (Taylor and Harris, 2008:155).
To reiterate a point, while Beyond Boundaries may generate discussion, this discussion
functions to buttress existing horizons rather than to „change the way we view the world‟.
You‟re being told that you‟ve got to fight against… fight and conquer your
disability… it is completely unrealistic, isn‟t it… the issues for most disabled people
are around getting a job… getting an education… getting around from place to
place… not traversing through Africa… or going through a swamp, up mountains…
these are not the issues… yet these are the issues that this programme presents…
(l.2:518ff.)
Charles‟ draws attention to the way that the location of Beyond Boundaries (Series 1:
Nicaragua; Series 2: The African Challenge; Series 3: Across the Andes [BBC, 2009:
unpaged]) decontextualises the experience of disability. To have filmed the same individuals
attempting to work as an intrepid team in order to traverse Edinburgh or Newcastle might
have produced more interesting questions.
Discussing the way in which Beyond Boundaries objectifies the disabled people taking part,
Charles remarks that:
…the narration is like Wildlife on One… it‟s like see the disabled people out of their
natural habitat…
While it is presented as an imaginative, progressive media representation of disabled people,
I argue that Beyond Boundaries is simply an updated version of the „strange little
programmes‟ (l.2:103) that Lola used to appear in. Both encourage the view that disability is
something that can be overcome with a positive individual attitude. Both preclude the
suggestion that resolution might be looked for in the social sphere.
Charles illustrates the way in which media feed off each other to sustain horizons: