Disability Now – Paul Darke
December 1998 TV Review
During
Armistice week disability was very prevalent on TV. Channel 4’s Sounds
Like Sunlight (7 Nov.), about blind
veterans and Shell Shock (8 Nov.),
about war trauma / mental illness, being typical. More routinely there were
three other documentaries that had disability at their core: Heart of
Darkness and Heart of the Matter:
One Brief Life (both 25 Oct. BBC 1);
and Horizon: Thalidomide – a Necessary Evil (29 October BBC2). Heart of Darkness explored
the rise of white supremacy organisation’s in Texas. The main problem was that it used a
victim of one such organisation – a black disabled man named James Byrd - in order to indicate that such groups
were now out of control and a serious threat to democracy. It was as if they were implying that
had they been killing able-bodied people it wouldn’t be so bad.
Heart
of the Matter, in contrast, told the
moving story of short life of Baby L whom was born severely disabled and how
her parents did everything they could to keep her alive. Eventually they were only defeated by
Baby L’s doctors’ successful appeal to the courts, against the
parents’ wishes, to terminate her life. More a case of ‘hearts of
darkness’ I would say. I
personally hate such programmes because they cannot fail, given their subject
matter, to move you irrespective of how good – as with Heart of the
Matter - or how bad they are made.
The
Horizon: Thalidomide documentary,
somewhat disturbingly, was unfocused and failed to deal with any of the
questions it raised, leaving one feeling that it was little more than a
promo-film for the imminent reintroduction into the UK prescription system of
the dreaded drug thalidomide.
Late
night ITV offered up a ridiculous tale of Siamese twins, Tales from the
Crypt: My Brother’s Keeper (29
October). A plot line in which one
twin wants to separate and the other does not, which was an entertaining piece
of ‘tales of the unexpected’ style drama that was suitably short and brief, and which sent me to
bed with a smile. Early evening
BBC 2 gave us the equally ridiculous Sliders: State of the A.R.T. (Nov. 4), a much more sanitised form entertainment,
about a mad wheelchair using scientist (played by ‘Freddy Kruger’
himself) who wiped out humanity only to replace it with human like robots who
called him ‘Father’. Sliders, I would argue, is the best of its kind of US import TV on television at present, and
this episode was no exception.
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