Disability Now
– Paul Darke
January 1999
TV Review
All those
who say disability is invisible in culture should take up television reviewing.
We have had disability bits on Children in Need (BBC
1), Home Front (BBC 2), another Holiday
episode (BBC 1) and Channel 4’s Garden Doctors. All of which were very sensible, suitably politically correct,
and awfully normalising in their attitude towards disabled people. No doubt
all the programme makers feel they have done their duty and provided a social
service. Sad really, but one
mustn’t grumble! I’m
being too hard on them, I know, at least it gives society a little bit of
variety and spice to watch of an evening. Interestingly though, they were all somewhat
incoherent in what they were saying or articulating, as is the continuing
new series of From the Edge (BBC 2, Tuesday evenings); a
programme that amazes more and more each time I watch it.
By far the
most interesting disability programmes on television in the last year were
ITV’s Changing Faces (24 Nov) and BBC 1’s QED
The Bionic Woman (1 Dec); both of which revealed the truly
frightening nature of modern medicine and its determination to rid society
of disabled people. This was not the intention of either documentary,
quite the opposite in fact, they wanted to show how medical advances were
‘helping the disabled’; from plastic surgery for people with Downs
Syndrome in Changing Faces to electronic spinal implants
for paraplegics in QED.
Changing
Faces used the examples of two families with a young child, and an
older man, all with Downs Syndrome whom all received varying degrees of plastic
surgery to make them more ‘normal’. QED, similarly, followed the medical profession’s
attempts to make the paraplegic Julie Hill stand and walk and cycle so that
she could be more ‘normal’- and they will, rather worryingly,
succeed. Each film offered a
glimpse of things to come for disabled people as we enter the 21st
Century: society doing all it can for those prepared to be normalised whit
the rest of us being left to ‘rest in peace’. These programmes frightened me, literally and Changes
Faces brought me to tears –
its becoming a habit - at the sight of an adorable four year old boy called
Michael bleeding from his eyes, nose, ears, chin and cheeks, and wrapped in
bandages, moments after radical plastic surgery.
All carried out in the name of normality. All I could feel was that this is not love and it is definitely
not care but it is the future. Help!
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