Disability Now
– Paul Darke
March 1999 TV Review
Gimme
Gimme Gimme (BBC2, 22 January) is an amusing new sitcom about a woman
and a gay guy flat sharing and their love-hate relationship.
It is up-front without betraying any of its political bite through
fear of being negative or stereotypical.
It is very fond of using abusive terminology about all social groups,
but its crassness is its edge; in having stupid people use stupid phrases
the stupidity of the abuse is revealed as ignorance rather than cleverness. The home help from hell featured in one
episode and although it was one-dimensional it captured nicely the two extremes
of home help types: the do-gooder and the indifferent. Shooting the Past (BBC2, 24 January)
captured wonderfully the beauty of photography in a drama about the closure
of a photo-library and although Timothy Spall was wonderful in this rather
predictable narrative his ending up as some one with a brain injury was a
little unnecessary and cliched. Still,
anything was better than Catherine Cookson’s Tilly Trotter (ITV.
29 January), a drama series so bad that they had to blame the author in the
programmes title. I think they
though they were being original in this Lady Chatterley type narrative but,
lets face it, they weren’t.
The other
drama of the month to use disability rather sadly was Midsomer Murders:
Strangler’s Wood (ITV, 3 February), a usually amusing kind of Inspector Morse series set
in a village where psychotic tendencies are the key to a residence permit. This episode had an elderly wheelchair
using mother keeping an eye on her murderous son who kills him once a new
murder takes place mistakenly believing the killer to be her son. One could only feel sympathy for the son.
Landladies
(ITV, 2 February) voyeuristically captured the landland and landlord Chris
and Janet, who are of restricted height, to look at the ‘common man’
on holiday. It could have not
been more patronising to either Chris and Janet or the ‘common man’.
Secondly, there was That’s Esther (ITV, 7 February) and
that’s crap. Never have
I seen a programme of such half-baked stupidity in my entire life.
Simply because it had two disabled co-presenters did not make it disability
OK, or in any way OK. It was expensive crap TV that was brought
to us with a smile of ignorance and the manner of a female Alan Partridge.
Keep an
eye out for Channel 4’s next Access All Areas in late February
and early March as I will be reviewing it all.
Tell me what you think!
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