Link April 1997
Disability specific television is, by and large, awful. Link, the Sunday morning slot on ITV and the BBC's From, and Over, The Edge have as much originality and life to them as a dead sheep. At least dead sheep have some use. I remember Nabil Shaban telling me that he refused to be on the 21st birthday edition of LINK because, as he saw it, if it was still on after 21 years it had obviously failed to make any significant in-roads in challenging the ghettoisation of disability on television. I agree with Nabil, but feel the situation to be worse. By having a programme such as LINK, ITV (and the BBC in its Disability Programmes Unit (DPU)) are excused from making inclusive television in any real sense. Why should they make anything other than that which they already do as they put so much money in to disability specific programmes?
I not only feel that disability specific television to be detrimental to disability empowerment in the main but more so in the manner in which it is facilitated by both the BBC and ITV and, sadly, by Channel 4 (though they are the least guilty of all). The disability movement needs the blood of democratisation and decentralisation of power if it to achieve anything of any great significance in the near or long term future. Yet the DPU is the embodiment of a centralised hierarchy churning out the same, or already used, disability imagery. It is even sadder considering that its three key members were the first people to identify the dangers and errors of creating a disability culture elite. Though I am sure being on £30-40,000 a year would encourage me to remain with the elite. At least LINK has the excuse that age has made it tired, weary, dull and repetitive.
Equally, if you make fifty two programmes a year repetition is, to some extent, excusable. But, as in the DPU, to let an individual producer(s) made the same fatuous programme repeatedly every season is a tragedy bordering on the farcical. What is (was) needed, remembering that the DPU has now gone so far down the road of institutionalisation within the BBC to be of any future social use, is a long term commitment to a regular series of differing independent productions, commissioned by the BBC from disabled filmmakers (old and new) which will not only reduce the burden of the DPU from the license fee payer but give a greater opportunity for the creation a diversity of imagery that covers the entire nation; a diversity that is not Londoncentric. A commitment to disability made independents in mainstream series', such as Arena, Omnibus and Horizon (to name but three), would not go amiss. But that's hoping for too much.