Disabled actor in Britain questions whether "Cast Offs" is good idea

From Simon Startin in The Guardian in the UK:

The C4 mockumentary promises to show a new side to disability, but will it mean programme-makers create better roles for actors like me?

Imagine if we stuck a paper bag on the head of Al Pacino and scrawled the word "disability" on it. Would Pacino have chosen to become an actor under such conditions? Yet this is the predicament faced by myself and the rest of the burgeoning number of disabled people who are choosing to pursue acting careers. We, too, dream of our nuanced, subtle and sexy performances garnering Baftas and Oscars. As a young actor, I would read biographies of Olivier and Burton and be transported into reveries of my imminent Hollywood Career. Foolishly, I hadn't noticed the paper bag.

In 1992, I auditioned for drama school. The first school reassured me afterwards that, had I not been disabled, I would definitely have been given a place. The second offered me a place provided I could cure my hunched posture (a result of one of my multiple disabilities, not easily rectified by a few sessions of the Alexander Technique) before the first day of term. Again, I heard the dull rustle of brown paper.
If you're worth your salt, there is plenty of work for an actor with a disability probably more than for the able-bodied, in fact. The UK disability art scene has never been more buoyant. Up and down the country, in new lottery-funded accessible venues, works of anger, beauty and the black humour you'd expect from artists consigned to a ghetto, are delighting audiences. However, the Baftas seem very distant when you're preaching to the converted in Nantwich.

Worthy as this work is, my tatty actor's ego wants "to do telly". And this is where it gets interesting. In recent years a new phenomenon has evolved: the disabled actor casting session. Word goes out that a "crip", as some of us drily refer to ourselves, is required, so the usual suspects are hauled into a dreary office off Goldhawk Road in west London. We know each other and we know what's coming: it's not about talent, it's about our impairment – or who has the "best" paper bag.

The brutal truth is the camera loves disability but not disabled people, and the often lazy writing prevalent in TV dramas of late has done nothing to help this. I've had many a director perform a sincerity bypass before my eyes as they lean forward and say, "I'm terribly interested in your disability" – without ever asking what my disability actually is. (The truth is it's not that easy to define, but that's not the point.)

I've had the sneaking suspicion for a while now that disability is a shortcut to authencity for the creatively challenged. Able-bodied programme-makers think we are all very brave to deal with our tragedies and should be rewarded with a few badly scrawled bit parts. But a mainstream disabled star? Well, clearly our fragile bodies would buckle in the ensuing mainstream hostility. (There is, of course, Marlee Matlin, who played Joey Lucas in The West Wing, but she's deaf, and I – like the deaf community – don't even think of her as disabled.)

But now there is Cast Offs (cast is pictured), Channel 4's new reality TV pastiche, promising to rewrite the rules of how disability is portrayed by mainstream drama. Is it really any different? The conceit is a mockumentary that maroons six people with disabilities on a remote British island to discover if they can survive without assistance. Whether this is a deliberate poke at the BBC's Beyond Boundaries documentary series (which features a team of physically disabled adventurers) is open to speculation, but the reality-TV-style jump cuts and awareness of an unseen camera crew – who decide what is making "great TV" – create a satirical success, deliberately placing the audience in the awkward role of voyeur.

The first episode centres on Dan, a wheelchair user who has only recently joined the disability fraternity after a car crash. This is much the same situation that Peter Mitchell, who plays Dan, found himself in back in 2002. Dan is a clever entry point to the world of disability, touchingly played by Mitchell, as he is eminently palatable for an able-bodied audience: an easily understood disability, boy-next-door manners, heart-throb good looks and still innocent of the disabled world's bleak humour and protective cynicism. Dan's backstory is nicely detailed with the gentle absurdities of the newly disabled, such as when his well-meaning and over-compensating father buys him a basketball for his "new life".

However, it is when the programme-makers unceremoniously dump Dan on the island's beach that cold water is thrown on the concerns of those who like their disability neat and nice. In one of my favourite TV moments for a long time, we are given a giddying dose of disability vertigo, as Dan enters the darkened homestead saying in true Big Brother fashion "I think I'm the first" – only for the other five Cast Offs, with their myriad glamorous disabilities, to be sprung upon us with absolutely no warning and no spoonfeeding. This is a show that, from the outset, makes no apologies for its subject matter. Oh, and then the Cast Offs start behaving really badly.

Early press coverage of the series is getting pretty excited about the notion of disabled people getting drunk and having sex (this is not news to me), but I sincerely hope this not all Cast Offs is remembered for. It aspires to be a seminal piece of television by being a vigorous riposte to traditional "impairment-informed writing" that fails to see any further than the disabilities of characters. Cast Offs promises to create storylines that go far beyond this, and in the process portrays its characters as fully rounded people, not "merely" disabled.

Frankly, the least interesting thing about the character of Tom (gleefully deadpanned by Tim Gebbels) is his blindness and his lame jokes about his blindness. Instead, it is the sense of hurt and evasion – which is emphatically not just a result of his visual impairment – beneath his well-rehearsed facade that bodes well for future episodes.

Cast Offs is more than a sharp-edged satire against able-bodied assumption. It has the courage to cock a snoop at the disability community itself, and its penchant for bickering and "outcripping" each other (another memorable scene in the first episode sees the characters comparing each other's disabilities in terms of the "hear/see/speak no evil" monkeys – the character affected by Thalidomide "loses").

Most significantly, this is writer-led television. Its creators, Jack Thorne, Alex Bulmer and Tony Roche, have the pedigree (Thorne has written for Shameless and Skins, and co-wrote an acclaimed adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Bulmer, while Roche has written for The Thick Of It) and integrity (two of the writers are disabled) to tell it like it is. But, for all that, whether this series really proves a sea change in the roles disabled actors can play remains an open question.

The Cast Offs are still stuck on their island. There is no guarantee they will bring change on the mainland, where paper bags are sadly still in fashion.