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"Are You Having a Laugh?" - disability on TV, aired on BBC Two at 9 p.m. on Friday June 25.
The unique documentary, voiced by David Walliams and featuring a selection of well-known commentators from the worlds of comedy and disability, including Francesca Martinez and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, takes a rye look at how various impairments have been represented on television down through the years.
Are You Having a Laugh remembers some of the most popular and infamous disabled characters to ever grace our British TV screens, Blue Peter's Joey Deacon and Brenda from the office to name but two. While celebrating how far television has come and where we find ourselves in 2010, the show also manages to convey, in a rather humorous and heart-warming way, the slightly ridiculous, vaguely embarrassing and darned right hilarious manner in which disability has historically been depicted in soap, comedy, kids TV and even American detective drama.
This is a funny, accessible, mainstream piece of telly, chock full of contributors who all make for seriously good disabled role models. In fact, with appearances by the Mat Fraser (pictured), Laurence Clark, Kiruna Stamell and Julie Fernandez, the credits read a bit like an Ouch! honours list.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From BBC's Ouch!: 
