Has anyone managed to catch any Olympics and Paralympics TV coverage? Lol, I’m joking - you’d need to have spent six weeks on Mars to miss it.

TV has always had the power to influence society, going beyond merely reflecting it. This includes the power to influence our attitudes to disability and inclusion. For a couple of glorious weeks every four years, our screens are full of disabled people. There are the Paralympians themselves, the disabled presenters and reporters, and the disabled talent behind the screens.

This visibility is absolutely to be welcomed, but it raises two questions: how do we turn this fortnight into something longer lasting? And what difference does what we see on TV make to the way disabled people are perceived? On the much-discussed first question, are things improving in terms of representation and inclusion? Yes, they are. Is there still a way to go? Too right there is. The much-quoted Diamond data shows 8.2% of onscreen and 6.5% of offscreen disabled representation versus a working-aged disabled population of 23%. Yet initiatives such as TAP (the TV Access Project), the training of more access coordinators and the work of organisations such as TripleC are all helping to support broadcasters and producers make a positive change.

However, the focus of this piece is on the second question, which is how TV and its coverage of events such as the Paralympics affects society’s perceptions of disabled people.

First, some history. The idea for a disabled games began at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in 1948 as a competition for people who sustained spinal injuries in the war. The first Paralympics by name took place in 1960 in Rome, with 400 competitors. Montreal (1976) saw the first (largely recorded) TV coverage. Barcelona (1992) was “the first time there was solid television coverage” in the UK, according to 11-time champion Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson. The BBC provided the coverage. And in Sydney (2000), the Paralympics reached an estimated worldwide audience of 300 million, according to olympics.com.

Then came London 2012, and the big breakthrough when Channel 4 covered the Paralympics for the first time. Athletes such as Ellie Simmonds, Sarah Storey, Jonnie Peacock and many more became household names. So did presenters, especially Adam Hills and Alex Brooker. Channel 4 broadcast more than 150 hours of live action, achieving a record total UK audience of 39.9 million.

 In 2012, for the first time, the Paralympics in the UK wasn’t just an add-on. It was the main event

Channel 4 promised its coverage would “be fearless, demystifying the difficulties and challenges facing Paralympic athletes while celebrating their sporting achievement”. It would “feel more intimate, breaking down barriers between the athletes and the audience, all the time emphasising their sporting achievement”.

 For the first time in the UK, the Paralympics wasn’t something added on. It was the main event.

The coverage was spearheaded by the “Superhumans” marketing campaign - cinematic, eye-catching and ubiquitous, although not without controversy. Dancer and model Monique Jarrett, a short-statured wheelchair user who danced at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics homecoming event, remembers how “Superhumans” changed perceptions overnight: “After 2012, we were suddenly seen by the public as Paralympians. I’d be going about my own business, going to Tesco, reaching for a tin of beans. And people were like, ‘ooh, you’re a Paralympian’. I’m like, ‘no’. It went from one extreme to another in the way people viewed disabled people.”

Deaf journalist and scriptwriter Charlie Swinbourne says that “this was when disabled people were being very negatively portrayed by politicians, and benefits were being cut. The narrative was scroungers on the one hand and superhumans on the other.”

In his 2012 closing ceremony speech, the Chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Lord Sebastian Coe, said British people would never think of disability the same way. Research in 2012 found that 65% of the public agreed that the Paralympics had delivered a breakthrough in the way disabled people are viewed in the UK.

In 2012 and 2016 (Rio), Paralympians were “Superhumans”. By 2020 (Tokyo) they were “Super. Human” – still super, but with more of an emphasis on the human ups and downs. In Paris, the “super” has been dropped entirely, and we see the Paralympians as humans, albeit humans who are extraordinary athletes.

Disabled actor and writer Melissa Johns says: “It’s about showing people who are inspirational athletes, judging them on their talent rather than the hurdles they’ve had to get over that society put in their way. Nowadays, when people say to me, ‘You could have been a Paralympian’, my response is, ‘You could have been an Olympian’, because I’ve realised it’s the exact same thing.”

And there’s a disconnect between the 2012 research and more recent findings from the disability equality charity Scope, which found a big difference between public perceptions of disability and disabled people’s perceptions: one in three disabled people felt there was still a lot of disability prejudice in Britain today, but only one in five non-disabled people agreed.

Non-disabled people might believe there’s less prejudice and link that to events like the Paralympics. But that doesn’t necessarily play out in disabled people’s lived experience. They are twice as likely to be unemployed as the rest of the population. They still live in the shadow of the pandemic narrative where their lives were seen as less valuable than those without “underlying health conditions”.

So where does all this leave us in September 2024? Is Jarrett once again being compared with a Paralympian every time she buys a tin of beans? I suspect she probably is. But I also think people are more inclined to see Paralympians as supreme athletes first and foremost than 12 years ago. And that’s due in part to the way Channel 4 is covering the 2024 games, with competitors shown as athletes first.

Swinbourne says: “The Paralympics is always an opportunity for people on- and offscreen to build their careers and go on to work on other types of programmes. We’re seeing more representation than we used to.

“But there’s still a lot more we should be seeing. Hopefully, this year will be another step towards that process of disabled people becoming more visible. We’ve seen progress over the last five years. Where we do see disabled people on screen, sometimes their disability is incidental, or sometimes it’s part of the story.

“It has moved forward and it’s become so much more normalised. That’s the power of television. Sport can do that, too. When you bring sport and television together, it’s powerful.”

The last word goes to Jarrett: “To be honest, I would love to see a natural mix of disabled and non-disabled people on TV, and disabled people in shows that don’t necessarily focus on disability. Because that is what society is in real life – disabled people don’t wake up and their whole day is about disability. It really isn’t!

I want to see us involved in everything on our screens. I want it to be everyday. Oh… but to also have a few superstars at Beyoncé level – but disabled. That’d be great!”

Katy Boulton is the Strategy and Operations Lead at TripleC