disability

David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived follows the former stunt performer through the major milestones of his life. Holmes spent his teenage years as a gymnast, before being selected to play Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Holmes returned for each subsequent film, growing up alongside Radcliffe, until sustaining a debilitating spinal injury whilst preparing for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I.

As an industry and medium, television’s strength is its ability to constantly evolve – and the steady, if slow, improvement in disability representation is an important part of that.

Disability consultant and Gogglebox star Simon Minty opened the session by celebrating the progress (as well as noting points of regress), before writer and actor Steph Lacey (Stay Close, Creep) reflected on the work still to be done.

Everyone’s heard of the Bechdel test*, right? Possibly the “DuVernay test”, too, as a measurement of the representation of people of colour in TV shows and films. Maybe even the “Vito Russo test” for gay and lesbian representation.

But what about the “Edgar test”, for disabled talent?

Justin Edgar of production company and disability training provider 104 Films, who is himself disabled, invented the rules when challenged by BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme.

Paralympic gold medallist Ellie Simmonds will investigate why about 40 percent of children in the care system in England and Wales have a registered disability.

This is a marked increase compared to the rest of the population, which is eight percent, and Simmonds wants to learn why this is the case.

To uncover the truth behind these statistics, Simmonds meets families who have adopted disabled children and those who felt unable to raise a disabled child.

At a time when ­producers and broadcasters are working hard to ensure diversity in their workforce as well as on screen, the team at Signpost Productions in the North East of England can claim to be ahead of the curve. Eleven of the company’s 23 full-time staff are deaf or have another disability – physical, chronic or hidden. Between them, they produce more than 1,000 hours of signed British Sign Language (BSL) translations a year for programming on three major broadcasters, including ITV.

Watching two disabled people make love on prime-time terrestrial TV is something many disability campaigners thought they’d never see. But last month, in BBC Two’s widely praised drama Then Barbara Met Alan, we witnessed the eponymous Barbara and Alan enjoy being intimate in a scene that may well go down as one of the most powerful and moving moments of TV drama in 2022. 

In the spring of 2020 I found myself, like so many other freelance folk, workless and incomeless. A friend kindly sent me details of a role at an organisation called TripleC DANC. I confess I had never heard of TripleC, and – realising they were Manchester-based – I idly wondered if “DANC” might be a reference to the weather.

In fact, TripleC is a disabled-led company that works to strengthen access and inclusion for deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people in the arts and media. The “DANC” bit stands for the Disabled Artists Networking Community, TripleC’s professional strand.

One of my first TV shows was about endangered animals around the world,” recalls presenter Ade Adepitan. “When I met with the producer and director, they told me: ‘This show is going to involve scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, trekking through the jungle in South Africa and Namibia, and hiking up mountains in Romania. We don’t want you to feel under any pressure, but is this something you think you can do?’ I said: ‘When do we start?’ I’m the sort of person who takes things on and then finds the solution as we go along.