disability

BBC News launches week of disability news coverage

Stories from across the UK and around the world will form the bedrock of the week, beginning on Monday 20th February,. Reports examine how different businesses are working to help disabled people and assess the true power of the purple pound on the global and UK economy.

BBC News will be reporting from Mumbai where a UK company has hired blind people as perfumers, and from Wales, where a farmer paralysed in a car accident has been able to return to work in a specially adapted tractor.

Have you met Miss Jones?

“When I meet someone their first emotion is to shit themselves because they’re like ‘Is she drunk? Is she mental? What is she saying?’ I love that because I can think, right, I am going to prove you wrong!” she says.

Rosie has recently come back from the Funny Women awards where she reached the final with the support of her mentor, stand-up comedian Sara Pascoe. “It was only my tenth ever gig” she recalls. “I performed to about 800 people. That’s my biggest audience by about 780 people…”

Your catch up TV must-sees

House of cards, kevin Spacey,

1. Cooked

 

 

This slow-starting series is both beautifully shot and engagingly presented.

The show centres around the ways food is prepared around the world and the role that food, and eating, impact us on a social, cultural and personal level. Each of the four episodes is named after one of the classical elements (earth, air, fire and water) and examines how these four elements form the basis of every meal that we eat.

Channel 4 launches Year of Disability

China, Beijing, Paralympics, 2008

The focus on disability coincides with the Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and aims to build upon the ongoing initiatives outlined in last year's 360° Diversity Charter which aimed to improve access for all under-represented groups such as BAME, LGBT and women.

In 2017, Channel 4 will focus on a different diversity theme.

BBC’s Defying the Label season won’t change prejudice overnight says Adam Pearson

The programme is part of BBC Three’s Defying the Label season, which aims to explore disability, poverty, hate crime, sex and romance in 15 specialist programmes over four weeks.

Yet Pearson, a former BBC and Channel 4 researcher who also starred in Channel 4’s Beauty and the Beast, argues that the BBC season is a ‘double-edged sword’. While there’s been progress in discussing disability on primetime TV, Pearson hopes to get to a stage where disabled people can appear on screen without “the need for a special season or with such a big song and dance”.

Diversity: job done? Don’t get me started...

All TV industry watchers know that, thanks largely to Lenny Henry, diversity remains high on television’s agenda. In the past year or so, the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky have each made big announcements, pledging to improve their on-screen representation of minorities and to do more to nurture and encourage multi-ethnic and diverse workforces.

But has genuine change finally kicked in? That was the question that Sky News reporter Afua Hirsch wanted answering as she chaired a packed and often emotional RTS event provocatively entitled "Diversity: job done?".

Disabled people still under-represented in TV

According to Creative Skillset's workforce survey, released in May, the proportion of disabled people in television is still much lower than in the economy as a whole and has not improved for 10 years.

Just 5% of those who work in TV consider themselves to be disabled, compared with 11% of the wider working population.

Comprising over 1,100 respondents, the poll is the largest survey of skills and training issues of individuals working across television.