Television representations

If disabled people have been over-represented in film (albeit, too often, as villains), they have been under-represented in television programmes. The Broadcasting Standards Council carried out a media watch of the existing four terrestrial channels in the UK for four years in the early 1990s and found that only 1-2% of broadcast output featured disabled people or disability issues. For many years, there were specialist programmes for disabled people, such as See Hear (BBC), One in Four (BBC), Link (ITV), Same Difference (Channel 4) and From the Edge (BBC), but recently channel controllers have had a policy of including disability issues across the schedule. Many disabled people think that this means their issues have been squeezed out by an obsession with ratings.