TV 'soaps'

When the Executive Producer of Eastenders was approached by a young disabled woman for Your Shout, Channel 4, and asked why there were no disabled characters in her programme, she said, 'You've got a point, but we don't want to make it into a freak show'. Mark Fowler, a character who was HIV positive, has left the programme and there is now no representation of disabled people in the show. If you consider that the 1991 Census suggested that 17% of the population of East London were disabled people, the prejudice and powerful influence of such 'gatekeepers' becomes clear. Eastenders, and other popular TV 'soaps', have not had a problem accommodating other changes in demographics or popular culture, such as including members of ethnic minority groups or people with alternative sexual orientation.

There have been some attempts to include storylines about disabled people in TV 'soaps':

• Eldorado (1992-3, BBC1), set in a village of UK expatriates in Spain, had disabled actor Julie Fernandez in her wheelchair, but the show only lasted 18 months.
• Emmerdale Farm (1972, ITV) has the disagreeable and grumpy Chris Tait, in a wheelchair as a result of a plane crash in the series some seven years ago.
• Coronation Street (1960, ITV) had Jim MacDonald in a wheelchair, and also Maud. Maud was a rounded, realistic character, but she died and Jim stood up the day his wife went off with his occupational therapist!
• Going back a long way, the original Crossroads (1964, ITV) had Sandy, a pleasant character in a wheelchair; and Benny, who had learning difficulties. Roger Tongue, who played Sandy, developed muscular sclerosis and the producers retained the part as he became a wheelchair user.
• Recently, in Holby City (BBC 2003), a wheelchair-using anaesthetist has appeared regularly in the operating theatre, and one episode had an actor with cerebral palsy (Francesca Martinez) deliberating whether to abort two of her four quads because of her condition and the danger this posed to her babies.
• Brookside (1983, Channel 4) has had a long-running storyline about deafness.
• Grange Hill (1978, BBC), a young people's TV 'soap', has the best track record. For the last 12 years it has periodically included well-founded disabled characters, played by disabled actors. They have been part of strong storylines eg an actor of short stature challenged some racists on a school trip. Francesca Martinez (see above) also appeared in this series, just as one of the students, her impairment was not made an issue.
• Byker Grove (1989, BBC) and Hollyoaks (1995, Channel 4). These two have also briefly featured disabled characters.

But, given the large audiences and the amount of broadcast time occupied by this form of entertainment, disabled people are not well represented most of the time, and hardly ever are characters there in their own right, not just as a plot device.

It's worth noting that another young people's magazine programme, Blue Peter (BBC, from 1958), has consistently raised issues of disability over the years, athough it has never yet had a disabled presenter.