Forgetting the Ability in Disability
After watching a few frustrating scenes in today’s episode of Neighbours, I have another rant to let out today.
For the first time in my life, I have something negative to say about my favourite soap.
When Frazer Yeats had his accident and ended up in his wheelchair, few fans were happier than I was to see disability on Ramsay Street for the first time in too many years. But after today’s episode, in which Frazer’s future mother-in-law told her daughter “If you marry Frazer, you will be making the biggest mistake of your life,” because “He’s disabled,” I don’t think there are many fans who are more frustrated than me! It was reading about idiots exactly like her (in the early 1990s) that convinced me that I didn’t have the right to fall in love… in this century, thank goodness, I realise that they are the ones with the problem.
What kind of message is Neighbours sending out to their mainstream viewers with that reaction? And do they actually want to insult the rest of us?
So I’d like to tell the scriptwriters of Neighbours: 1984 called, people. It wants its’ attitudes to disability back!!
Same Difference 
Trackbacks