Cast Offs’ April Is Happy That Her Face Fits

A very well written article, especially considering she’s an actress.

Men in BMWs shouting out “Oi! Desperate Dan!” and complete strangers asking “Does your face make it hard for you to kiss?” are just some of the comments I’ve heard people make about my face. (And by the way, it’s “no”.) But I know I’m likely to be getting a few more stares now.

On Tuesday and Wednesday nights for the next three weeks, I will join a deaf actress, a blind actor, an actress with restricted growth, an actor who uses a wheelchair and an actor affected by Thalidomide in Cast Offs, Channel 4’s new drama series about six characters marooned on an island. I play April who, like me, has a condition called cherubism that affects the shape of her face. There’s no point denying that any character I play will always have cherubism, in the same way that any character Sarah Jessica Parker plays will always be thin and annoying.

Cast Offs, penned by writers from Skins and The Thick of It, was my first acting role and I was so clueless on set that I spent the first week wondering whether Channel 4 would decide to replace me with an ex- Hollyoaks blonde, and use computergenerated imagery to give her a facial disfigurement. I needn’t have worried. Not only was the team incredibly supportive, the budget didn’t stretch to special effects.

In addition to Cast Offs, in the past few months, we’ve seen a newsreader with a facial disfigurement presenting Channel Five’s lunchtime news, a woman whose lower right arm is missing presenting on the Cbeebies channel and a wheelchairuser buying drinks in the Queen Vic. But will these breakthroughs increase the number of disabled people we see on television? And how does the way TV portrays disability compare with real life?

In the series, April is shown having to deal with insensitive comments about her face, and it does happen, but it’s not common. Indeed a few years ago, when I first started talking about my experiences, a TV producer was so desperate to show me being victimised that I was plonked in a busy street in Central London with cameras poised to capture any staring and, fingers crossed, someone shouting names at me. Not a single person stared, glanced or gasped in my direction. The producer was so frustrated that he eventually filmed a colleague staring at me in the street.

That said, nasty comments do happen. When I was 12, an older boy came up to me and said: “Eww! What’s wrong with your face? You’re so ugly.” To which I replied: “I have a horrible disease which you’ll catch if I breathe on you,” as I blew in his direction.

Earlier this year, a little boy next to me on the bus, tugged my sleeve and told me he was scared of me. I told him that I was a kind person and that he didn’t need to be scared. He smiled and seemed to accept that. I’ve learnt that young children are often curious but accepting once you explain. It’s the grown ups who need educating.

Other than our faces, April and I are very different people. She’s a clever research scientist and likes beige jumpers. I do not. If I look pissed off in the group publicity photo for the series, that’s not me acting — that’s me pissed off because I had to stand next to Sophie Woolley, who plays deaf, pregnant Gabby, and was looking radiant in a wedding dress. But from now on if people do stare at me, I will assume it’s because they saw my photo in The Sun under the headline “There’s a lot of bonking … but it’s not a freak show” and have assumed I’m some sort of “alternative” porn star.

Disabled characters in films and on television have historically been portrayed as “sad and pathetic”, “tragic but brave” or “bitter and twisted”. Freddy Krueger and the James Bond villain Blofeld are classic examples of where facial disfigurement has been used to symbolise a character’s inner evil. So it was a real honour to be given the chance to redress these stereotypes and play a character who doesn’t have a penchant for sharp knives or an evil plan for world domination.

Another TV cliché is to use disability as a dramatic plot device, where a character suddenly acquires a disability and is either quickly written out or miraculously healed. This is particularly popular in Australian soap operas, which are to social realism what the BNP is to social inclusion. If you thought Bobby Ewing coming back from the dead in Dallas was far fetched, that’s nothing compared with the number of characters who become paralysed in Neighbours and start walking again four weeks later (“Strewth, I can’t feel my legs!”).

Cast Offs grabs hold of these clichés and gives them a good throttling. Not only are these disabled characters portrayed as imperfect, funny, sexual, quirky human beings, but there’s not a miracle in sight. By the end of the series, we’re all still gorgeously deaf, disabled and funny looking.

Whether Cast Offs will have a long-term impact on the way disability is portrayed in the media and increase the number of disabled people we see on television remains to be seen. If it achieves anything, I hope it’s to encourage more disabled young people who want to become writers, actors and presenters to pursue their dreams.