BBC Needs More Disabled Actors

The BBC has been challenged to cast more disabled actors in primetime drama, to reflect better the make up of the audience.

At a meeting at Television Centre on Wednesday evening, organised by staff group BBC Ability, programme makers were urged to be ‘less scared of difference’ and to broaden their search for acting talent.

‘Around ten million people in the UK have some kind of disability but that’s not mirrored in the drama they see,’ said Martyn Sibley, social media entrepreneur and co-editor of online magazine Disability Horizons, who himself has spinal muscular atrophy.

Shannon Murray, who works full time in the BBC’s legal department and is also a model and a trained actor, thought that soaps, one-off dramas and continuing series should include, as a matter of course, more main characters who just happened to be disabled.

Highlighting her own experiences, she said: ‘An accident at 14 put me in a wheelchair when the only representation of disability on TV seemed to be Ironside [the American show featuring a semi-paralysed police chief], and I’m not sure we’ve moved on much from that.’

Although she had had odd parts in TV drama, they tended to be as ‘a nice disabled woman who has been a bit hard done by’ whereas she was ‘dying to play a complete bitch’ and to land a regular role in a high profile 9pm programme such as Waking the Dead.

Brilliant script

A suggestion that the reason there were so few disabled actors on screen was because few TV executives were disabled, was denied by Ben Stephenson, controller of drama commissioning, who said the problem was simply a lack of scripts featuring people with disabilities. He received hardly any, he explained.

‘The big thing we need to tackle is how we get writers to include a whole range of people,’ he said. ‘Any barrier can be broken down by a brilliant script.’

He thought the BBC should organise another event, similar to the one held on Wednesday, at which ‘the best writers in the country’ would be invited to discuss the issue of disability portrayal.

‘I think that could make a radical difference and that we could suddenly have a script with a disabled character who’s a computer nerd or a spy in Spooks or a forensic scientist in Waking the Dead.’