Why disabled actors need a fair deal on the small screen

Learning-disabled people on TV are like buses. You wait for an age and then loads come along all at once.

This month has been rich in representation for a usually pretty invisible minority and producers and schedulers are to be congratulated in waking up to a sector of society that is rarely seen on the box. Let’s hope we’re at the outset of a trend, one that celebrates the likes of the outstanding Sarah Gordy, an actor with down syndrome who played opposite Colin Young, an actor with cerebral palsy, in last week’s episode of prime Sunday evening viewing Call The Midwife.

A couple of weeks ago another highly talented professional actor with down syndrome, Tommy Jessop, and his contemporaries at Blue Apple Theatre formed the focus of Hamlet In Love, a documentary on BBC3, and Channel 4’s The Undateables has regularly featured ‘characters’ with various learning disabilities.

The learning disabled community has appeared more frequently in high rating television programmes in the past month that at any point in the past year and just ‘being there’ on the screen in front of millions is tremendous.

However once we go beyond celebrating that presence it’s helpful to ask ‘and what are they doing there?- these people who we haven’t seen here before?’ The answer seems to be primarily ‘having sex’ (Hamlet in Love) and/or ‘being watched trying to have sex’ (The Undateables) or ‘getting into a right old state as a consequence of having sex’ (Call the Midwife).

As the artistic director of Dark Horse, the Huddersfield-based national touring theatre company and drama school for actors with learning disabilities I’m very pleased that increasingly TV audiences are able to see these people who we work with. However, the content of these dramas and documentaries presents a niggling worry.

We work very hard at Dark Horse to prepare our actors for the industry. Tutored in the same skills as any ‘usual’ professional actor they work in our own productions of new writing and also in film and TV. We work with insightful producers like Lawrence Till. When he was series producer for the drama Shameless he workshopped with us and the result was eight rounded, well-drawn, antipathetic characters who played out to four million viewers.

If at any point in that process my actors had been asked to principally explore and present romantic/sexual relationship and for the camera to be invited into that kind of intimacy I would have said no.

There is a fundamental difference between people with learning disabilities and people without learning disabilities when it comes to the ability to self-manage and monitor inhibitions and it calls for a slightly more mindful editorial/directorial eye.

For me, The Undateables has crossed a line in its intrusion into the courtships of people, who, not able to hide the clumsiness we all experience in new romantic situations become fodder for finger pointing and distasteful echoes of the freak show.

In Hamlet In Love the focus was on the actor’s love lives rather than the tour of the Shakespeare play they were engaged. That was where the real story was, but it was simply brushed over.

It felt demeaning of the learning disabled people involved that their professional pursuits were disregarded for the sake of filming a prurient snog in the woods and a chronicle of their romantic fallings out. The extraordinary acting accomplishments they’d no doubt made was quietly airbrushed out of the final cut.

Our actors at Dark Horse work incredibly hard to be able to portray characters with full lives, familial, professional, fantastical- they don’t want to be represented as people who’s love lives take precedence over every other aspect of their being.

We’re about to go into rehearsal for the national tour of mainstream comedy Sing Something Simple featuring a leading role for Dark Horse actor Joe Sproulle, who has Down Syndrome. In interviews in the past he’s been asked whether he has a girlfriend or not, to which he rather splendidly chose some time ago to respond that he’s a professional and he would rather talk about the work, that his private life is just that.

It’s still a hurrah for the risk takers out there on TV, let’s hope the next stage in the evolution of this equality battle is a richer representation of people with learning disabilities- from the waist up.

Sing Something Simple will be at Cast in Doncaster from March 12 to 14 and Junction in Goole, March 18 & 19.