Disability In UK TV: A Year On From Jack Thorne’s Blistering MacTaggart, Changemakers Including Peter Bowker, Rose Ayling-Ellis & Ruth Madeley Assess The State Of Play

deadline.com:

When His Dark Materials writer Jack Thorne stepped up to the Edinburgh TV Festival MacTaggart podium last year in an audience-less room, he wanted to address an issue that had felt hopelessly ignored in the mainstream through past decades.The prolific British scribe’s proclamation that UK TV had “utterly and totally” failed disabled people drew headlines across the country and moved the industry up a gear in solving deep-seated legacy issues both behind and in-front of the camera that impact a minority which makes up around 20% of the population.“What Jack did so brilliantly was contextualize how the industry can conduct itself within a wider conversation around the country’s attitudes toward disability and treatment during the pandemic,” says Peter Bowker, acclaimed British TV writer of the BBC’s influential autism drama The A Word. “Presenting the wider context is smart as you challenge the industry by saying ‘Don’t feel too good about yourselves’.

But the most important thing is that he put this at the forefront of people’s minds.”One year on from Thorne’s powerful broadside, Deadline has spoken with top-tier changemakers including Bowker, Years and Years star Ruth Madeley, deaf Strictly Come Dancing winner Ruth Ayling-Ellis, Channel 4 Disability Lead Ally Castle and Thorne himself to assess where progress, if any, has been made.

The quintet paint a rosier picture of greater opportunity for disabled talent, an improvement in attitudes and an equalization caused by the Covid pandemic, but speak of progress required in areas such as on-set accessibility, which is in parts atrocious.

There remains, for example, just a tiny handful of accessible on-set trailers across the country.Leading the plethora of improvements,