TV highlights
If you like your TV disability flavoured, then you'll be spending quite a bit of time in front of the telly next week, with two programmes to decide between at 9.00pm on Monday 29 January.
Channel 4 is showing another programme in its Extraordinary Children series.
The Smallest People in the World tells the "moving story" (and how Crippled Monkey sometimes hates that phrase) of five American children who are Primordial dwarfs, the smallest and rarest type in the world.
Meanwhile, at the same time on Five, the Extraordinary People series - and boy, isn't that going to be confusing, considering that Extraordinary Children will be airing then too - meets The Boy Who Sees Without Eyes, a blind teenager who has "developed a unique strategy to cope with his disability" (it says here). Er, what that "unique strategy" is I can't say. Guess we'll all just have to tune in to find out.
But if all that medical marvel stuff is doing your head in, as it is mine, hang on for Wednesday afternoon on the C91Èȱ¬ Channel. Desperados is a new children's comedy drama series starring Paralympic bronze medallist and TV presenter Ade Adepitan as Baggy Awolowo, a coach who is desperate for new players for his junior wheelchair basketball team.
Comments
I must say how much I am looking forward to watching both programmes mentioned but wonder why I am doing so. Is it general inquisitiveness about other forms of disability or is it just general voyeurism?
Being disabled myself – I’m a below-knee amputee who spends most of his time outdoors and at work in a wheelchair – I get used to people staring at me. Sometimes, in the case of small children, it amuses me, especially when I see them trying to whisper to their mother ‘mam, mam that man has only one leg’ only to see the mother desperately trying to shut them up, and other times, I get pretty annoyed as in the case of adults who should know better staring. Now, apart from missing half a leg I don’t look overly disabled (terrible way to put it, I know) so can not even begin to imagine how someone who needs lots of help and perhaps has lots of adaptations to their chair or can’t control their body feels when they get stared at.
So, why will you be watching the programme and, by doing so, will you be just as bad as those that stare at ‘us’?