Introduction

This chapter discusses general issues concerning the portrayal of people with disabilities on television. ‘Handicappism’ is a cultural and social set of practices and attitudes which defines people as burdens, less than human or deserving or able to maintain and contribute to society. The physical difference gets in the way of proper understanding and becomes an issue in itself; the physical difference becomes the point of ridicule, the source of pity, the mark of difference. The importance of this critique of the medical model is that it not only blurs the easy categorisations which the public usually associates with disability but also challenges those who perceive disablement as a condition to be pitied because it is a condition regarded as ‘somehow less than human’. Any proper representation of society on television ought, the argument would run, to allow for similar proportions across the full range of television output.