Review: Cast Offs
- Article 5 of 5
- Action Network, January 2010
It’s a rare drama that puts the disabled character front and centre, a rarer one still that has six lead characters played by disabled actors. Channel 4’s ‘Cast Offs’ did just that, offering a fully rounded look at six people stuck on a deserted island for a reality TV show – six people who just happened to be disabled. Broadcast twice a week for three weeks in the run up to Christmas, it was the first decent mainstream drama with disabled actors on British TV.
Page 1 | Page 2 | All 2 Pages
But although it had some excellent performances, particularly from Woolley and Gebbels with even fast-time actors Wright and Mitchell doing well, it partially failed as drama. The pace was slow and episodes differed in whether they wanted to educate the audience about disability or not: “The script isn’t trying to educate everyone about discrimination and being deaf,” says Wooley but Gebbels argues, “It’s clearly a show that’s going to help audiences and get disabled characters on-screen. If audiences watch that and wind up with a better understanding and also having been entertained at the same time, I think that will have been a good thing to do.”
It also failed to conjure up the trials the group face on the island over 100 days, which was little more than a framing narrative rather than a real story. With a couple of exceptions, we didn’t go on to see if the cast offs changed as people once they were off the island.
However, there were individually excellent episodes: Gabriella’s and April’s were both very moving, and theirs and Tom’s episodes were very funny as well. By depicting disabled people as just people, rather than individuals to be pitied, it opens up greater opportunities for the disabled in other dramas – and for more dramas that have disabled people as their focus. It may not have been perfect and its ratings were low (only 160,000 watching the final episode), but it is a key that could open the door to more varied representations of disabled people on television – as well as potentially ‘Cast Offs 2’.
Page 1 | Page 2 | All 2 Pages