Cast-Offs
Jack Thorne on writing and disability
One island. Three months. Six disabled people. Tom, Dan, April, Gabby, Carrie and Will are adventurers of our modern age. Ambassadors selected by a TV company –we will follow their journey as they attempt to harvest crops, rear pigs, deliver babies and save chickens.
Do blind people know how attractive someone is? And if so, how? Amir, a cheeky chappy from Glasgow and profoundly blind, certainly claims so. In his audition with us he describes himself as a bit of a ladies man. In fact, a bit of a shark. We ask the obvious question – how do you know who’s attractive and who isn’t, i.e. how do you know who you want to shark? “Oh, I know” Amir replies. “OK” says Miranda, our director, “what do I look like?” Amir smiles, “size 12, long hair, full lips, and do you want me to say your bra size because I have a pretty good idea?” Miranda laughs. Yeah. He’s got a pretty good idea of what she looks like. Amir is clearly a bit of a magician.
In contrast, Alex Bulmer, my co-writer on Cast-Offs and a close friend, has absolutely no idea what I look like. Like Amir, she was born with sight, so if you give her information she can compute it, she knows what the colour red is, she knows what grass looks like. But during one of our final read-throughs she started reeling off her impression of what I looked like and went for her own version of Pre-Raphaelite poet. Long-dark hair. Slightly girly. Moderately attractive. Nothing like the gangly balding geek-t-shirt wearing freak I actually am.
So why did Amir seem to get it right and Alex not? I don’t know. Maybe it’s something in a voice. Maybe Amir wanted her to look like that and got lucky. Maybe Alex doesn't care what people actually look like, but prefers to design them in her mind however she chooses. What I do know is that blind people aren’t that into touching faces. Amir would probably touch anything to be fair to the guy but when we got Tim Gebbels, our extremely funny blind lead in the show, to touch one of the other actor’s faces, he acted in revulsion. It turns out Lionel Ritchie got his research wrong and that touching someone’s face would do nothing for Tim, blind more or less since birth; he’d really rather not.
The reason why I start with these examples is because every single time the responses we got surprised me, and that’s what Cast-Offs is trying to represent. Surprising stories about disabled people. In fact, more than that, surprising stories about people.
The Cast-Offs cast(left to right): Tim Gebbels, Sophie Woolley, Victoria Wright, Mat Fraser, Kiruna Stamell and Peter Mitchell
Cast-Offs was commissioned by the wonderful Alison Walsh at Channel 4, partially as a result of frustration with what she saw as generic disability programming. Disabled people on TV were allowed to be one of two things: acerbic and sharp and oh so very witty or, you know, tragic and heroic and kind of a bit sad.
With Cast-Offs we’d try and be funny and we’d try and tell some truthful stories. What we wouldn’t do – and couldn’t do – is attempt to tell ‘the truth’ about what disability is. We’d try and be for disability programming what thirtysomething was for thirtysomethings – far from representative, just a teller of decent stories.
It’s been an amazing process. Joel Wilson (our brilliant producer), Judy Counihan, (our amazing exec) and I decided early on that the only way to really make it work was to get the casting done as soon as possible. Writing and casting at the same time we wouldn’t be limited in the choices we made by saying – well, the writers have written a script about a deaf man, a deaf man is what we need. We wanted to get the best actors we could possibly get and then build the show around them, and I think we’ve got them.
Thanks to tireless work by our two ace directors, Miranda Bowen and Amanda Boyle and by our casting director Sasha Robertson, we met quite a large proportion of the disabled acting community and quite a lot that hadn’t acted before. We therefore have a massive range of experience in our leads from Mat Fraser, who has acted in more or less everything (mobile phone commercials, detective dramas and, if you want to see something really special, type ‘Mat Fraser’ and ‘freak fucking rap’ into YouTube) to Victoria Wright, who has never acted in anything before.
With writing, too, we’ve tried to do something different. I used to work on a show called Skins which had a writing team. But we never wrote on each other’s episodes. We’d meet every week and we’d talk (frequently shout) at each other about what the series could be and what the series should be. I think the series became a lot stronger because of that. But the episode writers were given control of their own episodes, a huge amount of control in fact because the weekly arguments and the brilliant leadership of Bryan Elsley allowed for that.
On Cast-Offs we wanted to take the model a bit further and really embrace the American aesthetic of writing teams – partly because I’m not Bryan and couldn’t do what he did, partly because we thought it’d work. There’s a brilliant extra on the Shield Series 3 box set about the writing process on the show and the way that scenes are dolled out to those in the room most capable of writing them. I love The Shield and wanted to copy the structure.
So every episode of Cast-Offs is written by me, big man Tony Roche (The Thick of It and numerous other shows) and Alex. On different episodes we’ve had different amounts of input, but all six have all our fingerprints on all of them and I’ve loved it. I think every writer knows the frustration of knowing what you want a scene to be, but not being able to write it. Well, imagine the privilege therefore of being able to say “Tony, this scene isn’t funny, can you please make it funny, it needs to be funny.” It’s been brilliant and it’s a structure I’d love to use again.
This is a series with which I have a personal involvement beyond just being the writer. I have been battling with a disability for a very long time. I have chronic cholinergic urticaria, a strange skin condition which basically translates as an allergy to heat. It sounds ridiculous but for six months I couldn’t move because as well as being allergic to natural and synthetic heat, I was allergic to physical heat.
Every time you move you generate heat, therefore every time I moved I had an extremely painful allergic reaction. So I kept very still and very cold and when doctors told me I wasn’t going to get better, I thought this was it, my life was effectively over. Now I have the condition more under control - I used to be on 13 pills a day, I’m now on three - but it remains something I struggle with every day of my life. Many would argue my condition isn’t a disability at all. It’s a hidden disability which means no-one can see it, unless I’m suffering an allergic reaction. So I never have to suffer the stigma that someone like Peter, our wheelchair lead, gets when he wheels down the street and attracts looks. In fact, some claim that Alex isn’t disabled, that blindness is an impairment not a disability – what is ‘disabled’ is, in fact, a really important discussion in the world of our show. But for me, declaring myself a disabled person has been an important part of coming to terms with who the new me, who can’t do things like other people, actually is.
I got involved with the disabled theatre world through deliberate stealth. I saw Jenny Sealey, artistic director of Graeae theatre company, speak at the Soho theatre in 2004 when she said the greatest thing I’ve ever heard live: “Cripping up is the blacking up of the 21st century.” Everyone knows that able bodied actors, or ‘ABs’ or ‘straights’ as some in the disabled world call them, playing disabled people has become the fastest possible way to an Oscar. Jenny nailed what that means in one pithy sentence and I fell in thrall with her then and there. So I got in touch with Graeae and they liked me and then when the Birmingham Rep offered me a small piece of work I asked for Jenny to direct it and slowly but surely I wheedled my way in.
Simultaneously I wrote a Coming Up for Channel 4 called The Spastic King about a man with learning difficulties who decides to hide the death of his Mum. My Mum was a carer for adults with learning difficulties throughout my childhood so I partially based it on the guys I met up at her day centre, and partially on my own trials and tribulations with coming to terms with myself. This is how I came into Alison’s remit, and it was she who got me involved in this show.
I do think disablism is one of the last great prejudices still permissible in modern liberal society. On Jay Leno’s talk show earlier this year President Obama said of his white house bowling score “It's like -- it was like Special Olympics or something.” He got a big laugh. He subsequently apologised but I think if Obama had made that comment about a racial group he may well have been impeached and there would probably have been riots.
But there is, slowly, change happening in the way that disability is represented and discussed, and I think the arts are playing a role in that change. Films like Le Huitième Jour, documentaries like Heavy Load, TV like Every Time You Look At Me and plays like Graeae’s Static will start to change things. I hope we’re soon in a situation where ABs playing disabled characters is as frowned upon as white people playing Othello.
If we get Cast-Offs right then I hope we can be part of that movement. But more than that, I hope – really, really hope - we’ve made a piece of TV that people can watch and enjoy.
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