His Dark Materials showrunner Jack Thorne: "TV has failed disabled people, utterly and totally"

The Hollywood Reporter

The veteran British writer on The Eddy, Skins and the British version of Shameless took the TV industry to task during his MacTaggart Lecture speech at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival, saying “TV has failed disabled people, utterly and totally,” adding that the TV world was “stacked against the telling of disabled stories with disabled talent.” Thorne described the past year as “a year of ableism like I’ve never seen before,” highlighting how the majority of people to die from COVID-19 in the U.K. were disabled, with many denied treatment because their “lives were not seen as vital.” Disability, he said, "is the forgotten diversity, the one everyone leaves out of speeches. Gender, race, sexuality, all rightly get discussed at length. Disability gets relegated out. In conversations about representation, in action plans, and new era planning, disability is confined to the corner, it remains an afterthought. Actors – actors I admire – have taken roles they shouldn’t have; I’ve been complicit in some of those decisions. Producers have ignored disabled writers. Commissioners haven’t taken the opportunity to tell disabled stories. There are very few disabled people in front of the camera, and even fewer behind it.”