I’ve been banging on about this for years. If 1 in 5 of us is disabled why are there so few disabled people on the telly? And even fewer making our programmes? I guess the two things are almost certainly connected.
Yes I know there’s the argument that you can’t see lots of disabilities so there are alot more disabled people ON telly and IN telly than you think, and that’s probably true. But I doubt either figure gets anywhere near the level you’d expect if TV was reflecting real life, as many of us programme makers like to think it does.
Researchers recently took a snapshot of three weeks of programming across British TV. Against the 20% of the real population with a disability, only 0.9% of people in TV land had one. Not good. The current data suggests that disabled people make up only 2% of the TV industry workforce. Not much better.