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An ode to Press Gang
I've been rewatching Press Gang with a bunch of friends. It's definitely not perfect, but very cleverly and funnily written (&hearts Stephen Moffat) and made a decent shot at depicting important issues relevant to teenagers at the time. (It also introduced ten year old me to the idea of the internet)
I just watched an episode introducing a tetraplegic character in an electric wheelchair, and two things that struck me were that (a)Pretty much every line was a joke about being in a wheelchair (they are afaict the sort of jokes that people in wheelchairs are likely to actually say, but it was a bit one note and according to Wikipedia the character was written out because the writer "couldn't figure out what to do with him" eg he ran out of wheelchair jokes) and (b)Unless the actor was doing a better job than one expects of kid's TV he was actually disabled.
And sure enough he is.
So that's a kid's show, on an english budget, with a tetraplegic/quadraplegic character played by an actual tetraplegic..in 1989. I'm just saying, is all.
I just watched an episode introducing a tetraplegic character in an electric wheelchair, and two things that struck me were that (a)Pretty much every line was a joke about being in a wheelchair (they are afaict the sort of jokes that people in wheelchairs are likely to actually say, but it was a bit one note and according to Wikipedia the character was written out because the writer "couldn't figure out what to do with him" eg he ran out of wheelchair jokes) and (b)Unless the actor was doing a better job than one expects of kid's TV he was actually disabled.
And sure enough he is.
So that's a kid's show, on an english budget, with a tetraplegic/quadraplegic character played by an actual tetraplegic..in 1989. I'm just saying, is all.