Desert Island Risks

With the jury still out on Channel 4’s Cast Offs, will the high-profile “disability” series be a springboard to stardom for members of its cast or an albatross round their professional necks? Ian Macrae talks to two of them

You couldn’t make it up. Six disabled people, with a range of impairments, pitched up on a lonely island in the latest experiment in social anthropology masquerading as reality TV. Like the man said, you couldn’t make it up. Except someone did.

The mocumentary series was dreamed up by Jack Thorne and created by him and two other writers, Tony Roche and Alex Bulmer, to produce a series billed by Channel 4 variously as “ambitious and darkly comic”, “satirical, poignant and unashamedly honest” and “brave and ambitious”.

Of the six disabled members of the cast, Mat Fraser and Kiruna Stamell are already comparatively well known from appearances in shows including Every Time You Look At Me and All The Small Things respectively.

Two of the others, Sophie Woolley (Gabriella) and Tim Gebbels (Tom) are new to television.

“I’m a writer myself, as well as acting”, says Sophie. “I write plays and cast myself as all the characters. When I started performing I was hard of hearing and my deafness has progressed. I do signing in Cast Offs but my character is like me: her first language is English. So though she signs a little bit on the island, the other disabled characters can’t sign so she mainly speaks.”

Of his character, Tim Gebbels says, “He’s kind of like me but also not like me. He’s quite cynical and also a bit vulnerable. He’s got quite a dry sense of humour which sometimes can go a bit far.”

The scheduling of the shows has mimicked both soap and reality TV, with two episodes each week. Each one focuses on one of the characters and their back story, interspersed with scenes from life on the island.

“You find out just how fucked up their lives are and why it makes sense for them to go and live on an island,” laughs Sophie.

The fact that Cast Offs is set as a drama and not an actual reality show mitigates one risk for the channel.

Commissioners might have shrunk from creating what could have been criticised or dismissed as the equivalent of a zoo exhibit, but they’re saved by the move from reality to surreality in a drama serial. This change of format allows the disabled characters to be placed beyond the conventional or traditional boundaries either of their impairments or public expectation.

“There’ve been a lot of disabled people on telly,” says Sophie, “and some of it has been a bit cheesy. There are shows like Beyond Boundaries and the writers may have found inspiration in that, because you see disabled people being a bit nasty to each other.”

For Tim Gebbels, the series also represents an important step in what he refers to as the process of “habituation”, by which the more the viewing public sees disabled people on TV, the less strange or remarkable we seem.

“The point about disabled people is that others go around thinking that we’re really different. Through shows like this you see disabled people getting on with each other, getting off with each other, having fights. People with a range of impairments just being people.”

One risk for the cast is that many disabled actors like Tim and Sophie find themselves between the rock of no work at all and the hard place of only ever playing disabled characters. But both Tim and Sophie see a break like this as only positive.

“I’m pretty glad I went deaf,” says Sophie, “because I wouldn’t otherwise have got this part.”

Tim adds: “Many disabled actors get cheesed off that more of us aren’t cast in non-disabled roles. I don’t get as exercised about that as others. I think [more casting] will come once TV programme makers relax a bit more about disability.”

So what hopes does Cast Offs offer or leave for the future? Tim and Sophie are clear about what they want. Sophie says: “I’d like to play hearing roles on TV. I’d like casting directors to see beyond my deafness.”

For Tim, his ambition takes him to another dimension.

“As a lifelong and quite serious Dr Who fan, I’d like to be in Dr Who. It could be a blink-and-miss-it part with me being killed in the first ten seconds. Or maybe when Matt Smith has finished, a disabled Doctor? Why not?”