No Laughing Matter: Creature Discomforts

It’s very hard to take a serious issue and convey it in a fun manner without losing some of the seriousness. The makers of Wallace & Gromit have done it astoundingly well. Their new campaign for Leonard Cheshire Disability called Creature Discomforts, which you can view here, manages to be sincere and cute at the same time, without slipping over into sentimentality or trivialising the issues. This is probably largely due to the fact that the voices behind the characters are people with real disabilities.

The biggest messages are about stigma and access. Like Kevin Gillespie who gives voice to Brian the Bull Terrier says:

“We went to have a look at a pub that we were considering visiting on a group day out which calls itself disabled friendly, but when we got there we found there was gravel outside which made it difficult to move our wheelchairs around, an extremely sharp right turn to get into the entrance, and then a step to get to the bar! That’s not what I’d call disabled friendly.”

“It’s things like this that make you feel excluded as there are certain places I’d like to go to but can’t because of access problems”.

These barriers, however, don’t stop Kevin getting out and about locally. “It’s really important for me to actually live in, and feel part of the community. I must admit, I have lived here for five years and I cannot recall anyone looking at me as if to say ‘What planet has he come from?’ Everyone has looked at me as they do able bodied people and forgotten about the chair”.

Here is the Guardian’s opinion on the campaign and here is a video on the making of it.

One of the things that struck me is that the campaign talks about access to bars, restaurants, places like that. In developing countries, we are so far behind on this curve that it doesn’t even bear scrutiny. To begin with, there is little data on disability. When poverty and social marginalisation are added to the cesspool, disabled people are discriminated against in many more ways.It is telling that in my social circle, I seldom meet disabled people. It is a quiet but systematic exclusion that takes place so much below the surface that most of us are not even aware of it.

A recent World Bank report found that disability seriously affects economic prospects in India and “physically challenged children are four to five times less likely to be in school than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes children.” In my own experience, organizations will usually not hire a disabled person. In fact, India’s disabled employment rate seems to be falling. Deprived of economic opportunity (and even before that, education), disabled people seldom earn enough to gain access to more than the basic necessities. You don’t see them in bars or nightclubs, rarely at restaurants or malls. So people forget about the issues of disabled people because it’s easy to.

It’s a vicious cycle and I think schools hold a large piece of the puzzle. If schools sponsored a few classes that were disabled-friendly, it would help bring them into the mainstream besides inculcating awareness from a young age among the other kids, who in turn would hopefully grow up to be less discriminatory as adults. Parents would also possibly understand disabled people better if they were friends with their children, came home, stayed for tea. It would go a long way towards driving up our collective awareness and empathy up a notch. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Our Bodies, Media Matters, Learning to Fly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.