Playwright Jack Thorne, who delivered this year’s James MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, used the honored distinction to bring light to the conditions those with disabilities lived in during the coronavirus pandemic. HIs larger aim was to call attention to the responsibility of those who work in television to feature stories of people with disabilities by using actors and actresses with disabilities. There are few places for them currently in television, and Thorne, who is known for series including His Dark Materials and This Is England, said he has heard of heartbreaking treatment of those with disabilities, who he called “the forgotten diversity, the one everyone leaves out of speeches.” 

One example he gave during his speech on Monday was that of a friend working in an old factory “who had to crawl up the steps and along the floor to get to her desk, while her electric wheelchair was outside getting soaked by the rain.”

Thorne said he saw another of his friends have his role reduced right in front of him. “I should have shown what this actor needed—solidarity. I did pathetically little,” the playwright said. “Another actor was cast and my friend’s part trimmed to almost nothing.”

During his speech, Thorne also explained why he considered himself part of the community of those with disabilities. He said he suffered for about 15 years due to a chronic and painful rash known as cholinergic urticaria. “I was allergic to outside heat. I was allergic to artificial heat, and I was allergic to my body movement,” Thorne said. “Every time I moved I would develop welts, and I was in pain.” Still, he said his condition was invisible and as a white man he’s had privileges his disabled peers could not access. He considers it his job to further the cause of those with disabilities, but he’s failed because the “TV world is stacked against the telling of disabled stories by disabled talent.”

Thorne said during his speech that TV has a way of reminding us what humanity looks like. “It has of course been a cruel year just like last year was a cruel year,” Thorne said. “We’ve all lost so much, and personally I think the greatest thing we’ve lost was a bit of humanity because this year was a year of ablism like I’ve never seen before. This was a year when a lot of disabled people died.”

“People know some of the statistics by now, but just to say a few: COVID-19 discharge requirements from NHS hospitals stated negative tests are not required prior to transfer into the care home,” Thorne continued. “People with the disease were put amongst vulnerable adults and left.”

More than 40,600 residents in long-term care facilities died of COVID-19 between March and May, representing about 40% of the nation’s coronavirus death toll, according to a USA TODAY analysis of state data. Thorne described care homes denied emergency nurses, “isolated from the outside world” in a struggle he became more knowledgable of in interviews preparing for his latest TV drama Help, which depicts life in the early months of the pandemic in an elderly care home.

“Through my job I’ve spoken to sexual abuse survivors, to people struggling through adoption, people who have lost huge things and there isn’t, of course, a trauma league,” Thorne said, “but the rawness I encountered speaking to carers was like nothing else. They thought they were responsible. They thought they had let their residents down.”

“And it wasn’t just care homes,” Thorne said. “Disabled people all over were denied treatment. They were seen as more acceptable to die because of conditions that had no relation to COVID-19. Friends of mine were told they would not get ventilated even if they needed it because their lives were not seen as vital.”

A new study partly carried out by the Office for National Statistics in England estimated that 105,213 people died of COVID-19 between Jan. 24, 2020 and Feb. 28, 2021, and people with disabilities accounted for 61,000 of those deaths. That’s almost 60%. “And how did the country react?” Thorne asked. “By using the term that helped them accept this unnecessary death—‘underlying health condition.'” The phrase relegated those with disabilities to another tier of life, and during the pandemic Thorne said the larger focus of many shifted to protecting themselves and their loved ones. “People turned away,” he said, later calling for them to turn back toward those with disabilities—especially in television. 

If his speech can be summarized in a simple sentence, broken down to an easy-to-understand takeaway for those with power in the television industry, that takeaway regarding those with disabilities is: “Hire them to tell their own stories themselves.”

Watch Thorne’s full speech, which begins at the 9:29 time marking:

YouTube Video