Who the heck wants to watch a deaf person eat a pancake?
Ten years ago, Miranda Robinson– executive producer of my short film, The Fishdance Kid – suggested that I capitalise quickly on my success and make another short film as soon as possible. She gave me the contact for a producer who was actively looking for short film scripts about disability, told me to introduce myself to him and name her as my reference.
In other words, she was opening another further door to the film industry for me and inviting me through it.
An amazing opportunity, yes.
But I didn’t take it.
I look back now and I can’t believe I didn’t. But at the time I couldn’t. I felt paralysed by the stipulation that it had to be about disability.
In real life, I am deaf and have to put up with that on a daily basis. But in my imaginative world where I am the gatekeeper who has total control over what happens, deafness – with all its mundane frustrations and daily dreary irritations – was always barred from entering.
How on earth could I make an entertaining short film about deafness? The choices seemed to be either victim or laughing stock. There was no other middle ground that I could see that people would have any interest in.
People rarely even asked me about it in real everyday life. And if it ever did come up, then I was always acutely aware that after a few moments, people wanted to move on and talk about something normal that they could relate to and had something to say.
I struggled with the idea that I was being nudged in this direction. I got defensive and angry at being pigeon-holed. I railed against the restrictive little box I was being placed in. My ideas are far bigger than this! The world I’ve created for myself is far more interesting than this! Blah, blah, blah...
And anyway, I couldn’t think of any fresh takes on deafness.
Like the rest of the world, and thanks to films like ‘See No Evil, Hear No Evil’ and ‘Read My Lips’, I was trapped by the idea that in films deaf people always seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like a laundry cupboard, witnessing murders and gangster fallouts, which they are conveniently able to lip-read 20 metres away, hence making them indispensable, if slightly sullen, witnesses.
But this was an open door. I had to make the most of it.
After agonising for several weeks over how on earth to write a witty snappy short film about deaf people, I began a script about a deaf woman being interrogated by a short-tempered police detective. The basic plot line was her hearing aid battery runs out but she can’t get a word in edgeways to tell him. It was hilarious. Needless to say I abandoned it quickly.
I wrote an email to the producer asking for more information. I never sent it. I tried to think of some better ideas.
I began a script for a feature length film about a deaf witness in witness protection. There was a lot of mist in it. But otherwise the only great departure I had to offer this well-trodden cliché was that my deaf character wouldn’t be that brilliant at lip-reading and my criminal was a mumbler.
Yes, it really was that ground-breaking. My gift of realism. You’re welcome.
After six months of anxiously gnawing over the deaf issue, I gave myself permission to leave it well alone and return to the normal world of my imagination where normal hearing characters – in this case, an exiled goddess - could just get on with getting lost in deserts and having sex and eating pancakes.
It felt a tremendous relief not to have to worry about trying to shoehorn deafness with all its worthy issue-based heaviness in there somewhere. Who the heck wants to read about a deaf person eating a pancake?
It wasn’t until eight years later, when another amazing door opened, that an important and obvious point that I had been ignoring - evading? - finally dawned on me.
This time round, I had been working hard on the feminism front. My novel about normal hearing goddesses and musicians, Cursed Love Blues, had only just begun the work I intended to do with edgy anti-heroic female roles and I was now proceeding to develop it even further with a television series about witches – a modern day drama that explored the deep socially ingrained fear and resentment that society has towards women who attempt to live life on their own terms. I had peopled it richly with diverse female characters who were just trying to manage the best they could, in spite of social obstacles.
But it was while I was writing my application letter to DANC (Disabled Artists Networking Community) for a place on a workshop they were doing on how to pitch a television series, that it dawned on me with a hot mortification that although my main character was mixed race and I had a bunch of robust older and gay characters and a character who has elective muteness as a result of trauma and another character who is exploring their gender identity, there still wasn’t a deaf character in it. Not one.
I returned to look at Cursed Love Blues. There’s not one single deaf or disabled character in there either and what’s more the whole book is an ode to the transcendental power of music, which some might think is pretty ambitious – misguided even - for a deaf person to write about.
It was at that point that it shamefully dawned on me that somehow, in all the stories I’ve ever finished over the 30 odd years I’ve been writing, all the characters I’ve ever created, and we’re probably talking about over a hundred – not one of them has ever been disabled, let alone deaf.
Which, given that I, myself, am profoundly deaf and have been since I was 18 months old, is a little odd really, to say the least.
And the shamed soul-searching that came about as a result of this Big Ben sized penny dropping made me ask how I could get on my box and bang on about the need for more diverse roles in film for women, when I couldn’t do the same for deaf people?
We didn’t always have to be sullen lip-reading crime witnesses. Why couldn’t we be witches? Or midwives? Or gangsters? Or detectives? Or pancake-eating, sex-addicted goddesses?
It was clear things had to change. A lot of things. Starting with me and my poky little deaf-phobic prejudices. So I started by taking a fresh look at my script for Witches and wondering not only which character’s storyline would benefit from becoming deaf, but how that might be a character strength too.
Two years later, thanks primarily to that wonderful paradigm-busting door of the DANC workshop and the people I met on it – especially Justine Potter, Head of Development at LA Productions, who listened to my pitch, told me she had absolutely no interest in witches but was kind enough to read my script anyway - I have found myself with an optioned script about witches, a commissioned script about a deaf, dice-rolling, love-sick sandwich-maker and a place on the BBC Writers Access Group (WAG).
Nearly every week, as part of this training programme, I’m invited to pitch new characters and new storylines for opportunities and commissions. It’s not necessarily compulsory to make any of my characters deaf. But of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?
Because now, unlike my sullen-deaf-witness-in-a-cupboard years, I have realised that my deafness, rather than something to feel restricted by, is actually an enabling strength in the world of storytelling.
Take any familiar predictable storyline, put a deaf person in there and watch how that shakes things up. Pancake-eating aside, we don’t always behave like you expect us to.