TV that takes you out of your comfort zone

TELEVISION has many functions – primarily entertaining, hopefully informative but occasionally to take you kicking and screaming out of your comfort zone. Tormented Lives, BBC1’s painfully moving documentary on the reality of life for the disabled, left you squirming in your seat.

If the truth was known, this was not a programme you’d have marked down as a ‘must see’ – but once you started watching you were hooked.

Tormented Lives was deeply disturbing in that it showed the incredible abuse inflicted on a daily basis on people with a disability. This isn’t the sort of abuse that makes its way into the Murphy Report; it’s name calling, spitting, shouting at Down’s syndrome children, bullying, intimidation and overall making a tough life even more miserable for people who haven’t the strength to fight back.

 The documentary maker Rosa Monckton is best known in the public eye as a friend and confidante of Princess Diana, but she is also a hugely important disability rights campaigner – not least because her own fifteen year old daughter Domenica is Down’s syndrome.

Her husband is former newspaper editor Dominic Lawson – brother of Nigella, son of former British Chancellor Nigel – and together they have been to the forefront of this fight.

So Tormented Lives was a deeply personal journey as opposed to a mere documentary and that came across in Monckton’s passion for her subject, her frustration at the treatment of the disabled and her pride and love for her own daughter in particular.

 The programme also told the story of Christopher, a disabled but highly intelligent man and his efforts to find an outlet for his IT talents.If anyone ever summed up the appalling way we treat the disabled, this man did – because he is a deeply sensitive but traumatised soul who retreats into a shadow of himself when he revisits the London street on which he grew up.

He talks – stammering because any new-found confidence is shot, over the memories – of his childhood when all he wanted was to be friends with the neighbouring children, but instead he was kicked and punched and ridiculed to a point that he preferred to exit his own home by clearing walls in the back garden so he didn’t have to come out onto the main road.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.