Cast Offs

Cast Offs, Channel 4's new drama about six disabled people comes with a narrative scaffolding designed to get you over any viewer prejudice that might be aroused by the phrase "drama about six disabled people". It presents itself as a kind of Big Brother reality exercise, in which a selection pack of the "differently abled" are marooned on an island for three months to see how they survive. "This isn't a camping trip, April..." said one of the participants. "We're here to prove something." One of the things they're there to prove, it seems, is that the disabled can be just as dirty-minded and grumpy and clumsy in the face of disability as anyone else - the early scenes offering a positive orgy of political incorrectness of various kinds. That's all a little laborious, as is the reality show armature itself, which is never used to satirise television itself (as it might easily have been) but only as a way of getting these very disparate people into one place, so that they can have flashbacks about their ordinary lives. But the flashbacks are surprisingly good, far exceeding the gimmick that has winched them into place.

Each episode cuts between ensemble scenes on the island and a more focused version of one character's back story. Last night, it was Dan's turn and this account of a young man coming to terms with his paralysis was beautifully done, including some touching scenes between Dan and his parents, in which all the self-conscious gaminess of the island sequences dropped away to be replaced by something that looked awkwardly true to life. It may be that future episodes do more with the gimmicky frame, but for the moment it's what's inside it that's worth watching.

Cast Offs actress: I'm happy that my face fits

No more cliches says Victoria Wright, one of the disabled stars of C4's Cast Offs.

Jack Thorne, the lead creator of Cast Offs, has a mission statement for the taboo-breaking comedy drama in which six disabled people take up a Survivor-style reality TV challenge: "To get away from the usual patronising division of most disabled people on screen into 'acerbic or tragic'." Ushered into existence by writers of Skins, Shameless and The Thick of It pedigree, and reinforced at script-writing stage by the experiences of its disabled cast, there's no reason for mission unaccomplished, right? But here's the rub - and it's possibly an easy trap to fall into when you're trying to smash taboos - last night's opener felt so heavy-handed that acerbity and tragedy ran through it like SodaStream bubbles.

If the main message was that disabled reality TV contestants can be just as odious as "normal" reality TV contestants, that was certainly achieved (although blind Mikey from Big Brother 9, with his vile shoutiness and nose picking, has already blazed that trail).

Filmed in mockumentary style, each of the six episodes focuses on one of the castaways. Last night we learnt that kindly Dan, recently made paraplegic by a car accident, was just as likely to be bullied on "Spastic Island" (their words) as by his wheelchair basketball team-mates back home. In flashbacks his chair-bound buddies stole his pants; now his reality show peers desert him, sans chair, on a dark beach after skinny-dipping, just as he was feeling at home with his new self. How could we not feel wretched for him?

The "comedy", alas, wasn't skilfully done. Deaf Gabby smited Carrie, a dwarf, for having a mouth too small to lip-read - but so often that it lost any comical smack. A clumsy layer of crude was then poured on; "little lips" becoming one of the show's many too-easy euphemisms. Surprisingly, the writing became even more clunky when they tackled disability head-on: Dan used forced lines such as "old me, new me, f*** me" to describe his post-accident chagrins.

Its darkness, silences and quiet asides did much more to build genuine poignancy. Moments of Dan's backstory were reminiscent of The Street - when a girl came home with him despite his wheelchair, his dad bobbed around with meerkat-on-Ritalin curiosity. This quietly delivered the message that disability is as much about people around you coming to terms with it as coming to terms with it yourself.

Some lovely lines flowed when the focus drew away from disability. Dan's dad recounted that Dan's accident happened when he lit a fag; his mum interjected, all motherly: "I didn't even know he smoked." The less we confronted the castaways' physicality, the more intriguing they became. Deaf Gabby was most amusing when she was just the dappy-girl-on-reality-TV, saying things such as "I like fire". Will drew us in by being ignored at the campfire - not by being thalidomide-affected.

Perhaps it was a mistake to start with Dan, who is more explicitly tragic because he's still adapting to his own disability, so nice that he makes others look mean. Perhaps Cast Offs just isn't well-written enough to fulfil its goals. Perhaps it's me as a spectator who is still too self-conscious, not sure whether it's OK to laugh at synchronised wheelchair dancing. Wherever the awkwardness lies, I'm intrigued enough to watch tonight's episode, featuring blind Tom. Hopefully Cast Offs will grow more of the courage of its apparent conviction, and let the characters farther transcend their disabilities as it moves away from this harsh first-episode initiation.

A blind one, a dwarf, a paraplegic, a deaf one, a thalidomider and a woman with cherubism - it's fair to say that Cast Offs ticked most of the disabled boxes. But one charge you couldn't lay at the door of this saltily written spin on Shipwrecked was tokenism: moving and funny by turns (yes, of a wheelchair) it offered a frank and funny portrait of survivors on the margins of society.

Taking TV's current obsession, the reality-show satire, and rolling with it, Cast Offs features six disabled characters cast away on a desert island (probably a Norfolk beach but, hey, who's quibbling?). Flicking back and forth between the show and individual backstories, you got a picture of people, not a set of conditions. It was a bit cheap kicking off with the story of sports jock Dan, a wheelchair basketball ace, because he was clearly the character most likely to appeal to anyone unsettled by disabled issues. But, by fair means or foul, I'm hooked.

That crunching sound you might be able to hear is the sound of new ground breaking. This series is the kind of thing Channel 4 was created in order to air - a programme that feels properly trailblazing, in this case in its portrayal of disabilities. Cast Offs is a six-part drama about a fictional reality TV show that takes a group of disabled people to an island and leaves them to fend for themselves. Disabled actors play the roles and helped with the script, and as a result it's a believable portrayal of grown-ups who drink, swear, have sex and arguments and reveal their character flaws. The action switches between the island and the earlier home life of Dan, a young paraplegic man who has joined a wheelchair basketball team in the hope, you feel, of escaping his over-possessive father. The macho basketball team is well drawn, as are the wrinkles of romance when you're a chair user. The trouble is, the scenes on the island feel forced. This is billed as a comedy drama, but that mainly means the characters laugh at things that aren't funny. Judging this opener in purely dramatic terms, Cast Offs is underpowered, but as a TV breakthrough it's huge.

In the post-Big Brother era, C4 is facing an identity challenge. At worst, as with The Execution of Gary Glitter, this has meant well-intentioned programming with spectacularly crass results. Cast Offs, a series in which people of various disabilities are brought together on a remote British Island for a fictional, I'm-a- Celebrity-type reality show, may raise similar fears but, thankfully, it's very well handled. Tonight's episode features Dan, a paraplegic who finds himself taken under the wing of assertive, three-foot-tall Carrie. This series works because of its humour and brusque unsentimentality, rather than any excess of sensitivity.

Cast Offs: the verdict

Channel 4 says its new comedy, which starts tonight, is a television landmark. But what do disabled viewers think?

Eighteen months ago, Channel 4 marooned six disabled people on a remote island to see how well they could survive for 90 days. Not really. These six may be disabled but they are all actors and this subversively comic and rather dark mockumentary-drama shows a rarely seen, unsentimental side of disability.

Tonight the focus is on Dan (Peter Mitchell), a good-looking young Irishman who's in a wheelchair after a recent car accident. His back-story shows him and his desperately well-meaning family still struggling to work out how to deal with this.

One early shot where the crew dump Dan on the island and leave him to wheel himself across the muddy beach and over the sand dunes is typical of the take-no-prisoners style and black humour the writers are aiming for.

If it makes for uncomfortable viewing at times, it's purely intentional - although its rather cruder moments come across as plain clumsy.

Jack Thorne on writing and disability

Writer Jack Thorne talks about Cast Offs.

"This is a comedy drama that has absolutely nothing to do with disability" said Australian Kiruna Stammell to us in a recent interview. And she was 100 percent right, except for the fact that it's all about disability. Basically, a group of six disabled people are cast away on a desert island for the making of a new reality show. We see their backstories and they make rude jokes about each other, etc. And on some levels it's absolutely fine. It's certainly got some better jokes than many of Channel 4's recent efforts at comedy. But as an exercise in normalising disability, isn't it already a complete failure? If you select six disabled characters and put them in a show together, then ghetto it at past 11 in the schedules, you can't claim it's normal. It's not.

Actually, thinking about it. Channel4 can really, really f**k off. Why not have a blind person in a normal sitcom? You know, like they were normal? Or a teacher in a wheelchair in one of your stupid comedy showcases? Make an effort, stop preaching and start doing your jobs. Still, like we say, it's not bad, at all.