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Why the BBC drama Then Barbara Met Alan brought tears to my eyes | Frances Ryan
To see on primetime television the activists who fought for disability rights in the 1990s was a profoundly moving moment
Before we even reach the opening titles of Then Barbara Met Alan – the BBC’s one-off drama depicting the fight for the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), which aired on Monday night – Barbara has graffitied “piss on pity” on a bus stop and turned down going for a drink with Alan because, in her words, she’d just end up getting drunk and giving him a blowjob. It is an instruction to the audience from the off to reject their preconceptions: this is not disabled people as you might think.
The story of how disabled activists – led by Barbara Lisicki and Alan Holdsworth – used direct action to lobby for the UK’s first disability civil rights law is one you’d be forgiven for not having heard before. Disability history is not taught in schools. It is not dramatised for entertainment and is rarely the subject of documentaries; on the odd occasion that the subject is on British screens, it’s likely to have been from the US – as in the 2020 documentary Crip Camp. As a result, I’d wager most of the British public think disability rights were introduced in the 1970s along with other anti-discrimination laws, like those legislating against sex and race prejudice, and came about by benevolent authorities gifting rights to the grateful disabled.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People – now out on audiobook
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