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Writer, actor, campaigner and Graeae Patron Mat Fraser, talks to former Associate Director of Graeae (recently appointed Deputy Artistic Director of Birmingham Repertory Theatre) about the visibility and representation of disability within film, television and theatre. How have things changed over the last 40 years? And how much further do we have to go?
This podcast contains some strong language.
A transcript of this podcast (in word format) is available to read or download at: https://graeae.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Mat-Fraser-Transcript-FINAL.docx
www.disabilityarts.online
www.graeae.org
Podcast edited by Ian Rattray for Clear Voice Enterprises. www.clearvoiceenterprises.org
The Disability And…Podcast gets right to the heart of some of the most pressing issues in arts, culture and beyond with a series of bold, provocative and insightful interviews with disabled artists, key industry figures and the odd legend. The Disability and…Podcast is currently monthly.
Welcome to the Graeae and Disability Arts Online podcast bringing together thoughtful discussion and debate. This month’s topic is on Disability and Representation with Amit Sharma talking to writer, actor, campaigner and Graeae patron Mat Fraser. This podcast contains strong language.
Amit Sharma: Welcome everyone to Graeae Podcast, and a massive welcome to Mat Fraser.
Mat Fraser: Thank you very much, Amit Sharma.
Amit Sharma: those of you who don't know Mat, Mat is an actor, a theatre maker, a television star.
Mat Fraser: I've done some tele, and I'm easy to recognise because of my very different visual impairment, which is that I have short arms that end at about elbow-length, and then inward turning hands, with four fingers and no thumbs, which is quite an unusual sight. I hold that I get tele recognised a lot more than non-disabled people would.
Mat Fraser: Because you might see a famous person walking down the street 50 yards away, think, "Is that John Travolta? (Amit laughs) I can't tell. I better not just in case." But when you see Flipper Boy, which I jokingly and colloquially call myself sometimes, you know damn well it's that bloke from American Horror Story: Freak Show, or whatever the thing is. "He's got the same face, same impairment. It must be him." I think I get spotted unnaturally more than I should do because of my impairment.
Amit Sharma: There's so much political stuff happening at the moment.
Mat Fraser: Gosh, yes.
Amit Sharma: I was trying to find the right word for it: Turmoil, upheaval. What would be the word that you would describe political stuff at the moment?
Mat Fraser: I don't have one word to adequately describe how I feel about the situation. I mean, ya know, we are in a company that is all too aware that the cuts to social services for disabled people are having an awful effect on the arts, notably there was mooted a workshop with Jenny Sealey the Artistic Director of Graeae Theatre, myself and a couple of other people, but now can't even begin to be thought about until later in the year because she's lost her Access to Work, which is a government subsidy to help disabled people be fully functional in their workplace, which actually is fiscally productive and not reductive. That's direct proof that things are getting worse and worse and worse. I know that Jeremy Corbyn's democratic, socialist vision of Labour, and therefore Britain, if they got into power would reinstate a lot of those things, because a healthy, vibrant, diverse community that looks after all of its aspects is a more productive Britain,
Amit Sharma: When you first were politicised.
Mat Fraser: Yes
Amit Sharma: For example, when was that moment, what was the society like back then?
Mat Fraser: Well funnily enough, because I'm old, the climate was actually quite similar because we were living in the heart of Thatcherism, and Nabil Shaban our glorious founder actually commented to me once, he said, "It was funny. In the '80s’’, which saw the destruction of the unions, destruction of traditional working class politicised social groups, Thatcher's ... you know, "There's no such thing as society, we're all individuals. Sell off the council homes," and all that kind of vibe. As that came in, the only group that got stronger as a protest group were disabled people. Everybody else, first wave feminism, several other aspects trying to create a more fair society were in subdued mode during early Thatcherism, but no one gave a fuck about us, did they?
Mat Fraser: But we were the only group that flourished, mostly because no one was looking, no one else was looking. I was politicised right from A-level Sociology, which is where I got my sense of right and wrong politics and didn't consider myself a disabled person because I saw disability in the medical context and I could do everything, so I wasn't. I was a punk drummer, and it was very rare that society went, "You can't do this thing you want to do because you're disabled," because I lived in the world of punk drumming where it was, "F the system, and do what you want.’’ Very rarely was I confronted with disablism until I decided to become an actor.
Mat Fraser: In 1994, my mother and my brother did a Pincer movement, I now retrospectively realise, and they took me to see Ubu Roi, the Graeae show at Oval House with Jamie Beddard, and up to that point I thought it was embarrassing for "normal" people, inverted commas, to watch disabled people on stage. It would have to be an exercise in PC willingness and love, not just, "This looks like fun, I'll go to it." I couldn't believe that could happen; that's how oppressed I was.
Mat Fraser: I went to see the show and I looked round. First of all, I didn't understand what Jamie said for the first five minutes because sometimes with somebody with profound CP it takes five minutes to tune in, as I like to call it. And this bloke with CP was naked, spitting cake at a woman, a wheelchair user, and it was utter chaos on stage. I looked around and the whole packed audience were thrilled and loving it. I was like, "Oh, I've got this wrong."
Mat Fraser: Done my drumming career and I really wanted to act. I realised that barrier had been removed for me now. I was like, "Oh, I could do this." But it's all because of one thing that happened.
Mat Fraser: I got an audition for 2000 AD, which was a film with Sylvester Stallone about Judge Dredd. In Judge Dredd, the comic book, there are lots of mutants. I thought, "Oh, I could audition as a mutant because I've got the mutancy, and I've also got two-foot long dreadlocks and loads of fetish gear. I look really cool." Just how the mutants seemed to be depicted in the thing ...
Mat Fraser: When I went to the audition at Pine Tree they basically said, "You can't play a mutant because you're a real mutant."
Amit Sharma: Whoa. (In shock)
Mat Fraser: And they didn't say those words but that's what they meant.
Amit Sharma: Yeah
Mat Fraser: I went away slightly as if I'd been punched in the face and I was sort of stars truck, It simmered and it festered, and LDAF, the London Disability Arts Forum were at the Diorama at the time. They had a magazine called Disability Arts in London, DAIL magazine. It was run by a man called Kit.
Mat Fraser: And I was so full of this confusion and anger, stuff. They spotted it a mile off. I must have had it like a halo over my head (Amit laughs). "Watch out for this one. He's about to go." They sat me down. Of course, I was surrounded by Kit and two other people. He went, "What happened?" He put on his therapy voice and went, "What happened, Mat? What's been going on?" I just went, "Agh!" And unleashed it all. I was in tears, and really felt the pain. It was in that moment I was not the same after that. I couldn't go back. I couldn't pretend I wasn’t disabled. I couldn't pretend I was being treated like shit because I was disabled. I couldn't pretend there wasn't a cultural apartheid against disabled people in the arts. It became everything I lived about.
Amit Sharma: When you've had that moment, what else started to come into your world that perhaps…
Mat Fraser: Oh! All the politics I had related to all the disability stuff, and that I could just bring the disability module and place it into my politics and the rest would just take care of itself. Before I knew where I was, I went to a disability rights demo outside parliament, and somebody sort of sidled up to me and went, "You know, there's a group called Direct Action Network. We go a little bit further in our demonstrations." And I was right up High Street. I had been on the Poll Tax Riot. I'm not a pacifist. I believe that if the forces of oppression and power are violent, you are legitimised in being violent back to them, but it doesn't really work with disabled people though, does it?
Amit Sharma: (Laughs) Well there's an expression of violence that -
Mat Fraser: There is, but when I got to Johnny Crescendo's, as it were, DAN group, they were like, "No, we operate the Gandhi style. We sit down in the road." What happened was I went on a demonstration. This was the clincher. I went on a demonstration, Ewan Marshall was there, some Graeae people were there, the new people who I really respected in my world, who I wanted to be a part of. We closed down Parliament Square. Just 200 of us closed it down. This was before the police had guns and tasers. We closed it down and it was immensely powerful because I do believe that the power of demonstration lies in the individual demonstrator and how it makes them feel about themselves and what they can and can't do with the world. Of course, they swept us all away and life carried on. We just about made the local news.
Mat Fraser: But I had the fire. That was it. That was it! Everything I did was about making disabled people more equal. I realised it was probably best done in the arts.
Mat Fraser: I'm going to jump forward five years. I was under a bus. I had handcuffed myself with another Danner to the exhaust pipe of a single-decker electric-powered bus, not knowing that when the ignition turned off, the compression would change and the bus would slowly sink to the ground on top of its wheel hubs, and probably flatten us (Mat giggles). They angrily told us this fact. "That's why we're keeping the engine on!"
Mat Fraser: I turned to my compadre, who I don't really know really well ... I wish I could remember who it was because I should thank her. Maybe she remembers and she will hear this one day ... "It's funny, you know, I should be at an audition. I'm and actor, I got an audition, but this is much more important." She looked to me and went, "You're a stupid, fucking wanker. I can't act. I can't show people how we want to live on stage, but you can. Anybody can go under here, right? Off you go. You go and fight our fight on stage because that's where you should do it. I can't do it there. You can. Go and do it!" That was it. That was the final stitch …in my wound. (Amit laughs). Society wounded me and I finally stitched it up. I went off to be a proactive, politicised, disabled theatre maker and theatre participant pretty much only interested in work that dealt with the issues at that time.
Amit Sharma: And what other changes have you seen like in your time as an actor? Whether it's theatre, whether it's TV, have there been any changes?
Mat Fraser: Yeah, well that was 20 years ago. There have been huge changes, mostly in the last five years or so, I feel. I think you guys, Graeae, have been obviously pivotal in making these changes happen. And I think whether it's because of or whether it ran in parallel because there's a zeitgeist of feeling often politically and culturally, but you guys created the possibility for mainstream theatres to not be scared of disability, and know that they could work with Graeae or with a group of disabled actors and come up with a mainstream production that's called mainstream that deals with disability that their audiences won't be scared of. It's hugely important because it's all very well making the wonderful work we were making, but if no one else is watching it, where do we go from there? I think there's a real part played there.
Mat Fraser: But I also think that society change. We had Blair's Britain, Gordon Brown's Britain. And I know currently they're getting a drubing, but they were a lot bloody better than Thatcher. You know what I mean? Sure, they helped the bankers a little bit but disabled people got benefits. Culturally, gay people, disabled people, women, abortion, all these issues came back on the table and were slightly liberalised again. We started popping up on tele, didn't we, occasionally? I was one of those poppers, I suppose, occasionally.
Amit Sharma: I remember you on the mobile phone ad.
Mat Fraser: Yeah, that was my big one.
Amit Sharma: That was so awesome.
Mat Fraser: It was radical, wasn't it?
Amit Sharma: Totally.
Mat Fraser: I was looking back, it was, yeah.
Amit Sharma: Totally, you know, because that wasn't in the last five years, and those adverts have come out post, I suppose, even the Brazil Olympics really. It wasn't necessarily there, after the London Olympics. There was that, there was you having your documentary series on Channel Four.
Mat Fraser: That's right, yeah. There were a lot of great things. When I did the cage fighting documentary, I did a documentary on cage fighting to show that it wasn't a brutal blood sport (chuckles), which it's hard to persuade people because it really looks like that.
Amit Sharma: (Laughs) There's lots of blood and there's lots of cage.
Mat Fraser: Channel Four offered me a series of documentaries called Mat Fraser's Extreme Worlds. Think Go with Noakes or Duncan Dares, but with flippers (Amit laughs). I felt I really wanted to be an actor and Channel Four wanted me to be a presenter. Maybe I made a mistake back then but I held out and didn't do what they wanted, and continued occasionally to work in theatre instead. But erm, that's what was going on, so maybe I made a mistake.
Mat Fraser: I went off and produced a musical, Thalidomide!! A Musical, learnt about arts council applications and touring in small and mid-scale theatre. I learnt and wrote a paper on how to market your product when the local paper just wants to write a tragedy story. I remember I did Thalidomide!! A Musical. It was a B-movie horror-style, very un-PC take on the thalidomide history. I had a nurse with her boobs showing, I had a chainsaw, I had a psychotic plastic surgeon from Brazil cutting the limbs off babies. It was pretty full on.
Amit Sharma: It was pretty full on.
Mat Fraser: And, yet, when I went to Dorset or wherever the hell it was, it was, "Brave thalidomide victim does show about traumatic life." I thought, if I read that headline, I would not want to see that show. I know I've gone off on a side.
Mat Fraser: I learnt how to market stuff. Point case, don't have an interview, only giving a choice of three shots that you've chosen, don't let them come and take their own photos, and watch out for the fact that they're going to try veer it to personal stories about how you grow up and, "Was it bad?" And always trying to get it back to the product.
Amit Sharma: We're still having conversations around non-disabled people playing disabled parts.
Mat Fraser: Oh, Lordy, we are.
Amit Sharma: And there's inevitably the conversation, which kind of goes, "Actors should play actors. Why can't non-disabled people play disabled parts?"
Mat Fraser: I think it's just about a level playing field. The Palestinian-born American comedian Maysoon Zayid has honed it into one phrase: "If I can't play Beyonce, Beyonce can't play me." She's got cerebral palsy and it's quite apparent. I'm like, "Eh, that's pretty much it." If I can play Winston Churchill, sure, Gary Oldman can play me. But without a level playing field, that whole "acting is acting" thing is, it's fine for the winner but not for the losers. If it really needs to be equal then we should all play everybody, and I'd like to see more productions like that, which mix it up in a fun way, where the women play the men, the men play the women, racial, disability. Let's have fun and see what happens. We're going to see stuff like that because that's going to be happening.
Amit Sharma: Do you get a sense of that fun is brewing or taking place?
Mat Fraser: I think it's brewing. I think taking place, it's up to the likes of you and me, really, for it to take place. But it's definitely brewing, and I'd like to see it because it's a burning issue that keeps going on. I don't want to get too specific because the listeners to this might not be aware of the things, but I'm just going to take two cases in point. Bryan Cranston recently playing a wheelchair user; no need for him to do that. It's very cut and dry for me, that one. I get it with the star thing. That is the problem.
Mat Fraser: I've been telling producers this for years, "You need to start grooming good disabled actors. Give them the roles. Get them the status because otherwise we're never going to get those big roles." I do understand it's about money. But then the Theory of Everything with Eddie Redmayne playing an able-bodied, then a little bit not so able-bodied, then quite disabled but impaired, and then profoundly impaired, Stephen Hawking, that's a harder one to argue, isn't it?
Amit Sharma: Yeah.
Mat Fraser: I hate using that one because there's so many grey areas in that. When you're just playing a regular wheelchair user that should and could be played by a regular wheelchair user, then it should be, and I'm very clear about that.
Amit Sharma: With the Eddie Redmayne example, you know there was the film with Bob Dylan, and the different people who played Bob Dylan.
Mat Fraser: That's right, yeah.
Amit Sharma: It is harder because it's not as clear cut because of the journey of a person like Stephen Hawking, but we are artists, right?
Mat Fraser: Yes.
Amit Sharma: Our job is we have a particular way we view the world and particularly how the way we want to express it. Some may go, "Actually, that's a really good example of a film. Bob Dylan."
Mat Fraser: It's a wonderful example Amit, and you're right, they could've done that. I would've loved to have seen that version. Maybe we should argue to do that more because the refuseniks or the people who are scared of having us will always use that as a, "Oh, no. We need them for the one-minute scene when they're walking at the beginning of the five-hour film, where they're just going to be a wheelchair user for the rest of the five-hour film. But for that one minute we need them to be walking, so it'll have to be an able-bodied actor, I'm afraid."
Mat Fraser: I remember when Andrew McClay, who's a wheelchair using actor, myself and Dave Kent were, in 1997, ITV's the Unknown Soldier. We were First World War injured. I was playing Double-Amputee blah, blah, blah. We had to do a flashback scene for when we were leaving the trenches, and we faked it the other way round, and it was fine, and it was easy. I'm like, 1997, guys.
Amit Sharma: YouTube it.
Mat Fraser: ITV. (both laugh together)
Amit Sharma: What does the future hold, do you think? Going back to the very beginning, there's a lot of upheaval, there's a lot of turmoil. The stuff around Brexit and the parties having these splits and everything is taking a lot of attention at the moment. Meanwhile, back on the ground, it's a really tough place to be a disabled person, a disabled artist, yet it feels like there are opportunities that are presenting themselves, but the support isn't there in other ways.
Mat Fraser: Yeah it’s weird isn’t it.
Amit Sharma: Totally.
Mat Fraser: The providers of the opportunities are opening their doors.
Amit Sharma: We want to work with you!
Mat Fraser: But we can't afford the transport to get there because the government took it away. My worry is that if you were to do a current piece about the socio-political experience of a poor disabled person, which you and I might think this is a wonderful cross-sectioned, hard core view of reality life with disability, people are going to see it as anti-Tory propaganda and be less interested in it. We're caught literally again as the victim of a situation. There's that happening at the grassroots, ground level. It's really particularly unfair for the less physically able people who need more assistance to get to do their job, innit? It's very unfair.
Mat Fraser: I would call myself a mid-career artist. I realised about five, six years ago I'm horrifically ambitious. Amit, I do want an Oscar.
Amit Sharma: (laughs) Yeah, why not?
Mat Fraser: Yeah, I'll be honest about it. I don't think I'll ever get one but I strive for it. I also strategise about how it's possible to enable society to be framed in a way that allows a disabled person to have one. What's the product got to be for that to happen? And all of those things. I'm constantly whirring it around in my mind. But one of the things I'm doing is trying to make myself as well-known as possible because I realise that is always the argument they have, isn't it? "No, we need someone famous," otherwise they won't bankroll the film. I'm like, "Okay. I get it." I am not going to get the work unless I'm better known. I'm trying to do work that gets me better known, and encourage television work and stuff like that for those reasons.
Amit Sharma: But at some stage, you're going to hit the media, right? You know what I mean?
Mat Fraser: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Amit Sharma: And the depictions and the way disabled people are talked about, you will have to deal with that.
Mat Fraser: Yes, and hopefully my interviewer will be Trevor Noah,
Amit Sharma: Ah-ha yeah
Mat Fraser: But knowing my luck it'll be Piers Morgan.
Amit Sharma: Which, okay, if it is Piers Morgan.
Mat Fraser: If it's Piers Morgan it's going to be very unfortunate live television. (Amit laughs)
Amit Sharma: They might have to do a pre-record.
Mat Fraser: I don't know if I would be able to handle it because I am very confrontational. He's such an asshole. I don't know if I could take it, whereas when Trevor Noah did that thing recently to listeners. The Bryan Cranston portraying a wheelchair user brought forth a lot of debate, and it was on Twitter and it was fiery. Trevor Noah, in one of his discussing in between the scenes takes, eulogised upon the subject. He didn't name the actor, the disabled actor in question, who complained about it and brought it to his attention, which I felt was a shame but he aired it.
Mat Fraser: I actually got quite depressed about that because I like Trevor Noah. He's on top of it, he gets everything, and yet he was so far behind on our subject. I thought, wow, is this where liberal mainstream has gone, to thinking, "Huh, they might have a point, you know? They're a little bit angry but they might have a point." However, he got there, and we will get there again soon with another because a repeat offending will happen, and every time, our articulation and profiled articulation of response to that will become more mainstream.
Mat Fraser: Now people are going to find the disabled person to comment on the next thing without there being a furore because they remember the last one. They're going to want that. We're all going to get more sophisticated about the argument. I think within five years it should be dead in the water. What year is it? Let's mark this moment.
Amit Sharma: 2019.
Mat Fraser: Let's mark this moment. In five years time, there will be no able-bodied people playing profound, in profound roles about disability.
Amit Sharma: What other markers shall we lay down?
Mat Fraser: I want to see a disabled actor get a Best Actor, or actress. For me, it's a non-gender specific word now, so it's hard, but in categories it's still genderised, isn't it?
Amit Sharma: Yeah.
Mat Fraser: But that would be great. Peter Dinklage doesn't count, okay, because he's already had one (Amit laughs). I love him and all, and he's wonderful. Goodness me, he's helped change the landscape at the top, but something a little bit more testing of the Academy, shall we say? A proper spazza. (Amit laughs)
Amit Sharma: And here as well.
Mat Fraser: Yeah, the BAFTAs, I'm surprised. I do know this ... I've just done BBC's His Dark Materials for Bad Wolf, a production company who do a lot of work with the BBC and Channel Four. I have to tell you ... Mostly British ... I have to tell you, there has been a change. There really has. They would never, ever cast a non-disabled person as a disabled character now. They'd also actively seek places where it would be inverted commas "okay" if that were always done by a disabled person. Now, they might not quite be as far down that road as we are but, hell, they've started. I think that's really important.
Mat Fraser: I’ve bashed the producers a little bit because I felt like I was the only disabled person on it. They killed me off at the end of the first book, which is fine, my character had to go. They're doing the second book this year. I'm meeting one of the producers on Monday for a chat and cup of tea about something else, but I am going to say, "You better have at least two in this series. You better double it. There's lots out there. It's a fantasy, it's a parallel universe fantasy in worlds that don't exist. Don't tell me you can't have disabled people in those places. You can," and they know it and they're looking.
Amit Sharma: There are good actors, actresses out there.
Mat Fraser: Here's the real difference, Amit? I did that Shakespeare. The Globe, Shakespeare's birthday, do sonnets and scenes at Westminster Abbey and I was like, "Great. Love it. Yeah," on the phone, "Yeah, thanks so much. Really great." Put the phone down. Tokenism. I go along, I walk in, and for the first time in my life there were two other disabled people in the company, four black women. This is the Globe, Amit. (Amit laughs)
Mat Fraser: It's Amy Trigg and Michael, Irish fella who was in Government Inspector.
Amit Sharma: Keane.
Mat Fraser: Keane. I was looking at them with these joyful, "Oh! We're all here. Isn't it amazing?" And they're like, "No. What? Who are you?" You know, a bit like that. I'm like, "So was it a real struggle?" They're like, "No, I just went to drama school." And of course the new breed, they've all been to drama school, they all expect to have a mainstream career and they're getting one. That's a huge shift.
Mat Fraser: Of course, now with austerity and the turmoil of current British overland politics, as one might call it, the ground swell of artists looking to talk about stuff like disability is happening, and now we've got these great actors who've been trained to go and do it. It's very exciting. Very exciting.
Amit Sharma: The RSC are doing it. At the Royal Exchange. I was there and Nickie Wildin was there as well. That’s two disabled directors.
Mat Fraser: That’s right. And yeah, and they ... I don't know if -
Amit Sharma: There's Ramps on the Moon, you know?
Mat Fraser: I know this sounds awful of me to say but they didn't have to do that.
Amit Sharma: Totally
Mat Fraser: But they wanted to and that's the difference, isn't it?
Amit Sharma: Yeah, yeah, yeah
Mat Fraser: We used to have to, first, bully them to do it, then ask them to do it. Now they just want to do it. That's big.
Amit Sharma: It does feel as if things are shifting and there's a desire, not only because it's funding related but it's because actually this is the right thing to do.
Mat Fraser: But it is the right thing to do.
Amit Sharma: It's representation, you know? The word "diversity" I think is starting to become a bit meaningless for me, but representation is really proactive. You don't need a book, you don't need any guidelines. You just look at it and go, "Is society being represented on this stage?"
Mat Fraser: Yeah, absolutely.
Amit Sharma: Rather than, "Is diversity ... ?"
Mat Fraser: And, "Nothing about us without us," has been topped by just, "nothing without us." I'm like, okay, I'm on board. Good. It's hard when you used to be the old radical. I still feel radical inside but I'm being superseded by other people with radicalism that is allowing radicalism to belong in the mainstream. I'm like, "No! It belongs in my agitprop prop corner. I've got my back to the wall, I know where I am. Fuck everybody!" I can't do that anymore. I just stand in the middle of the room. I'm not used to it. The younger kids, that's what they want to do and I love it. I love it.
Mat Fraser: What do we do with all those wonderful old actors who think they can't act when they become disabled because ...
Amit Sharma: Or we gotta hide it ...
Mat Fraser: Or hide it. Because we could do with their experience and their mentorship in acting. I think that's something I'd like to see Graeae do.
Amit Sharma: It's bar-raising, isn't it? It's constantly bar-raising. It's not disabled as come before has been bad but it's about bar-raising and going, "Let's keep pushing, let's keep pushing. Let's see if we can overtake."
Mat Fraser: I want Marsha de Cordova, I hope I’ve said her name right, the Shadow Minister for Disability, Black woman who’s blind. I want to see her in power. I want to see her regularly on talk shows and us understanding blindness. That's big too. When an important politician has a disability that does a huge amount.
Amit Sharma: Totally.
Mat Fraser: I want to see the film about FDR, Franklin D Roosevelt, the wheelchair-using Franklin D Roosevelt, who's bodyguards had black paint and a brush in their pockets because he had callipers on that were painted black, but sometimes they would scuff and they would show a glint of silver, which might pick up on the lights of the photo opportunity. They developed a technique where they would pretend to tie their shoelaces, but what they're actually doing was touching up his calliper with black paint. That actually happened, that was real history. That's real disability history. I want to see that film! I want to see these things. I also want to see new things. Lest we forget, there have been some great ones in the past and they need bigging up.
Amit Sharma: Totally.
Mat Fraser: I want to see America decide they don't want this photo of the standing Franklin D Roosevelt, they're going to replace it with a photo of him in a wheelchair, because he was powerful and a wheelchair user. He was a wonderful President and a disabled person.
Mat Fraser: There's a lot to do but I think now that I'm out of the terrifying trauma of the angst, of the furore, and the turmoil a little, I see what the job is in hand. I see how to do it. But the time is now and the place is here to make disability appear to be more like what it really is in the real world on our screens, and on our stages, and in our headphones, and on our speakers.
Amit Sharma: Pleasure, Mat. Thanks for that.
Mat Fraser: Yeah, thank you.
Amit Sharma: It's been a good chat.