TVScope: The Spastic KingChannel 4, Thursday, 22nd November
'People like hugging spastics, but not kissing them," says Toby, the acerbic main character in Jack Thorne's darkly humorous, but challenging new drama.
As Toby is the self-declared "King of the Spastics", he is able to give a psychologically true, if cynical, voice to those adults who occupy a twilight world between normal and disabled.
He has a learning disability, but he looks like a normal adult. He lives with his elderly mother and attends a day centre, where he is acutely aware that he is more able than the others there, who have more severe physical and learning disabilities.
He is scathing about the staff's lack of acknowledgment of this fact. Their response to knowing he is high ability is, he tells us, "to make my brain work as much as they can, which means pushing Norman, who is low ability".
His revenge is to play a game of "how long will it take them to notice?" in which he abandons the helpless Norman in his wheelchair in the middle of the street.
Toby exploits his dual identity of normal/disabled in the community to his own advantage.
He collects glasses in a local pub in exchange for a free pint. He works in a local shop putting leaflets into newspapers. He then justifies his stealing from the shop on the basis that the shop-owner gets a lot of kudos from being seen to employ a "spastic".
The drama was most effective in its juxtaposition of Toby's caustic take on the world, with documentary style interviews with his mother, friends and centre workers.
Their reduction of him to a clichéd stereotype of the lovable rogue who is happy with his lot was cringingly patronising. Ironically, it was the long suffering, "low ability" Norman who best summed up the real Toby: "He makes me smile sometimes, sometimes not."
Most poignant was the desperately chirpy protestation of his mother: "Toby has brought such a lot of joy into my life, he really has."
It was the death of his self- sacrificing mother, who treated him as a man-child, which precipitated the crisis for Toby at the heart of the drama.
His fear of losing his independence leads him to conceal her death, and he ends up barricading himself into his home and retreats into a twilight fantasy world inhabited by his mother, and his imaginary girlfriend/lover, Annie.
In the end, all is resolved, and Toby is able to continue to live independently, and he develops a new appreciation of the value of his friends in the day centre.
The lack of the usual soft focus in drama about disability was successful in The Spastic Kingin showing that the Tobys of this world are not all the one dimensional lovable characters we would like to believe they are. Neither are they all "wankers", despite what Toby insists about himself, but rather complex, multifaceted individuals with capacity for both goodness and nastiness - in fact exactly like us so-called "normals!"
Review by occupational pyschologist Olive Travers