Fighting for a normal life

TVScope: Three 60, RTÉ 1, Monday The reason why Louise decided to have the TV cameras there in the run-up to her wedding was simple, she wanted to show that people with a disability want exactly the same things in life, and that includes getting hitched.

She's young, attractive and about to spend as much as anyone else on her big day yet in bridal shops she became accustomed to a look of astonishment on the faces of shop assistants.

"People with disabilities are not seen as likely to get married," said Louise, in the voice of a woman used to a certain level of discrimination in the normal course of her life.

At one wedding fair the man from the suit hire company was so patronising, "all he was short of was patting me on the head".

But she and her fiance, Steph, who both have cerebral palsy, took their business to suppliers who treated them in the same way as they'd treat any other excited, stressed-out pre-wedding couple. And the big day itself looked beautiful and happy.

They were featured in Three 60, RTÉ 1, Monday, the magazine programme which, as presenter Bethan Collins said, "aims to examine whether our world supports disabled people or not". It is back in a prime time slot for a second series.

Louise and Steph's wedding was one of the main items in a very busy programme and it left this viewer at least wanting to know more.

The sort of basic stuff that a feature on any other wedding would have delved into, such as where the couple met, when did they fall in love, did their families get on, the usual behind-the-scenes details. But the programme pretty much ignored the other dimensions to the couple's wedding and focused on their disability.

It was the same with the fascinating feature on David Jordan, a man with Asperger's syndrome whose boyhood interest in minerals and geology led him to study for a doctorate in Trinity College.

He describes Asperger's primarily in terms of "social dyslexia" - of his inability to gauge social situations, to participate in casual conversations and to figure out the right thing to say at the right time.

"Up until a few years ago I didn't realise people had emotions," said Jordan, a man in his 30s,

"I suppose people viewed me as eccentric," he said.

We saw him in the midst of a support group that he started, where fellow members, mostly male, talked with acute self-awareness of their social difficulties. But does Jordan only hang out with people with fellow Aspies (as he called people with his condition), does he socialise with fellow students?

He talked about bullying at national school level but there's a whole lot of schooling between then at doctorate level.

Most puzzling of all was the self-consciously arty camera work. In several moody shots we saw Jordan standing in front of a large photographic mural in Dublin of the Last Supper.

The tricksy camera work added nothing to the story and why choose such a powerful iconic backdrop? Does that religious image have a special meaning for Jordan? And if so, given that so much time was spent looking at him and it, what is that meaning?

While the camera swirled around Jordan the impression given of the man and his life was far from the 360 degree, rounded vision, as promised in the programme's title.

For all that, the 10-minute item gave me a clear picture of the typical symptoms of Asperger's - no small feat given the puzzling nature of the condition.

The shorter items, a funny cartoon voiced over by Bethan Collins, depicting some of the more inane conversations she has to endure about her guide dog and a piece by Donal Toolin about the lack of representation in art work of people with a disability were powerful in their simplicity and thought-provoking in their approach.