Some of Burnell’s early theatre work was with Graeae and The Nasty Girls, a disability-led theatre company and comedy troupe.

Disability features in The Magical Playroom, a children’s play Burnell has written and stars in, and which is currently touring the UK. In September she published Snowflakes, a children’s picture book which tackles issues of race.

Almost five years after the initial furore, Burnell is still on our screens each week day evening, short arm clearly on show but never mentioned.

Which of your disabilities has a bigger impact on your life, dyslexia or having one short arm?

On sight, it’s my physical disability. For me personally, it’s my dyslexia. But that’s a bit dubious really because it’s not a disability, it’s more a difference.

There are lots of real positives to being dyslexic. It gives you a huge capacity for imagination and thinking outside the box, if the people around the dyslexic person realise and they are given the right support. I don’t think the dyslexia has a negative impact on me now, its just part of the way I think. But I couldn’t write until I was 10 or read until I was eight. So at school, my listening skills were over-developed because I never wrote anything down, I just remembered things.

You have said you’re a disabled person politically. What does that mean?

I think if you are going to talk about minorities and you’re going to put people into different groups, that’s the group that I fit into and the disabled community is the one that I’d identify with. There’s a massive difference between an amputee and someone who was born with one hand. I don’t think that you can lump them all together but the common ground is that anyone with a disability will understand the way that you’re perceived by the non-disabled community.

Having a disability is not a negative label. It doesn’t make you vulnerable, it doesn’t mean that you’re lesser in any way, it doesn’t mean that your life isn’t enriched. It just means that you are a minority.

What does it mean to be disabled in 2013?

It doesn’t really mean anything different to me than it did in 2012 or in any other year of my life but I do think there should be more representation of disabled people on TV now.

I’m very lucky because CBeebies is one of the most diverse channels the BBC has. Any person from any walk of life in the UK can turn that on and see somebody or someone that they can relate to. I think it’s great that children are learning about inclusion without realising it.

What does your daughter think about having a disabled mum?

Sometimes she’ll say “I want to have one hand. Why can’t I have one?” Other times, “Do you wish you had two hands?” I’ll say no, I’m fine, and she’ll say, “Oh good, can I have a cake?”

And the other way round, what’s it like to be a disabled parent?

I was just like any other new mum really, up to my eyes. When I got my pushchair, I did make sure that it was one I could fold away quickly with one hand.

I volunteered when I was younger in a children’s home in a leprosy centre in India, so I knew about changing nappies and all of that stuff.

If you want to have a baby, however limited you might be, you’ll still find a way to do it.

Will you ever stop wanting to talk about disability?

I don’t think I ever will, it’s far too important an issue.

Disability will always be part of my work but not all of it.

The second book I’ve written, which doesn’t come out until April 2015, is about a little girl who’s in a wheelchair and its called Mermaid. I can’t say any more about it than that.

Why do you think some well-known disabled people shy away from talking about their impairment?

I can appreciate that if they are constantly asked the same questions, time and time again, it could become a bit dull.

In every interview I’ve ever done, I’ve had to explain that I wasn’t hurt by any of the comments that were made when I joined CBeebies. I’m not sure I’ll ever get away from that.

What would you like to do after CBeebies?

I’ll stay there for as long as I can but we children’s TV presenters don’t have a particularly long shelf life. In the future, I want to do more theatre, I’d like to do film, I’ll certainly write more children’s books.

I’d like to write a memoir about the unexpected side of being disabled. About how actually it is only a small part of your life and it is not the most interesting thing about you.

Would you want to present television for adults?

I’m slightly becoming a children’s author. That’s something I’d never want to stop. Picture books and children’s books are the most important books of all because that’s how you pull someone in. That’s how you build a relationship with literature. I used to learn them by heart, remembering which lines went with which picture. Then I’d make my own stories up. Even though I couldn’t write things down, that was the starting point for my becoming an author. Learning to read is so important and books are so important that I wouldn’t do anything to burn any bridges.

Who is your favourite CBeebies character?

I do love The Adventures of Abney and Teal. Teal is a little ragdoll with red hair and Abney is a man who looks like a toy. They live in a tree house on this island which is in the middle of a lake, in the middle of a city. It is quite bizarre and very lovely, with lots of music and gentle colours.

But what I think CBeebies is really good at is the live action. At getting children on screen who aren’t showy.

BBC

Ouch! is full of great news articles and feature some really interesting interviews. With regards to campaigning, they are pretty proactive and their online talk show likes to go beyond the headlines properly reflect disabled life. It’s well worth having a look.

Check them out here

The reforms were designed to get hundreds of patients with learning disabilities and autism out of assessment and treatment units. More than 1,200 patients were in such units when there only needed to be “300 to 400″, said Norman Lamb, the health minister.

By 2014 local authorities and the groups of GPs set to control NHS spending would have to justify why each patient had been kept in such a unit.

Lamb said they were meant to be short-stay places but many people with learning disabilities were in them for years and shouldn’t be.

“We have a clear responsibility to bring this to an end. Nothing short of a complete change of culture is needed,” he said.

As part of the new “culture”, Lamb said corporations and the City would need to act responsibly. The Department of Health would scrutinise both the board directors and “financiers”, implementing changes to ensure they could not take “financial rewards without any apparent accountability”.

Officials would look at how “corporate bodies, boards of directors and financiers can be held to account for the provision of poor care and harm”.

Proposals would be put out by spring next year, and would include both “regulatory and criminal sanctions”.

Winterbourne View hospital near Bristol was closed last year after a BBC Panorama programme uncovered a regime of systematic ill-treatment of patients. People with learning disabilities were being pinned down, slapped, doused in cold water and repeatedly taunted and teased. Eleven former members of staff at the home, then owned by Castlebeck,admitted criminal offences of neglect or ill-treatment.

Castlebeck is owned by Lydian Capital Partners, a Geneva-based investment fund backed by a consortium of investors, including Irish billionaires Denis Brosnan, Dermot Desmond, JP McManus and John Magnier, the racehorse breeder. At the time of the scandal the chairman of Castlebeck was Brosnan’s 35-year-old son.

The NHS and local authorities paid Castlebeck an average of £3,500 a week to care for each patient. Since 2006, when Lydian Capital bought the company, yearly receipts have risen by 80% to £55m. The official serious case review said the company’s “appreciation of events was limited”.

The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services said: “… the most immediate failure was of a provider, Castlebeck, offering a service to meet very high levels of need; charging extremely high fees to public agencies in order to meet those needs, and then completely failing to deliver on the promises made.”

The association’s president, Sarah Pickup, said: “We must ensure that providers in future are properly held to account for this kind of failure.”

Labour questioned whether, under the new NHS system, GPs who refused to provide funding to local councils — or were “slow to do so” — would be taken to task.

Liz Kendall, the shadow care services minister, warned that “some parts of the country continue to use long-stay institutions because they haven’t developed alternative care in the community and at home”.

“In a time of constrained resources, when we need to make the best use of taxpayers’ money, there should be one budget for people with learning disabilities – not separate funding for NHS and council care. Can the minister explain how he will guarantee this happens in every local area?”

The Guardian

Total Permission (click here to watch) follows conductor Charles Hazlewood, founder of the British Paraorchestra, as he encounters 12 of the artists commissioned by Unlimited, a strand of the London 2012 Festival that encourages deaf and disabled artists to take risks, to create work that is not just unlimited, but exceptional.

Throughout this 30 minute documentary, Hazlewood talks to the artists, reviews their work and speaks to audience members at the Unlimited festival, described by Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of Southbank Centre, as ‘one of the most significant festivals we’ve ever done’; and described by Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow as “enshrining what we have learnt from the Paralympics”.

Total Permission portrays how Unlimited successfully challenged preconceptions by showing disabled people in ways audiences did not expect. The documentary, commissioned for The Space, is the conclusion of the award-winning Push Me collection, a series of short films made for The Space which chart the journey of these extraordinary artists, whose work may not otherwise have been captured on film.

Conductor Charles Hazlewood says: “The Southbank Centre Unlimited Festival was a distinct moment in time, an amazing counterpoint to the London 2012 Paralympics. There is no question that a major shift in perspective is taking place, that the world is waking up and greeting – as if for the first time – the extraordinary community of people with disability. Unlimited provided a platform for artists at the top of their game, just as the Paralympics has done for athletes. But the Paralympic Games has taken over 50 years to gain the trust and respect of the world; the arts have a lot of catching up to do. Unlimited felt like the first step on a journey where the outcome must be deeper and fuller integration at all levels for artists with disability, into the mainstream. Unlimited showed us what we had all been missing!”

Ruth Mackenzie, Director, London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival says: “ I was honoured to chair the panel of artists and producers who awarded the Unlimited commissions to the great disabled and deaf artists from the UK, collaborating with artists from round the world.  The panel, the funding partners but above all, the artists themselves have shown that the Unlimited programme is a game changer for disabled and deaf artists – for audiences, for festivals, for funders and future Paralympic Games, the bar is now at a new high and the challenge is to go higher still”.

Jude Kelly, Artistic Director, Southbank Centre adds: “London 2012 has been and gone and what’s changed?  Many things probably but one thing certainly.  After Unlimited, the biggest festival by deaf and disabled artists, we will never marginalise the power and meaning of this area of work again.  It’s gone mainstream.”

Dick Penny, Managing Director of Watershed and executive producer of Total Permission says: “The creators of these extraordinary performances, which include an underwater wheelchair, a bipolar circus, a symphony of sirens and a ten metre tall inflatable, are not “superhumans”, but simply artists like any other, who are rarely given the attention of their non-disabled peers.”

The documentary features the work and performances of artists Sue Austin, Bobby Baker, Caroline Bowditch, Laurence Clark, Jez Colbourne, Claire Cunningham, Rachel Gadsden, Graeae, Stumble danceCircus, Simon Mckeown, Ramesh Meyyappan and Janice Parker as they took part in the Unlimited Festival at the Southbank Centre in September 2012.

Artistic Director Sue Austin’s Unlimited commission, Creating the Spectacle!, sees footage of her plunge into the sea in her wheelchair. She was motivated to make the film, she tells Hazlewood, by the negative reactions she received when she started using her wheelchair: ‘They saw it as a tragedy and a loss.’  But she saw it quite differently.  Following an extended illness she had lost her mobility and become almost house-bound, so for her, ‘it’s always been my freedom, my power chair’.  This exhilaration and freedom is clearly captured in the underwater footage.  Before and after watching her work, Sue asks people what they think when they hear the word ‘wheelchair’. Before seeing the film they use the words ‘restrictive’, ‘difficult’, ‘inconvenient’; afterwards, these descriptions are transformed into ‘graceful’, ‘freedom’, ‘inspirational’, ‘wonderful’. Her favourite response to her work is, ‘I want one of those’ because, she tells Hazlewood, ‘It is so much fun, it is an absolutely ecstatic experience.’

The work produced by these artists is all extraordinary, evidenced by the responses from the audience shown at the end of Total Permission. One audience member describes the experience as ‘The best piece of physical theatre I’ve ever witnessed.’ Yet disabled artists are rarely given the attitude and attention of their non-disabled peers. Jude Kelly points out in the film: ‘One of the key things we wanted to do was take deaf and disabled art and put it right to the front of the Cultural Olympiad. We wanted to be clear that deaf and disabled artists in this country were already doing amazing things – but people hadn’t seen it, there was no critical matter bringing it all together.’

The artists were commissioned by the Unlimited programme as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.  Further information about the artists and their journey to the Unlimited Festival is available on The Space in the form of two series of 90 second short films, the Push Me Collection and the Push me Collection: The Journey.

You can watch Total Permission here.

Total Permission is a commission for The Space from Arts Council England with additional investment from Creative Scotland, and is produced by Watershed.

The theatrical premiere of this documentary will take place on Monday 3rd December with special screenings plus Q & A at both Watershed in Bristol and National Media Museum in Bradford (visit http://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/3897/total-permission-qa/ or  http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/films/t/totalpermission.aspx for more information).  In addition, the Southbank Centre is planning an event and screening in early 2013 to celebrate and reflect on the legacy of the Unlimited festival.

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An appeal has found presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who called facial growths “really ugly things”, had played on a “stereotypically negative reaction”.

It ruled that remarks about not wanting to talk to the camper van at a party were “not editorially justified”.

The episode of the hit BBC Two motoring show was broadcast on 5 February.

The comments in question were made during an exchange between presenters Clarkson and Richard Hammond, while reviewing a Prius camper van.

The BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee reviewed the remarks following an appeal from a member of the public, who had complained they were “offensive, prejudicial and unacceptable”.

Previous investigations found the show had not breached guidelines, and the BBC said it felt it was clear the joke was on Clarkson or the camper van itself.

At the time the BBC apologised, saying it was “genuinely sorry” for causing upset, but hoped “it would be clear from the absurdity of the context that no offence was intended”.

‘Offensive stereotype’

The committee’s report said the show’s audience enjoyed the presenters’ “sometimes controversial and forthright views”.

It found Clarkson’s slurred speech while referencing Joseph Merrick, played by John Hurt in The Elephant Man, was “on the margins of acceptability”.

However it upheld the original complaint, ruling that comments near the end of the exchange, suggesting not being able to look at a person with facial disfigurement, “strayed into an offensive stereotypical assumption”.

Clarkson had said on the show: “That is not a car that you could talk to at a party unless you were looking at something else is it?”

The show’s executive producer had previously acknowledged that the segment was scripted, rather than ad libbed by presenters, and had been through the BBC’s compliance system.

But finding the programme in breach of guidelines on harm and offence, the committee said the comments “did not meet generally accepted standards in the context of their portrayal of a disability”.

It concluded that it was not necessary to change the guidelines, in ways that had been suggested in the complaint.

One hundred and thirty-seven complaints were originally received about the Top Gear episode.

However, the committee did note that charity Changing Faces, which helps people affected by conditions, marks or scars that alter their appearance, had drawn attention to the programme and asked their supporters to contact the BBC.

‘Changing attitudes’

The charity said today that it welcomes the BBC Trust’s decision to uphold its complaint.

“Everyday people with an unusual appearance and other disfigurements suffer bullying, ridicule and hate crime,” said Changing Faces founder James Partridge.

“This is a small step towards changing attitudes. It is vital that people with disfigurements are not seen as fair game for low level jibes which are unacceptable and cruel.”

Mark Boylan, who has a cystic hygroma and haemangioma which causes facial growths, added that as a “genuine Top Gear fan” he was “gutted presenters felt the need to stoop to such a low level”.

He said: “Their humour singled out people who are visibly different. Although some may perceive these as harmless remarks, the fact that they were seen by millions could potentially influence their reactions to people with visible differences.

“Even though we are in the minority, our right to respect is equal to that of any majority.”

The 33-year-old has won nine Paralympic medals across five separate Games.

He told BBC London: ”If you asked me four or five months ago, I’d say London would be my last Paralympics.

“I just want to enjoy this moment, sit back and be proud of my medals and then see. I’ve got plenty of time to make the decision on Rio.”

Weir, from Wallington, took gold in the 5,000m, 1500m , 800m andmarathon races in the T54 category in London.

“I’ve had the greatest preparations ever for any championships I’ve been in,” he added.

“I had no injuries or illnesses and have a great family to pick me up when I’m feeling low.

“I don’t know [about Rio]. It’s a long way ahead.”

Weir was Paralympics GB’s most successful athlete at the Games along with cyclist Sarah Storey.

But he says his victories in the 5,000m and marathon stand out.

“They are all special but I think the first one was very special as I just wanted to get off to a winning start in my home games,” Weir continued.

“The marathon was great because all my family were on the last corner.

“I’ll never forget seeing my son, my partner, my mum and dad and a couple of friends at the finishing line.”

Weir, who has won the London Marathon six times, admits that his success at the Games has still not sunk in.

“I’m still running off adrenaline,” he said.

“I can’t believe it’s happened. I feel like I’m dreaming.

“I feel like someone will click their fingers, I’ll wake up and have to go off and race.

“It’s a dream come true and I’m loving every minute of it.”

Courtesy of BBC News