大象传媒

The 大象传媒 wants to hear the views of disabled people in order to inform its disability equality scheme.

If you are interested in providing your views and taking part, fill in this questionnaire.

The deadline to fill this in is the 30th of November, and all those who take part will be put into a prize draw to win one of 10 pairs of tickets to tour 大象传媒 studios.

I have a bit of a musical head on nowadays, what with all these Your Music features, finding songs to play at the end of the Podcast, and what have you. Anyway, Being the nosy researcher that I am, I had a little brouze on the internet for some more global representation, and came up with some fantastic results.

There is some particularly remarkable stuff on YouTube. A clip called the , shows Iraqi musician Naseer Shamma playing the Oud(middle eastern guitar) with one hand. Apparently, he developed this technique to give amputees and disabled people an opportunity to play music. Then, I found a clip of some ,
playing wedding music "outside one of the temple sites at Angkor".

And finally, some , played by a blind man in Shanghai.

Don't forget to check out the Your Music section of ouch for some disabled musicians a little closer to home.

We get many emails into the Ouch! inbox, asking us to advertise various disability events and happenings. There is no possible way we can mention them all, but here are a couple that we would just hate for you to miss out on.
presents DaDaFest 6, which takes place in venues in both Liverpool and Manchester throughout November.

The event includes performances from big names in comedy such as the Nasty Girls, and Ouch's own Laurence Clark who says,
鈥淒aDaFest is a unique mixture of both professional and community-based disability art 鈥� showcasing the best whilst giving everyone an opportunity to have
a go. Without it I doubt if I鈥檇 have become a comedian, as the first time I ever performed was at the first festival in 2001.鈥�

The programme for DaDaFest is available from the website.

There are also a lot of exciting things happening in the camp. Carousel is an organisation which "inspires people with learning disabilities to achieve their artistic ambitions".

Events include brand new musical Debbie Rock Angel, and various club nights, but you can find a full list on their

We're going to try and bring you an entertainment update once a month on the Ouch! weblog, so if you have anything to tell us about,
email the Ouch! inbox.

Ouch has launched a new blog - Access 2.0, written by Paul Crichton.

Paul developed , the accessible search engine that only lists accessible websites, and also writes regularly for Ability Magazine.

The point of this blog is to look at all the things happening on the web now and in the future; the good, the bad and the downright fugly. But we'll be looking at it from the point of view of inclusivity. En route, we'll be looking at real disabled people, how they use the net, how they want to use the net, and throwing in things that fascinate and interest us.

Check it out now at /blogs/access20

The Ouch Podcast is playing a brand new game, with a little help from one of the 大象传媒's most famous disabled presenters, and we need your help.

I can't give away much more about the game itself, but needless to say, it promises to be lots of fun.

If you would like to be a contestant on this quiz's very first outing, please send us an email at ouch@bbc.co.uk, with your name, telephone number, and a couple of lines about yourself.

You will need to be available at the end of a phone at some point on the evening of Monday the 23rd of October, or possibly even this Saturday afternoon. Good luck, and if you aren't called upon this time, please don't lose hart, because we will be noting your interest for future editions.

Following representations from parliamentarians and the RNID, the 大象传媒 is increasing the number of hours of subtitling on its 大象传媒 Parliament channel from 450 hours to 810 hours per year.

The half-hour review programme, 'The Record', which is shown twice daily, already carries constant on-screen subtitling, but now the most important of the events in Parliament will be shown in a subtitled version.

大象传媒 Parliament is available on Freeview, satellite and cable and shows all the work of the House of Commons live, and also replays the sessions of the House of Lords the following day. The channel has a monthly audience of approximately 1 million viewers.

Monkey has been cruising the Information Superhighway (smirk) for disability comedy. There's got to be something out there to laugh at, yes? Especially if the Ouch Podcast is binned and TV channels still edit disabled people's lives down to the size of 'interesting documentaries about what's wrong wiv us'.

Enter YouTube. I spent a good half an hour yesterday surfin' around and discovered a gem! Not made by disabled people but spot on humour.

. A spoof documentary item from Australia about an inspirational fella who works in a home for people with odd disabilities ... gawed if only there were more like him. (Warning, not hugely strong language but a little).

While we're about it, check out this spoof advertisement for a child's doll called
.

You got any disability humour you'd like to share with Monkey?

What's this - a crip on TV who isn't trekking across Africa?

Yes, Kerry McGregor made it through Sharon's boot camp to win a place in the live knockout stage of X Factor. We've been doing a little digging this week and here's a quick roundup of facts about our favourite talent show contestant.

声 Exclusive! On this Saturday's live show, she'll be performing Stevie Wonder's "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life".
声 According to our source, Kerry can use crutches but doesn't have much ease of movement on them, so who knows which mobility aid she will be using on Saturday's show. A little bird tells us that they had to redesign the set to accomodate this. Allegedly.
声 She once competed to represent Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest. Another little bird says that she was , so as not to garner the 'sympathy vote'.
声 She appeared in the Channel 4 series 'Book Group' in 2003, and apparently, there were some with another disabled actor.

We're hoping to be able to speak to Kerry soon, but in the meantime join in with the X-Factor discussion on the Ouch! messageboards.

just a quick note to let you know that, tonight, In an Inside Out London special to commemorate Mental Health Week, they will be exploring the lives of the mentally ill and investigating cutbacks in the mental health
system

One of those featuring in the programme is Sarah Tonin from , an interdisciplinary arts organisation, founded and run by and for people with severe and enduring mental illness.

You'll have to be quick, because the programme goes out tonight, Monday 9 October, at 7.30 PM.

It's Friday, the weekend is upon us, and what's more - it looks like rain. Again. So what better way to spend an inclement weekend than tucked up in the warm catching up on some of the best disability related content in the blogosphere?

Here's just a snapshot of what's going on, but if you know of a blog that deserves a mention, get in touch at the usual address - ouch@bbc.co.uk.

声 reckons his helper is trying to bump him off, in an outing cunningly disguised as a trip to Tesco - but then he hasn't been sleeping much lately...

All went a bit too smooth really, that is until we were on our way back to the car, which incidentally I managed to pull straight into one of the 5 empty Disabled Parking Bays so I cant even rant about that, when the trolley attached to the front of the wheelchair came to a sudden halt nearly throwing me over the top. She'd only gone and pushed me HEAD ON into a Bollard, not just caught it either, smack bang in the middle of the trolley leaving a nice big dent. 'I didn't see it coming,' she said.

Read more at

声 is writing about how a seemingly trivial illness and some life-stress can cause a flareup of her bipolar symptoms:

The fact that all of this co-incides with a change of job does not necessarily mean that the new job is to blame. On the contrary, when I'm enjoying this job, I really love it. I think what may be going on is that I've had too many stresses and shifts recently, including a very busy summer and a complete change of work situation, and all this stress has become the catalyst for a whole load of symptoms that I really don't need at this very busy time. Ah, the marvellously irritating paradox of stress-induced bipolar crap.

Read more at

声 Over at , Gordon is proud of being a visually impaired wheelchair user. This week he's blogging about just that, and asking the question - why should non-disabled people assume he's unhappy with himself for being so 'faulty'?

People may find it crazy if I tell them I'm proud to be disabled. Why? Because I have learned to do new things and got to explore myself in more ways than I ever thought possible. Except for the physical pain, being impaired can mean finding yourself again. For in fact, what people see on the outside is nothing more than an image.

Read more at

声 Finally, it's 'Parts Replacement Week' at the as Blue goes to get her new trach fitted. What's more, she has a 'posse' to go with her...

So. I have this nurse who goes where I go, and parents who have a knack for teamwork in the doctor-patient arena with me. All four of us went to the clinic together today for the trach change. And while there is good people-watching of all kinds there, I'm sure we are something to see. If you wandered into the nearest church lutefisk dinner and picked out two reasonably limber senior citizens and a women aged 35 or older, you'd have an idea of the utter coolness of my entourage. They carry gauze and saline. They wear comfortable shoes.

Read more at

Well, that's it for our first roundup - who needs RSS? If you know of a blog we should be featuring here, let us know at ouch@bbc.co.uk

When Lady Bracknell received a text message from one of her top moles telling her that GMTV were trailing a touching story about "how a family of four live life to the full despite the fact that they are all blind", she immediately dropped what she was doing and ran (oh, ok, hobbled) to the nearest internet connection to check it out for herself. After all, she knows there's nothing Crippled Monkey likes better than heartwarming pieces of journalistic fluff about tragic blindies.

So , in all its patronising glory. For the full impact, scroll down past the factual stuff about retinopathy to the paragraph entitled, "Talented". (And when did you last read an article about a disabled person in which they weren't portrayed as being either tragic or talented? Let's face it, we're always either an inspiration or an object of pity. Or both. Simultaneously. Which, frankly, is a good trick.)

Anyway, back to the amazing Turnham family. Mum Sue is evidently so talented that she manages to run her household "exactly like any other but with the aid of four guide dogs". Now, despite the entertaining mental imagery this creates of a small army of guide dogs wearing pinnies and running their paws across the tops of picture frames to check for dust, it's a ridiculous and misleading statement. (And downright lazy journalism, to boot.) There are four guide dog users in the family. If Sue's the only family member in the house at any given time, she's not going to have four guide dogs there with her queueing up for a chance to do the ironing. The other three are going to be out with their owners. This is not rocket science, folks.

Younger son Roy plays in a rock band "with other sighted members". So clearly Roy is either incredibly talented or his sighted band mates are a model of compassion and philanthropy. I mean, heaven forfend they might simply be mates and his blindness just isn't an issue.

Bizarrely, Lady Bracknell once travelled to a meeting in London with the father of this prodigious family. Her tolerance for anecdotes about his offspring's sporting achievements wore perilously thin after the first hour or so. Although, given that the only alternative seemed to be a detailed description of the toileting arrangements for the four guide dogs, she gritted her teeth and attempted to sound interested in cross-country running. But she still has flashbacks.

Over on the Ouch Talk message board, there's been what Mrs Merton might have referred to as a heated debate about the dismal lack of wheelchair access during the "boot camp" stage of the UK X Factor.

Now, there's little doubt that the contestant in question has been, at best, patronised. And Lady Bracknell for one is definitely of the opinion that it should have occurred to the production team that there was every chance they might need an accessible venue.
But things are a whole lot more heated than that over at the Australian version of Pop Idol where judge Kyle Sandilands has described contestant Bobby Flynn as "a full mong". Oh dear.

Not surprisingly, the Down Syndrome Association of Queensland has demanded that Sandilands be sacked unless he makes a public apology. For the full story - and the chance to read Australian viewers comments about it - follow

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