| Barbara Lambex explains why a six-year-old girl with Down’s Syndrome* was introduced into one oftelevision’s most popular series. | ||
| Six-year-old Nina Weill has made television history. She is the first mentally handicapped | ||
| child to be written into a drama or soap opera. | ||
| The decision to introduce Nina into Crossroads was a courageous experiment by producer | ||
| Jack Barton, who has in a sense been testing the loyalty of his 14 million regular viewers. Indeed, | ||
| 5 | Crossroads slipped out of the top ten for a few weeks, probably due to the squeamishness of | |
| some viewers. It has gradually climbed back. He knew that if Nina could hold their interest, if | ||
| they could accept her and her disability, there was a chance of chipping away at some of the old | ||
| prejudices that prevent the mentally handicapped from being accepted into the community. | ||
| The Crossroads cast was scriptwriter Arthur Schmidt's first hurdle. Would they accept her, he | ||
| 10 | wondered, and would they be able to make sense of a scene with a problematic child wandering | |
| around? He got round it by offering the actors every possible alternative to allow for Nina's | ||
| unpredictability. The script was worked round the little girl - Nina doing what Nina usually does, | ||
| and the cast fitting in with her. 'The main thing was to create a medium for Nina, to have that | ||
| little girl around, with people loving her or being uncomfortable with her. There would be an | ||
| 15 | intended range of reactions with which all parts of our audience could identify. ' | |
| He admits that Nina was capable of doing a lot more than was shown on the screen, but he | ||
| wanted to cover a wider range of disability. 'My expectation was that it is a 24-hour-a-day job to | ||
| look after these children and that they cannot be trusted. Nina can't be trusted not to run under a | ||
| bus, but that's because she's a child. She can run her own bath and not let it run over. I never | ||
| 20 | expected a child like Nina to be toilet trained and she is. She also has lovely manners. If she is | |
| given a sweet, she will make sure you and I get one before she takes some herself. After knowing | ||
| her a month or so, I described her to someone as "adorable". It would never have occurred to me | ||
| to call her that when we first met. ' | ||
| After their initial meeting Arthur wanted to know what Nina's daily life was like, how much | ||
| 25 | her school resembied a normal school and whether after 10 years she would emerge brighter than | |
| she went in. 'What I was interested in was how do these people with Nina's level of intelligence | ||
| perceive the world and what do we owe them? There are those who say she should have been put | ||
| away at birth, but I have been won over to the view that mental handicap is our problem. With | ||
| some help they could be integrated into the community, upsetting nobody in particular, not | ||
| 30 | hospitalized, not particularly expensive nor a burden on society. ' | |
| Arthur Schmidt is concerned about the Down's Syndrome adult, who may face a lifetime of | ||
| hospitalization. As he says,'There are not enough residential homes for adults because in certain | ||
| communities there is local resistance to siting them, usually through ignorance. ' | ||
| The program has inevitably attracted criticism. 'A few viewers attacked us for compromising | ||
| 35 | and using a very attractive child. ' Arthur Schmidt ad mits that,'like many people in soap opera | |
| land, she is a little prettier, wears cuter clothes but there were at least half a dozen other children | ||
| at her school just as pretty and enchanting we could have used. We were also attacked for | ||
| implying the limitations of her handicap. We said Nina would probably never read. Yet we have | ||
| had responses from parents who say their retarded son or daughter can indeed read. But those | ||
| 40 | people touched personally by mental handicap have been gratified, because someone is sharing | |
| what they know, something they seldom see, in an ordinary, down-to-earth way. ' | ||
| The Guardian, December 2, 1983 |