Penny Pepper has been a writer and activist within the disability arts movement for 20 years. She has written articles for dao, Arts Disability Culture Magazine, Disability Now and Ouch! She has also written short stories for DAO and is the author of Desires (2003), a controversially unique collection of explicit fiction focusing on disabled people, relationships and sex.

Special needs pets!

24 November 2008

Blog

Did anyone see Special Needs Pets on Channel 4s Cutting Edge the other day? We can usually expect reasonable quality from Cutting Edge documentaries, but this had that snide sniggering quality that infects a lot of TV these days. It's all so, so funny; look at the wobbly dog falling over, the cat having his bowel's squeezed empty, the bunny with dodgy back legs, and the obsessive behaviour of a sexually confused parrot. And never mind the pets, let's laugh at the oddball, saddo owners, more...

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Euphenasia anyone!

17 November 2008

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Earlier I listened to Liz Carr on Radio 5 Live, fighting the corner for our right to live, gamely, in the face of an arrogant paralysed Noel Martin insisting he will do the deathly deed on himself before he's 50. (Great publicity though, especially as he keeps postponing it). If society goes much further down this line of argument, can we look to the day when there's a campaign to put down Prof Steven Hawking? Poor waste of space, clearly a tragedy, he can't have much quality of life. I mean,...

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Hello world, is anyone there?

16 November 2008

Blog

It's hard to believe that three weeks ago I was setting off in the happy Autumn sunshine to film a pitch in Hoxton Square. Oh look, another TV documentary about sex and disability. And they want me to be the gravitas. Dearie, dearie me, how things do not change. A shame the TV company managed to send an ambulance (yes, ambulance) to whisk me to the shoot. I sat, cardboard bed pans inches from my bigged up hair and reflected on how I could explain to my mum that this was not glamourous in the...

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