Six Disabled Actors in Channel 4's New Drama Cast Offs

29th July 2009

Cast Offs is a highly ambitious new drama written by rising star Jack Thorne (Shameless, Skins, Scouting Book for Boys), in conjunction with Tony Roche (The Thick Of It) and Alex Bulmer (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, R4). In mock-documentary fashion, the show will tell the story of six disabled characters parachuted on to a remote and desolate island for a year, and follow their hardships as they build their own homes, grow their own food, fall in love and fight to survive.

The series features six disabled actors with a range of impairments including blindness, deafness, dwarfism and cherubism. The series will also feature a cameo from Thomas Turgoose (This Is England, Somers Town) and is due to air later in 2009.

Alison Walsh, Editorial Manager, Disability said, "Channel 4 has made huge strides in casting disabled people across all our programmes. The next big challenge was to find a more imaginative, brave and ambitious way to cover disability on screen. We wanted innovation in form as well as content - to really test the outer limits of disability on TV. When Eleven Film brought us Jack Thorne and Cast Offs I knew we'd found it."