It's my disability and I'll laugh if I want to

A young generation of disabled writers is reclaiming our stories, says Melanie Reid

- Melanie Reid

A year after it was first broadcast, I have discovered We Might Regret This, a groundbreaking BBC2 comedy/drama co-written by and starring Kyla Harris. Unashamedly exposing the messy, darkly hilarious territory of disabled life, it was acclaimed by the critics and panned in all the predictable places as scatological leftie indulgence.

For me, it was joyful - the first time I'd seen anything close to my own experience authentically represented on screen. (Joaquin Phoenix tried in the movie Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot about the late cartoonist John Callahan, but as brilliantly as Phoenix acted, we knew he wasn't disabled.)

Harris and I are both tetraplegics, paralysed by broken necks long before it was cool to be disabled. To us the cheerfully shitty world of nonfunctional body functions, dependency, tokenistic inclusivity and always, but always, the condescension of the able-bodied.