Code of Silence

A deaf actress playing a deaf character? Seriously?

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(I am composing this on an IPad, and I can’t get various photo-related functions to work. So…The photo is a color headshot of actress Rose Ayling-Ellis. She has blond hair, green eyes, and is wearing an emerald green blouse. Photo credit: Wikipedia.)

Introduction

Contrary to popular advice on Substack, I am veering out of my lane with this Section of my Substack. I have been frustrated lately in not having a place to express my impressions of popular media, whether focused on crips or no. I love a couple of Substacks in this space already,

Reda Rountree (she/her)

and

Beth Lisogorsky

. I cannot recommend them highly enough, especially if you’re a major screen denizen like me.

This is Rose Ayling-Ellis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Ayling-Ellis#:~:text=Edit-,rose,-Lucinda%20Ayling%2DEllis%20MBE

Rose is star of new program on the BBC streaming platform, called Code of Silence. (Silence and the character is deaf. Get it? So clever 🙄) Actually, it is not a bad title in the context of the plot.

Today (because I am retired and I can do what I want), I watched the first couple of episodes of Code of Silence . They are going to rollout the rest of the episodes once a week.

The show is a police procedural, so we have crooks and we have cops as per usual. The plot is mostly plausible—particularly the portrayal of the social awkwardness of the hearing characters dealing with a deaf person, Alison, Rose’s character.

The way the cops keep forgetting that they need to face Alison if they want her to read their lips, reminds me of being in meetings with ambulatory co-workers who leave their chairs in my path of travel when I am trying to leave.

I don’t want to give you any spoilers—but I think it’s safe to say that Alison’s decision making is problematic, only partially because of her disability. IRL, deaf people who are relying on lip reading only get some of the information in any conversation. They make educated guesses based on context. If they don’t have any context going in, it can be really difficult to parse out. Plus people turn away from the lip reader or multiple people are talking at the same time.

If you’re like me, and always looking for new things to watch, you should definitely check this out, whether you’re interested in the deafness aspect of the show or not.

Kudos to the BBC

I watch British quite a bit, and I am noticing more and more casting of disabled actors in their shows. I would say that they are way ahead of the US in this regard.