The man who helps actors 'blind up'

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IN TOUCH – The man who helps actors ‘blind up’

TX: 12.11.2019 2040-2100

PRESENTER: PETER WHITE

PRODUCER: LEE KUMUTAT

White

A couple of examples of that much prized buzz word “inclusion”. In a few minutes, why there’ll be some braille in the shops this Christmas – well one shop actually but it’s a start. And you don’t come much more included than tonight’s other guest – a blind film producer and advisor. Here’s why:

Clip - See

Centuries from now almost all humans have lost the ability to see.

[A group of woodland warriors moves over a rocky crest.]

Some say sight was taken from them by God to heal the Earth. But after so many years the power of sight has returned.

[A newborn is held.]

The children, they have the ability to see.

For centuries we feared this day would come. The evil of light once almost destroyed the world.

And now it has returned. Find the children who can see and bring them to me.

Well that’s from See – a four-part TV series made by Apple TV Plus, which started up at the beginning of this month. And they decided that if they were going to make a whole series based on blindness it might not be a bad idea to find someone to make sure they actually got it right.

Well Joe Strechay was hired for insights like this found on his You Tube page.

Strechay – You Tube clip

You go up to the urinal with your cane and tap, tap, hopefully someone says something but otherwise you might be poking someone right between the legs or in the legs as they’re urinating and that’s – that’s a treat – for them and you. I go into the stall, every public restroom stall is an adventure, so you go in there, you enter in there, you check for toilet paper because you don’t want to end up sitting in poop.

White

Joe Strechay, welcome in person to the programme from Harrisburg in Pennsylvania?

Strechay

Thank you so much for having me on, it’s a great pleasure, thank you.

White

So, Joe, why did you get this gig?

Strechay

So, I’ve worked on a few other shows. I worked with the USA network’s Royal Pains with their writers’ room on three episodes of a show and then I worked on Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix starring Charlie Cox, who’s a Brit. And then I worked on the OA for Netflix as well, starring Brit Marling and they sought me out, I’ve had other opportunities but this one was the right opportunity and I believed in what they were trying to do.

White

Just tell us a bit more about the basic premise of See though, the series.

Strechay

Basically, there’s a viral apocalypse, somewhere between now and maybe a 100 or 200 years from now that kills of the majority of the population of Earth. We’re down to just a few million people left on Earth. And actually, those people emerge blind. And then our show takes place centuries later, maybe four or five centuries later, where people are living in societies and civilisations of sorts in different environments, living off the land, they’re all people who are blind. And then these twins are born, these twins with vision. It kind of changes things a little bit.

White

Right, because people suddenly found this thing called sight that became a much-prized thing. But it’s not negative about blindness, is it, as I understand it? I mean this civilisation was doing okay without being able to see, weren’t they?

Strechay

Yeah, I would say actually some people call it a dystopia, I would somewhat call it a utopia, you know, the land – the environment has recovered, these beautiful landscapes and you see the remnants of what the world was in the past but the environment has recovered and had time. And these people are living good lives.

White

And we blind people haven’t stomped all over everything wrecking the world, is that right?

Strechay

Exactly, exactly. There’s definitely some commentary on the environment and the current state of things in our show.

White

Just briefly Joe, what’s your own background because you weren’t blind from birth, were you?

Strechay

No, no, so I was born with an eye condition called retinitis pigmentosa and my vision deteriorated from the outside to the inside and I was legally blind at 19, diagnosed at 11 and lost my vision over time and I’m totally blind now.

White

And I think you had that rather gentle introduction to blindness in the doctor’s office.

Strechay

Oh definitely. I think I was 17 or 18, probably 18, just turned 18 maybe and the eye doctor’s like – yeah, you’ll be totally blind by the time you’re 25.

White

Just like that.

Strechay

And then he left the room.

White

I think some people will identify with that. Doctors say it’s very different now. Just to go back to the film making, the teaching, what was the hardest thing to teach sighted film actors about bring convincingly blind?

Strechay

The portrayal of blindness is a sensitive thing, we always start from a place of education and awareness and addressing the misconceptions about blindness. And I train people in the skills that people who are blind use every day. So, it’s understanding how to trust your senses and use those senses in a different way, like using your hearing to pick up the sound of balls and different things and different objects at times or picking up the little subtle differences that your other senses – that most people don’t pay attention to – like your proprioceptive sense or your vestibula sense, like feeling the raise of the ground as you’re going towards something can become kind of a landmark for you to find whether it’s your stoop to your door or whether it’s some other building.

White

Were there things they just didn’t get?

Strechay

Yeah, you know no one who’s not blind is going to ever know what it’s like to be blind and our actors are pretty honest about that. You know some people didn’t get certain aspects and we just spent more time on it and you know it’s a portrayal, so, they’re not going to have all the skills people who are blind have. So, definitely, sometimes people mix up, what I would call, signalling, like signalling a person with echolocation, like there’s passive and active echolocation, so you’re using echolocation to find shape and space and define objects and other things and signalling you’re just letting someone know where something is or where you are.

White

But couldn’t the production company actually have saved themselves your fee by hiring all genuinely blind actors?

Strechay

But you’re also throwing out the idea that most people who are blind or low vision, right, like so low vision is different than totally blind, right, like even the movements of a person with low vision is different and the skills that they know. Often people with low vision don’t embrace or even utilise a lot of the independent skills that people who are totally blind utilise. So, either way I think I would be there, if we hired all people who are totally blind, you know, we’re not at a place where we have enough actors who are totally blind or low vision. But you know there are great opportunities. Marilee Talkington, who’s one of our actors, has just started an initiative around training actors who are blind or low vision and making sure it’s in an accessible curriculum designed for them.

White

But what I guess you’re saying, is quite a lot of blind people aren’t that good at being blind.

Strechay

I’m just saying people who have vision tend to use that vision. So, that’s all I’m saying.

White

Well Joe Strechay’s our guest, stay with us Joe, because we also want to talk, for a moment, about a very different kind of inclusion. For many people, the advent calendar is an integral part of the celebration of Christmas and even for those people who aren’t necessarily practising Christians the ticking off of the days till Christmas by opening the calendar doors takes them back to their childhood. Well this year, there’s to be a braille advent calendar, a few in fact, a very few, in the shops and more online and one of them is in front of me and it is a bit of doorstep actually. It is a book with braille pages…

Kumutat

Are you sure it’s a book?

White

Well, hang on, you haven’t touched it have you?

Kumutat

Well no, I haven’t…

White

Let me pass it across to you.

Kumutat

It sounds like a brick.

White

There you are, it is a brick.

Kumutat

Is it, where are you?

White

If I hit you with it, got it?

Kumutat

Don’t throw it.

White

There it is. It is big isn’t it?

Kumutat

It’s huge.

White

Yeah.

Kumutat

It’s definitely – this is Lee Kumutat, the producer by the way, I was permitted to enter the studio. When we looked at doing this, I expected it to be like the braille calendars, you know the wall braille calendars that you get? And I was just thinking how is this going to be done because the braille wall calendars are kind of flimsy, aren’t they, there’s not that much to them and they’re quite thin.

White

No. Why don’t we bring in the expert? This is the brainchild of Kristina Salceanu, who runs a not-for-profit trader Advent of Change. So, why an advent calendar?

Salceanu

It’s really funny to hear you talk about the size of the calendar because we did joke when producing them that we might have to deliver them with a forklift truck because they did end up having to be quite big, just to fit everything in. But the reason that we went with the advent calendar is that it’s our signature product, essentially. Last year it was our only product and we actually raised £100,000 for charity with the advent calendar last year. But we sort of had this dawning realisation upon starting this year that actually there’s a group of people out there who not only wouldn’t be able to use the calendar as it was but actually would feel really excluded from it and we hated that and so that’s where we decided to make it accessible.

White

But I guess the thing is you didn’t know much about braille when you started this and I gather you’ve had a few surprises.

Salceanu

We did. I have to be honest, I knew absolutely nothing about braille when starting the project and was probably incredibly naïve. I sort of thought well, it’s a paper product, it’s made on card, surely it would be really easy to just add braille to it. So, funnily enough, the first thing that I did was go and speak to John Lewis and talk to them about the product, they loved it, said of course we’ll take it, what a great idea, we’d love to help. And so, at that point, off I went on my way thinking easy-peasy we’ll just create a braille version.

White

I gather you couldn’t get anyone to print it to start with?

Salceanu

No, so I actually thought it would already exist and it would just be a case of creating our version. I was really surprised to find that in the UK there was no braille advent calendar and there was certainly not anything that was as text based as ours. And so, essentially, it was a case of starting from scratch.

White

And what did people say to you, what kind of things did they say about what the problems were?

Salceanu

Ah well the main thing I got told a lot was that it was completely impossible. And I heard that a lot. So, I just started googling, essentially, how to add braille. I called pretty much everybody on the first couple of pages of Google, I got through to about six, I sent samples to about four and everybody told me it wasn’t possible. For a number of reasons, so, obviously braille is much bigger than the text that we have as standard on the calendar and also it was really important to us when developing the advent calendar that it wasn’t a lesser product, it wasn’t a more than product, it was just an equal product. And for that reason, we really wanted to have the perforations, we wanted to have that surprise element, we wanted something hidden behind the doors. And actually, having braille behind a perforation has literally never been done before.

White

Lee and I have been speculating about the braille behind the perforations because one of the things that we have wondered is whether reading the back of it you can’t actually – a good braillist with sensitive fingers couldn’t read it without actually opening it, we wondered. I haven’t quite managed to pull this off yet but I don’t see why not.

Kumutat

I’m trying now but I think the challenge…

White

Will you be cross with us if we succeed in this Kristina?

Salceanu

No by all means, please do.

Kumutat

It will keep us amused.

White

It will, could keep us very quiet.

One of the things we should say, while Lee is trying to do her version of the Rubik’s cube, is that one of the key differences with your calendar is that you don’t get little gifts inside it, do you, as you do with normal calendars, you give gifts.

Salceanu

All of our advent calendars donate to 24 different charities. So, every single day, instead of opening a door and finding a little piece of chocolate, not that there’s anything wrong with a little piece of chocolate, you actually discover a new charity and you find out how you’ve helped that charity. So, to give you a couple of examples, it could be “today you’ve given a hot meal to a homeless person” or “today, you’ve picked up 50 items of plastic from our shores” or “today, you’ve given a blanket to a child refugee”.

White

So, if it’s such a good idea why so few in the shops?

Salceanu

Well it’s been really difficult for us to produce them actually. So, we’ve had a number of stumbling blocks and one of those is cost. So, you can imagine being a brand-new product, it’s been quite costly for us to produce them and also, we just have no idea how many we’ll sell. But we thought the best way to do that and the best way to make sure they don’t get bashed around too much was to make that readily available online and to put it in sort of the high-profile John Lewis stores. And maybe next year that’ll be different, maybe next year they’ll be in every store but we’ll need for people to go out and buy them, essentially, to make that possible, so we can prove the concept.

White

I mean it’s a pound a page you give don’t you, it’s a pound a day, so you’re giving to 24 charities effectively…

Salceanu

Yes, that’s exactly it.

White

And you have to pay VAT.

Salceanu

I know, I know, it’s an absolute pain, so if anybody’s listening from HMRC please – please feel free to change that legislation.

White

They listen all the time, the tax people.

Kumutat

There is one advantage though, that you can send them articles for the blind can’t you.

White

If it’s a braille product, you can send…

Kumutat

You can save on postage and send them articles for the blind.

White

Kristina, thanks very much.

Joe Strechay, I hope, is still with us from Pennsylvania. Joe, what present would you like invented for you for Christmas or equalising, as it were, with a sighted equivalent?

Strechay

Is this a philosophical one like changing the employment rate of people who are blind or low vision?

White

You can do that, yeah.

Strechay

Okay, there we go.

White

What is it in America, in the States what’s the rate at the moment?

Strechay

There’s debates about it but it’s somewhere around like – some people say 58% of people who are blind or low vision are unemployed, or it might be even as high as 64% unemployed. And then they go higher when you say under-employed because over 70%. And there’s a hidden population of people who have not been in active in the employment process in so long that they’re not even counted.

White

So, come on, we’ll keep it simple, give us the numbers you’d like to see employed, what would you think would be a practical aim of getting people employed? Could it be the same as the rest of the population?

Strechay

I would say similar. I think that’s a goal but we’re nowhere near that at this point, so if we cut in half that would make me feel great.

White

I’d just like to bring you back to the series See before we have to end. Does a series like this really improve people’s understanding of blindness do you think or does it perhaps just reinforce the idea that we’re all marvellous superheroes with superpowers? After all, the truth about being blind is a lot of coping with it is rather banal, isn’t it, like your bathroom advice at the beginning of the programme?

Strechay

I think it changes the script basically. Most portrayals of blindness are comical and don’t show people who are blind doing things that we do everyday in life, typically they are people who need help or they’re just sitting in the corner, they’re a person with a disability and that’s their role. Our show shows them as villains, as warriors, as lovers, as parents, as people doing trades and that’s something you don’t see typically.

Kumutat

Isn’t it really just a slick vehicle for an action adventure sci-fi series and it doesn’t mean anything and producers haven’t thought very deeply about blindness at all?

Strechay

That’s an interesting point. It is a piece of entertainment, like the goal is to create this product, an idea that was out there that hadn’t been done. But right from the beginning, the discussion was – how can we make this inclusive, how can we bring actors who are blind or low vision. I wouldn’t have worked on it if they hadn’t, truthfully. At this point in time, that’s where we going and we need to be going. And we had numerous actors who were blind or low vision, we had two stunt performers, we had numerous background who were blind or low vision and we’ll continue to grow in season two and have that opportunity.

Kumutat

Pete and I will send you our cards for the next series.

White

Yeah, we will, we’d love to do it.

Strechay

Yeah, well we still have four more episodes launching and look for more. And I’ll tell you each episode, as we – we kind of build the plane while we were flying it, each episode includes more and more blindness. So, episode four, you just saw, and five and six and seven are some of my favourites and include a little pieces that most people won’t even realise.

White

Joe Strechay, that’s all we’ve got time for. Thank you so much for joining us today. Also, our thanks to Kristina Salceanu. And Lee, while you’ve been ferreting about, found any chocolates in that calendar?

Kumutat

No, that is one great failing of this calendar.

White

Why no chocolates Kristina?

Kumutat

Yeah, honestly.

Salceanu

We did toy with the idea of adding a surprise chocolate behind the 24th door this year actually.

Kumutat

Next year Kristina.

White

I actually nipped out, Lee, at lunchtime and got you some chocolate.

Kumutat

Ah, ah thanks Pete.

White

So, you can put it in the advent calendar if you like.

Kumutat

Thank you. Right o Pete, hand it over.

White

That’s In Touch from me, Peter White, producer with a sweet tooth Lee Kumutat, our guests and the team, goodbye.