Steven Fletcher’s Disability in Radio (Australia, 2023) is a short film that speaks to work, ability and daily life through the lens of radio. With themes of cerebral palsy, congenital disability and wheelchair use, it looks at adult experience and employment-related issues without prescribing a single story. The film sits comfortably within the Focus on Ability festival, offering audiences a thoughtful, human view of achievement and participation in public life. Expect a film that is intimate and direct, one that invites reflection on how radio and accessible workplaces can shape opportunity. A concise, respectful contribution to conversations about disability and inclusion.
There are four types of cerebral palsy, there's hiplegia, diplegia, quadriplegia and paraplegia. In my case, I have quadriplegia, which means that all limbs are affected, but it's mainly affected my legs, which has made my legs stiff over the years. As you can see, I do use two forearm walking sticks and I do have a power chair and two sports wheelchairs. When I first left school, I had to find work experience. Casey Radio 97.7 were the only people that were prepared to take me on for those two weeks. It wasn't until I finished my work experience that I really got into radio. When I first started in 1993, there was no person that I knew of that worked with a disability on radio. In the 18 years that I worked at Casey Radio, I did have some of the best experiences. It was 2005 where my radio career really took off because it was the first time that the radio station first went online over the internet. In that time, we were getting emails from people from overseas. The station manager at the time asked me and my co-host at the time, David Pearce, to put together a directory of services for people with disabilities. We wanted to focus on non-for-profit organisations. It basically saved my radio career because what we did, we researched non-for-profit organisations in the United States, England, New Zealand and Australia. The reason why we wanted to focus on the non-for-profit organisations is because we felt that the non-for-profit organisations were being taken over by the big ones. That's why we basically wanted to focus on that because there wasn't a huge representation of people with disabilities on radio at the time. I have a lot of pride in what I have done between 1993 and 2011 because we did actually do 836 shows in 18 years. I had an absolute ball working on the show because it gave people with disabilities the opportunity to ring up a radio show and feel part of being involved in the radio show as listeners. A heap of listeners ring us up. For example, between 2009 and 2011 we had an average of 30 phone calls every Saturday night for nearly 2 years. So in between 10 o'clock to 12 midnight we had heaps of phone calls. I can't remember exactly what the listeners thought of the show but the feedback that we got was, again, it was a radio show that was for people with disabilities and it was a show dedicated to them. 2008, that's when I became a life member of Casey Radio for presenting a disability radio show for people with disabilities.
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