Ö÷²¥´óÐã

Wheelie actress Cherylee Houston is about to join Coronation Street and will grace our screens in April.

The website, aims to help learning disabled people through the voting process.

This week's The Surgery on Radio 1, about stress, anxiety and depression.

The tunes of disabled musician

A blog post on why

What are the Ouch! Team chatting about in the office today?

1. the one-handed piano player.

2. Too White To Be Black, a Radio 4 documentary about Black and Asian people with albinism.

3. Back To Baghdad, a Ö÷²¥´óÐã 1 Northern Ireland documentary about Ali Abbas, who was brought to Britain with charity funding after losing his arms in the 2003 Baghdad bombing.

4. The to get the controversial Ian Dury and the Blockheads track, Spasticus Autisticus, to number 1.

5. A TV biopic on animal behaviourist with autism, Temple Grandin, premiering on America's HBO, February 6. Starring Claire Danes!

Remember Sesame Street? All those muppets with all their furry limitations? Being a monster or a rat is a disability in itself, right? Anyway, the show isn't really prominent in the UK anymore, so I'd sort of forgotten about Big Bird etc until Lawrence Carter-Long, disability comentator and friend of Ouch! from across the Atlantic, kindly sent me through an exciting YouTube video.

Rocco Fiorentino, a 13 year old blind guy from New Jersey, will be appearing on Sesame Street on January 21st. However, the whole section is already for all to see.

Rocco chats a bit to Elmo and Telly Monster, telling them that he likes to sing, and asking them not to feel sorry for him for being blind, because "it feels natural to me". Then, he and the muppets burst in to song.

Happily, is a really strong jazz singer. We're even hoping to play a track of his on Ouch's next Talk Show.

The segment will be repeated regularly over the next couple of months, so if you have access to Sesame street, tune in and check out a bit of disability awareness for kids.

• Ö÷²¥´óÐã Northern Ireland have worked with the Sesame Street gang in recent years and produced a local show called Sesame Tree where you can see all the characters you know and love plus some home grown ones.

What's 'top trending' on Ouch's radar this week?

1. Gok Wan's how to look good disabled and naked show on Channel 4 tonight (Tue 19)

2. Deaf artist Sophie Woolley's play 'Carbon Cleansing' is on Radio 4 tomorrow (Wed 20)

3. Hayley, the wheelie character in Hollyoaks, is 20 weeks pregnant.

4. Why doesn't wheelchair character Adam get any good lines in EastEnders?

5. Tories are putting forward a million quid to help disabled Conservatives into politics

6. EHCR: New 'naked scans' at airports will upset disabled people and transgender people too.

Already rather popular in the US and down under, a teenage musical sitcom, is just now hitting UK screens for the first time. A sort of modern day Fame, the show is set in an American high school and is based around an underdog glee-club. It prides itself on representing difference. The club even includes a wheelchair user. Or does it?

actor Kevin McHale, who plays all singing, all dancing, wheelchair using geek Artie Abrams, is not disabled himself. With more and more pressure being put on television and film companies to use disabled actors in disabled roles, disabled people saying its akin to blacking up etc etc, you can imagine it caused a bit of a stir when Glee first aired last year in the US.

On the back of an episode called where all the club members acquired wheelchairs in solidarity with Artie, who uses one "even when the music stops", published an article around the disabled actors for disabled roles debate and a plethora of bloggers, including posted their views on the character Artie and on portrayal of disability in the show in general. Apparently someone with a stutter and a couple of people with Downs Syndrome also feature in this particular bumper disability episode.

The question now is, will Glee provoke a similar response when it gets going in the UK?

This week, there were at least three separate programmes on Ö÷²¥´óÐã TV which focused on the lives of disabled people. All available to watch on iPlayer right now.

On Ö÷²¥´óÐã Wales on Monday night , Why do you hate me was broadcast. This is a documentary about disability hate crime, presented to us by a wheelchair user who experiences it on a regular basis. He filmed some of it on his mobile. Distressing stuff, but definitely worth a watch.

Pukey programme title of the week goes to Africa's walk of hope. This was shown on Ö÷²¥´óÐã1, also on Monday night and tells the story of Olivia Giles. She was a lawyer in Edinburgh before becoming a quadruple amputee through Meningitis. Now, she works with amputees in Milawi and Zambia, providing them with orthodics and prosthetics where necessary. The documentary follows her initial journey to Africa to figure out the best way of going about her planned work. Despite the questionable title, it looks like this woman is doing good stuff.

Then, on Tuesday, after the 10 o'clock news came Hannah: The Girl Who Said No to a New Heart. This hour long documentary follows Hannah Jones, partly using a personal video diary, from late 2008, when she hit the headlines for saying no to a heart transplant at the age of 12, right up to late 2009. There are some major slushy bits of course, but essentially, the programme gave me an incite into a strong young person, who, with the support of her family, went against medical advice to make her own decisions about what would happen to her body. Hannah herself is a great personality. I was just sorry the programme was shown so late, as I'm sure young teens with and without disabilities would have gained a lot from watching.

All the links above take you straight to iPlayer, where you can watch the programmes mentioned for the next 3 or 4 days. A perfect excuse not to brave the icy pavements.

Public service broadcaster Channel 4 has for the rights to televise the London 2012 paralympics.

Until now, viewers have been used to seeing coverage of disability sport only on the licence fee funded Ö÷²¥´óÐã, so to see them move to a commercial broadcaster is very interesting.

Disability programmes and sport haven't previously been seen as great money-spinners by businesses - the people who, crucially, may or may not buy advertising in the breaks. But Channel 4 and the Ö÷²¥´óÐã both appear to have been raising their game around disability in recent years with disabled people regularly included on Big Brother and seemingly more and more specials from auntie such as Britain's Missing Top Model and the soon to be broadcast Dancing on Wheels.

Campaigners often go blue in the face reminding their audiences, "Disabled people have an annual spend of 80 billion pounds and so should be taken seriously". Could Channel 4's purchase of the games be an acknowledgment of disabled people, their friends and family, as a sizeable economic force? Or are they betting that the halo of love around the London-based olympic and paralympic games will pay worthwhile dividends and get viewers glued to their sets.

Anyone hooked on the nightly coverage from the Beijing games in 2008 like I was, is going to relish seeing so much live sport from disabled competetors. Somehow, disability sport has more to offer than mainstream sport with its back stories and a higher than average element of jeopardy from mixed ability male and female athletes. It's like WWE on acid and with no play acting.

Channel 4 has pledged that it will give itself over to the games after the summer olympics is over. It also plans to broadcast documentaries in 2011 and 2012, with other disability sport events, to help build towards the games. Being as some of the rules and categories are quite complex, lots of explanation is likely to be necessary up front. e.g. if a swimmer appears to beat the rest of their field and reach the end of the pool first, they're not necessarily the winner. Disability is so confusing.

• The Ö÷²¥´óÐã has an excellent an regularly updated disability sports site that we urge you to add to your favourites right now:

In the usual ridiculous dash to find a 13 Questions, I headed for the Ouch! Inbox in desperate need of post-Christmas inspiration. About 4 emails down was a message from Susan Archibald. I'd called her a year ago because I heard she was going to be blogging for the Sunday Mail, but nothing ever came of our exchange. She was letting me know that it had all fallen into place.

I tell 13 Questions interviewees that the chat will take 30 to 40 minutes. Susan and I spoke for an hour and 35 minutes and I had to drag the phone away from my ear when we ended the call. She is a fascinating person and less than half of what she said made it to the final cut.

After a short and fearful time where neither of us could understand what the other was saying, I'm Irish and she has a very strong Fife accent, Susan jumped straight into telling me about herself. Shortly after she became disabled , having previously been the main breadwinner, she then felt guilty for not bringing in money, a failure as a parent and described becoming a wheelchair user as being like a social death. Then, when she did try to get back to work, every possible barrier was put in her way. She says that Fife Council suggested jobs she could never manage, brought her to interviews where the actual office she would be in was up stairs, etc. etc. She admits that she tried to take her own life around that time.

So it is all the more brilliant, and dare I say it, inspirational, that Susan archibald is where she is today. She went to the library to read up on the laws she would need to know about to bring her ultimately successful case against Fife Council. Then, she entered into a degree in community education and while she didn't finish it due to lack of support, she found herself campaigning for the other disabled students at the university.

She had never driven in her life and when she decided that it was a necessity, she read the theory book two hours before her test and took lessons for just 5 weeks, passing both exams first time.

Then she got the campaigning bug and within a couple of years, everyone who was anyone on the Scottish disability scene was not only aware of her, but regularly calling on her to help them "get things done". But all her helpfulness came at a price.
Everything Susan was doing was voluntary and while she insists that she didn't mind this, her family fell into debt and she had to do something to bring them out of it. So now she is self-employed and while she sets up her official foundation, Susan gets by on speaking to businesses about disability discrimination. Susan hopes to widen her campaigning and speaking work out to Europe over the next year or so and I', for one, wish her the very best of luck. I just love speaking to people who "get things done".

Read my 13 Questions interview with Susan Archibald here.