‘This is like my legs. And I’m sitting there thinking: ‘Oh my God, they’re going to break it,’” says the broadcaster Sophie Morgan after her wheelchair is damaged by airline staff at the start of this searing documentary. For Morgan, this was a defining moment.
Since becoming paralysed as a teenager, the 39-year-old has frequently suffered poor treatment when flying. Within days of her wheelchair being broken, she is on the set of Loose Women to launch the . It calls for the Civil Aviation Authority to impose fines when an airline fails a disabled customer and, in the long term, for the redesign of aircrafts to enable disabled passengers to stay in their wheelchairs while they fly, as they can on trains.
If this were a documentary aimed solely at disabled viewers, it would be rounded up in 15 minutes flat. No one who has used a wheelchair in public needs to be convinced that transport, especially air, . But Morgan knows she doesn’t have the luxury of preaching to the converted.
To create change, first she has to convince non-disabled decision-makers that this matters. “We normalise the discrimination of disabled people,” she says. “The feeling is we’re asking too much.
” To prove her point, Morgan holds up her phone to the camera to show a tweet she has just received from an anonymous X user in response to her campaign: “Do you ever shut the fuck up about your disability?” Luckily for us, she doesn’t. Watching Morgan, it’s almost impossible not .