‘Pick your battles,” Sophie Morgan says, dressed all in black, looking incongruously gorgeous, like she belongs in a sonnet or a music video, not in the Guardian offices (no offence, colleagues). “Pick any battle.”
The latest battle she has picked is with airlines, who treat disabled passengers shockingly badly. Wheelchairs get lost and broken, people get left on planes for hours waiting for help to disembark, basic human dignities are disregarded. “What’s happening here is not a bunch of disgruntled holidaymakers whose luggage is lost,” she says. “It feels like an assault.” It doesn’t mean she didn’t wrestle with it as an issue: “Part of me thought, really, why are we campaigning for flights, when flying’s so bad anyway, in a climate crisis? When we’re in a cost of living crisis where disabled people are struggling to access anything, let alone holidays? But it does feel, when you’re us, like no one’s listening.” I get a flash of Morgan’s Loose Women persona – funny, knowing, redoubtable.
The first time Morgan flew as a wheelchair user, it was six months after the car crash in which she sustained a spinal injury that left her paralysed from the chest down. She had worked at her rehabilitation unceasingly, even frenziedly – getting up in the middle of the night to exercise, relearning how to swim on her own. She is 38 now, but she was 18 when the crash happened, and had huge horizons – she wanted to go to art school, she wanted to study law, she had just got her A-level results – and suddenly she was in a world where she had to fight for everything. “I was the first disabled person I really ever met. I had this internalised ableism but also, all around me, there was this insistent, ‘You can’t do this. You can’t do that.’ I suddenly realised I was going to need to know my rights. It’s such a privilege not to need to know your rights.” When she went to take her place at art school in Brighton, they tried to rescind it because their building wasn’t accessible; she had to get a lawyer to explain to them that, actually, they had concrete duties under the law.
Her life up to that point had been carefree. Her father was a wine merchant and her mother did various jobs, including nurse and gun-dog trainer. Morgan was “a naughty little shit”, she says, “pushing and pushing against boundaries”, expelled from her first school for supplying alcohol, after which she went to Gordonstoun, the Scottish private school. “I’ve met people who have been paralysed later on in life, where they’ve had a family, or a husband or a wife, or a job, that has rejected them, where they had something to lose, and lost it. I was so young, I didn’t have anything to lose, in a way. Just everything to regain.” It’s a determinedly positive take on a cruel reality: “I was 18, I had my hot girl summer, three months of it. It was paradise. I had that August – loving life, and then I was paralysed.”
By 2004, the BBC were looking for disabled people to contribute to the first season of Beyond Boundaries, a reality TV show that followed a team of men and women with physical disabilities trekking round Nicaragua. Morgan is moderately sure her occupational therapist suggested her as “someone who’s absolutely bonkers”. “There was just an urgency about me. I was a really headstrong little girl, and thank fuck, I’m really grateful for that. Because, suddenly everyone saw me completely differently. I was 19, thinking, ‘What’s changed? I’m exactly the same person, I just can’t walk.’ So when the BBC called and said, ‘Do you want to go on this expedition?’, I said, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ Obviously I couldn’t. I thought it was going to be such groundbreaking TV, change the way people viewed disability. And it didn’t really do that. I think it educated a few people, but, if I’m honest, it veered into inspiration porn. And my representation of myself was not what I wanted. I got amoebic dysentery. I was flown home.”
It was the beginning of a vexed journey on TV. She was building a body of work: the BBC reality show Britain’s Missing Top Model (in which eight women with disabilities competed to win a prize fashion magazine shoot); Licence to Kill, a BBC documentary about young drivers and road accidents (which won best current affairs film at the Royal Television Society awards in 2013). “But there was no opportunity for me to be on telly. I was always told, ‘Why you? Why would you be the person to tell this story? If it’s about disability, you can do it.’” I tell her about Dan Hodges, the journalist who lost the sight in one eye when he tried to stop a brawl in a bar in the 90s. He kept getting bumped off debate programmes, and a TV producer friend told him it was because of his “irrelevant left eye”. If the story was about knife crime, he would be relevant. If it was about anything else, what was his irrelevant eye doing on the panel? Morgan says she has had the same experience: the go-to for a disability documentary – she also made one about the experience of being disabled in Ghana – but “there were other things I wanted to talk about”.
With all that gatekeeping, it was hard not to imbibe the message that the realities of disability have to stay hidden, even when the disability is the subject: “Now, I’m fine – you can show me being carried, you can show me falling, you can show my wheelchair, you can show that I have a support worker. But at the beginning, I wouldn’t show any of that. I had a real chip on my shoulder about where my disability met my life.”
There was more driving this than the subtle but rigid anti-inclusivity values of the media: “You’re always dealing with a stereotype. There’s the superhuman trope and the vulnerable trope – the benefit scrounger, someone who takes, doesn’t offer anything to society because they’re so incapable. And if you’re trying to be the superhuman, you don’t want to look as if you’re leaning on anyone, because people will think, which one are you? It’s really hard to embody both. But the gap between the tropes is where we want to live.”
In 2012, the Paralympics came to town, which in one way turbo-charged the superhero shtick – how could it not? – but in another way upturned it. The Paralympics were not a bolt-on to the Olympics; they were excellent in their own right, and seemed to better embody the spirit of the whole event. “I was 10 years paralysed, and I had never in my life seen representation like that. I had to get involved.” She called up the BBC and begged for a job, and they found her something – sitting in the Olympic Park in Stratford, holding up cards with the weather on them. She didn’t even get to say anything, she says, except, “It’s gonna be sunny.”
It’s an open question as to how much lasting impact the 2012 Games had on diversity and representation; things have certainly shifted in the media over the past decade. By 2018, Morgan was fronting a home improvement show on Channel 4, which, even though it lasted only one season, at least meant she was no longer boxed in. But that could also partly be down to social media. Morgan didn’t take to it immediately, but when she did (joining Twitter in 2011 and Instagram, where she’s more active, in 2012), she found it “incredible. The gatekeepers have gone, and disabled people can just show themselves. If I’d been paralysed now, I’d be very different. I wouldn’t have had to go on television to prove myself. I think I would have just moved into the world in a much easier way. I would have been able to Google or Instagram paraplegic women and seen the shit that they do.”
By the time of the 2016 Rio Paralympics, Morgan was the natural choice to front Channel 4’s coverage (jointly with JJ Chalmers), and this was when the barriers properly came down. “After that, Channel 4 were very much, ‘What do you want to do? What are you interested in?’ I said, ‘I want to do all of these things,’ and to their credit, they let me.” Now, when she makes a documentary about disability, it’s because she’s chosen to, not because she had to somehow prove her relevance.
Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/Rex/Shutterstock
That’s how Trapped, Disabled & Abused came about in 2022: “I wanted people to understand that I might be on telly as a wheelchair user, but I’m a woman, and a physically disabled one, and we’re twice as likely to be victims of domestic abuse. And I am one of those statistics.” When Covid hit, she had been working on a travel show where she drove to Japan for the 2020 Olympics, which, of course, was cancelled. “I’d just lost my job. When lockdown started, my boyfriend at the time literally left that day. I’d just lost everything. I was shielding.”
Covid was terrifying, because nobody knew how it interacted with spinal injury. “I’m actually not bad at being stuck in a house; I’m used to being othered. I’ve done bed rest before [She had to lie on her front for three years in her 20s, after she got a splinter in her bum cheek and didn’t feel it, so it got infected]. But I didn’t know what would happen if I got Covid, because I’m paralysed from the chest down, so I already can’t breathe to full capacity.”
It was a hair-raising time full of unknowns and hand sanitiser, “the lowest I’ve ever been”. She filled the days writing a memoir, Driving Forwards. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I thought, ‘If you’re going to do this, do it honestly.’ I confessed to so many of the things that I had not confessed to in my real life. I kind of came out in my book: I explained the extent of my paralysis and how it impacted my sex life. I’d never talked honestly about that to any man. I was always too scared they were going to leave me.” The book is a searing read throughout, but what she says about sex is written very neutrally, and is absolutely heartbreaking. “Unable to feel two-thirds of myself,” she writes, “no matter how hard I have tried, the act of sex has still not been adapted satisfactorily enough to fully meet my needs … I can’t help but ask myself if it is ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’, and when that applies to sex I would say the answer for me is an undeniable no.”
Looking back, she says, “I had a string of really bad relationships. That has been probably the most challenging part of all of it, dealing with relationships with men. I never knew how to navigate it. I never had the skills. I would lie to my partners; I would try to make myself as able as possible. Which was so at odds with what I was doing in the outside world, where I was getting more and more confident with my disability, owning it, reclaiming it. No wonder my relationships failed, because I just wasn’t being authentic.”
It’s like a feat of engineering, the way Morgan uses adversity as rocket fuel – she has emerged from the pandemic having published a book, established herself as a regular panellist on Loose Women, and discovered a new zeal for campaigning and activism. She won’t pass by an injustice to her personally without mining it for ways to improve lives for wheelchair users in general.
So far, 125 MPs from across all parties have signed Disability UK’s Rights on flights petition. Some of those signatories were staked out by Morgan during an MP drop-in at Portcullis House. “We had the father of the house come in; I’m new to all of this, but apparently that’s good. And then the disability minister came in. I’ve never looked into the eyes of a disability minister before, in 20 years of being disabled. And I thought, ‘What can we do with you?’”
Last month she took on another issue after someone broke into her car and stole her blue badge. “It’s been extremely disabling for me,” she says. “I haven’t been able to use my car since. I think it goes to show how little people respect disabled parking. We shouldn’t be dependent on a card, it should be done online.”
But, beyond any of her achievements, Morgan has a new attitude. “I had that hot girl summer when I was 18, then lived another 19 years paralysed – this is going to be my 20th year. I am back there, about to live my second hot girl summer. I’m feeling it again. Like I’ve got my shit together.”
Driving Forwards by Sophie Morgan (Little Brown , £9.99) is out now. To support the Guardian, order your copy for £9.29 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
