 This week, Channel 4's ground-breaking new drama, Cast Offs, hits the screens. The story of six disabled people who are sent to a desert island to fend for themselves for 90 days for a reality TV show, it’s a darkly comic take on disability, television, prejudice, love and life. Find out more about the show with actor Tim Gebbels.
Gebbels plays Tom. Tom is an aspiring actor, and is blind. It might not sound too much of a stretch for Tim, a blind actor, to play Tom, a blind actor. But Gebbels’ dry, understated performance is a highlight in a compelling drama. Here, he explains a little more about the project, reveals why he thinks it’s important as well as entertaining, and discusses what it’s like to be watched in the bath by a whole film crew.
What’s the concept of Cast Offs?
Essentially it’s like a reality TV show with six disabled people on an island for 100 days, making out and having fights and getting into trouble and falling out and cooking tea and procuring food. Except it isn’t quite like that. It is a mock documentary, if you like, so it’s pretend reality TV, in actual fact we’re all actors and it is a drama.
You play Tom. What’s his story?
Tom is blind, because I am. Or the other way around! He wants to be an actor, so that’s where he’s going, but I think he’s probably unemployed. He shares a flat with his mate Pete. He’s a bit of a loner in some ways, he’s quite acerbic and quite cynical, so maybe he doesn’t fit in all the time with the other cast offs. He tries to. He’s perhaps someone who doesn’t understand himself as much as he could. He’s still finding out things about himself as he’s on the island.
What was it that attracted you to the script?
What attracted me to the script was first of all that it’s a job! Actors like working. It’s excellent writing, it’s clearly a show that’s going to help audiences and put disabled characters on screen. If audiences watch that and wind up with a better understanding, and are also entertained at the same time, then it will have been a good thing to do.
Where did filming take place, and how long did the shoot last?
The shoot lasted about five weeks for me, spread out and split up into little chunks. Every character has their own episode, so there’s an episode in which Tom features strongly. In that one, there’s scenes of him on the island with the other five characters, but there’s also his back story, so before he’s gone to the island, in his flat, when he’s nicking his flatmate’s girlfriend and things like that. All those interiors were shot in Nottingham in February, over about a week, and then we went off to the island for two two-week blocks. And the island filming was split up – there was one location in Derbyshire, and one in Holkam Bay in Norfolk.
How did you all get on as a cast?
Fantastically, I think. There was a range of experience. I learnt a lot from working with some of the others. I don’t know if they learnt anything from working with me – perhaps never to work with me again.
One of the first rules of acting is never work with animals. How did you get on with the pigs and chickens?
I didn’t have much to do with them. It wasn’t Tom’s job to look after the pigs, so I was mercifully spared that. Mat Fraser, who plays Will, had a lot to do with the pigs. There was one night, when he was recording all his scenes, when we could just hear lots of screams echoing across the Derbyshire countryside. And the pigs were making quite a lot of noise as well.
Were there any particular practical difficulties in filming the series, bearing in mind the various disabilities of the cast?
I suppose I can only really talk for myself. I had my access worker there all the time, who’s like a personal assistant, someone who’s there, who’s paid just to help me around the set, get food at meal breaks, help me find the toilet, that sort of thing. And look after Alice, my guide dog, when I’m off working. That made a huge difference. Before I’d done a lot of telly, when I started being an actor ten years ago, I used to worry a lot about being blind. Would it matter if I didn’t know where the camera was, and what size shots they were doing and things like that.
 I’ve kind of got over that now. I worked for a director called Matthew Evans once, on an episode of William and Mary, and he said “Look, shut up, do your acting, if I’m not getting my shots I’ll tell you.” So I think I’m less bothered about the hyper-technical aspects of what I look like and whether I’m exactly on my mark and if I should be looking two inches to the left. There’s no point in my stressing about not being able to do eye-lines, because blind people can’t anyway, so why would I ever be playing a character who would do that? If you’re blind, your facial language and body language is different, and that’s the reality which gets shot. If the director doesn’t want to shoot that, then they don’t want reality.
Did you have reservations about going into acting because of your blindness?
I knew it would be difficult. I knew there wouldn’t be the same choice of parts, but that didn’t stop me. It kind of cuts both ways, because yes, there are far fewer jobs around, but when I started acting in the late 90s, it was getting better, and still is getting better. Although there are fewer jobs, when a show decides it wants a blind male between 30 and 50, actually the competition’s a lot less. It’s the same five of us at every audition.
And how’s it going? Is there enough work out there?
I’ve been very lucky. In the ten years that I’ve been doing it, the phone has always rung. I just about make a living doing it, which is not a bad achievement. I’ve been very lucky. I suppose one day it’ll dry up, but it hasn’t yet. I’ve been incredibly fortunate.
How would you cope with being cast away on a deserted island in real life?
Not terribly well, really. I’d struggle a bit. I’m not desperately impractical, but building shelters and things like that, or fishing or whatever I’d need to do, would be a bit of a struggle. I’d get thinner.
What useful skills would you bring to a group in that situation?
Obviously I’d be a wise and wonderful person who could provide leadership and groundedness for everyone else. Apart from that, I’d be not a lot of use, I don’t think. I can cook a bit. I know how to build a fire. I learned how to do that at Cubs. But that’s kind of it.
Who would you choose to be marooned with?
I’d take my girlfriend. She’s very practical, she could build bits and do all the cooking.
What home comforts do you think you’d miss the most?
I’m a bit of a bath fiend. I’ve just moved into a new flat, and the bath’s miniscule. I’m really cross about it. So much so, that I’m considering having a bigger one put in. I’m a bit sybaritic about baths. What else? Crisp white wine, fresh black coffee, those would be the top ones.
Now I think about it, there’s quite a lengthy scene in Cast Offs of you in the bath, isn’t there?
There is, yes. That was murder, to be honest. I had trunks on, I said I wasn’t going to do it totally naked. I’m a bit too inhibited for that. So they put loads of bubble bath in to cover up the trunks. Really, not just normal loads, but like a whole bottle or something. I constantly had men coming in and sticking their hands in the bath and thrashing about to make it all froth up. And we overran, it was the last scene of the day, and I had about 20 minutes to get some of this soap off and get changed and get my train. It was a bit of a struggle. I had to get the wardrobe lady to come in and pour water over me to try and rinse me off.
Did they have to keep topping up the bath with hot water?
There wasn’t any – it had all gone cold. So I had to look very warm and relaxed, and actually I was rather cold. But I’m used to that. I once did a shoot in a swimming pool where I had to be fully clothed, in a suit, in a pool, for two hours. At the end of that, I thought I was getting hypothermia.
Tom is good with a shotgun. Apparently you’re not bad either, is that true?
I was probably lying about that, I think my abilities are slightly more modest than Tom’s actually. But it is something I do as a pastime. I go and do that every week, I’m not bad over ten metres, I’m all right.
How does it work?
You have what effectively looks like a sight on the top of the rifle, but actually the target’s illuminated, and it’s lightest in the centre, getting progressively darker as it goes out. Basically you’ve got a photo-electric cell in the sight that converts light into sound, so when it’s pointing at the centre of the target it’s emitting a really high pitch, and that pitch drops as the aim goes off the centre.
Do you think that the way disabled people are generally portrayed on TV is unhelpful?
It’s getting better. To start with, our beef was that if you had a disabled character, first of all it used to be quite stereotyped – a victim or a super-crip – and generally, no, always, the character would be played by a non-disabled actor, which is not on. It’s the equivalent of blacking up, basically. But these days, I think television makers are starting to understand that if they’ve got a blind character, or a deaf character, or a character in a wheelchair, they’ve really got to find an actor with that impairment. It’s starting to happen, but as recently as 2007 the BBC did an episode of Robin Hood, and they used a sighted actor for a blind character, which was pretty outrageous. But generally, television makers are getting better about that.
Is there a danger, with a series like this, that we’re just lumping disabled people together, and taking a whole raft of issues and looking at them as one?
It’s a good question, because there are different issues if you’re a wheelchair user than if you’re blind, or if you’re deaf rather than someone who’s Thalidomide-affected. But I don’t really have a problem with that, because why discrimination happens is because people aren’t habituated. People react negatively when they see a disabled person on the street or in a shop or whatever, because they’re just not used to seeing it, and so they panic in whatever way. Now, if people are going to watch disabled characters doing their thing, just being regular guys on screen, if that gets them more habituated or more relaxed about seeing someone disabled next time they go out of the front door, then that’s a good thing.
 Cast Offs is funny and irreverent and sad and exciting. Is it also important?
I think so. I think because it is going to have a role in showing us as disabled characters doing what everyone else does – making out, having fights, cooking food, talking, joking, just doing what, in many ways, any other six people would be doing on an island. I think it’s going to show, for many people, the similarities between disabled people and everyone else, rather than the differences, which aren’t really there anyway.
In the work that you’ve done as an actor, where does this sit in terms of how proud you are of it?
Oh, I’m very proud of it. It’s been a very great help to me. It’s certainly the biggest telly I’ve done. I love making telly, I love the whole process of filming drama. I learnt a lot doing it. It’s a decent thing to be seen in, and I hope and think it will make a splash.
|
An ATV Network News production for ATV Network Limited