Rosie Jones has criticised the token representation of disabled people on screen.

Speaking at the launch of her forthcoming Channel 4 sitcom Pushers today, the comedian said so many shows paid only lip service to making sure disability is portrayed on screen.

She said: ‘I have watched too many TV shows that have one disabled person, and you can tell that the writer or creator has gone, "Oh, we’ll write one disabled character. We will give all the disabled story to them, their personality will be ‘disabled’. Well done us, move on". And that is not the world we live in. 

’24 per cent of the UK is disabled [according to the Department for Work and Pensions’ Family Resources Survey]. We live among disabled people everywhere.’

Her new comedy – in which she plays a woman with cerebral palsy who gets involved in drug-dealing to make ends meet when her benefits are cut – features several characters who are disabled, all recruited to the criminal world as they are effectively invisible to the rest of society. 

’In terms of characters, we both got really excited about writing the series with a predominantly disabled cast because one you have three, four, five characters with disability, they're no longer "the disabled one",’ Jones said.

‘I really hope that you watch 10 or 20 seconds of the show and forget that any of them are disabled, because it's not about that. It's about how complicated, how three-dimensional they are as people.’

She added that she was also keen to have disabled people behind the camera, too, adding: ‘We fundamentally believe that it's a better show because of it.

‘Disabled people are so under-represented in every line of employment you need to disabled people in order to create a full, rich work environment.’

Jones said Pushers – which has gone to series following a 15-minute Blap called Disability Benefits she made for the broadcaster in 2022 – ‘is first and foremost a comedy’ and that she hoped ‘people watch it as a good giggle and enjoy themselves’.

But she also hoped viewers would get a ‘feeling of what it is to be disabled and working-class in the UK right now, and what a fucking shitshow it is; and how we need the government to change; how we need it to be a better and more welcoming and more inclusive country for disabled people. That’d be good…’

Her comments received a round of applause from the cast, crew and journalists gathered in a Central London hotel for the screening.

Sticking to the political theme Jones added: ‘It’s quite funny that we came up with the idea, did the Blap, and wrote the series under a Tory  government.

‘And then we had the election right before we started filming and Labour came in. It won't surprise any of you, but I'm a Labour voter, So personally, I was like, "Yay", but for the sitcom, we were like, "Shit, the sitcom doesn't come out till June 2025 by then, a year into a Labour government, it will be glorious for Diablos people we’ll be living in a utopia. 

‘It has not worked out that way.’

‘Unfortunately, I think we need a show that highlights what it's like to be disabled more than ever.’

Of what she hopes to convey about living as a disabled woman, the comic said: ‘The fact that even now, every day, I get patronised, I get underestimated. Going out every day into a world that isn't set up for people like you, is so isolating and so damaging

‘Luckily I was brought up in a lovely environment, great parents… but thinking about [my character] Emily, growing up in a world in which she didn't have those people that she could rely on. She didn't have the confidence the intelligence that energy to go "fuck you"  and move to London and be an comedian. 

‘She's invisible and when we meet her at the start of the series, she's finally got that opportunity to be someone. And she takes it -  even though it’s very illegal.’

Jones also joked: ‘I’d do quite well in jail. I would enjoy it!’

And she said she was ‘excited’ by the central relationship in the show, ‘a dynamic that certainly I've never seen before between a heterosexual, non-disabled man and a disabled gay woman,’ she explained. ‘So there’s absolutely no ‘will-the-won’t they’.

‘Until season five when we run out of ideas!’ added co-writer Peter Fellows

• Pushers starts on Channel 4 at 10pm on Thursday June 19