Only Human: Make Me Normal review
Written on 11th Feb 2022 by Alex Lowery
Only Human was a series that aired with three seasons from 2005-2007 on Channel 4. It focussed on people with different issues in different locations every episode. The first episode was focused on a school for autistic children in London. The documentary was called ‘Make me normal’. You can see the full documentary at the end of the article. Warning: the documentary does have swearing.
I’ve watched this documentary several times and I have a love/hate relationship with it. I watched it for the first time in about 2008 or 2009 when I was 14/15 years old. At that time I really enjoyed it for the simple reason that I’ve always liked seeing programs that focus on other autistics and see how it affects them. Looking at it now: I can still watch it and be entertained. I do have a level of nostalgia for it and I even still rewatch it sometimes. However, I do think it’s absolutely terrible to use as a way to raise understanding of autism.
Right from the start of the introduction, you can tell the program is very negative and is there to use autistics as a tool for entertainment. It features an autistic girl talking about how they’re all very strange and the audience may not like them. She says stuff like, “We want to live in the real world and not the autistic world but it’s hard”. The documentary also focuses a lot on extreme autistic behaviors and it almost felt it was encouraging the general public to be afraid of those with autism, instead of learning to accept it.
When one of the students was feeling really upset the headteacher said “You don’t understand this because you have autism” which I personally don’t think is the best thing to tell someone. The kids felt bad enough about themselves already. All the children the program focussed on seemed to be very ashamed of the fact that they were autistic and neither the teachers nor the documentary staff did much to make them feel less ashamed. And I’m sure that there must have been some kids at the school that weren’t ashamed of it but they didn’t focus on them. Even the title “Make me Normal” is extremely negative.
I did make my own short documentary when I was at College. I followed the lives of autistic students and I made sure to take a less negative approach than the Make me Normal program. You can see that documentary below and I hope in the future I can maybe make better ones. You can see what I made below.
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