Last night I watched quite an interesting BBC 3 documentary about freak shows in the US, in which ”actor and presenter Adam Pearson explores the world of freak shows and meets people who use their medical conditions to educate, entertain and make money.” Far be it for me to deny anyone a chance to make a bit of cash, but I found the programme extremely troubling. The fact that such shows, in which essentially disabled people put their bodies on display for all to gawp at, says a lot about how people with disabilities are still perceived. Judging by this program, things have not come on much since the nineteenth century. Of course, you could argue, as Pearson does, that it is a matter of taking control and ownership of one’s body; these people do what they do because they are proud of who they are. Yet it struck me that you could also liken it to selling your body, and surely there are better ways to make money than parading around as a freak. I’m no stranger to the odd bit of exhibitionism: Spastic Ballet attests to that; but as I wrote here, spastic ballet was supposed to be ironic. It was also a one-off, and not for money. What the people in this program were doing was completely different, and I must say it left a bad taste in my mouth. Playing with perceptions of disability is one thing; deliberately conforming to those perceptions in order to make money is quite another, and does the rest of us a disservice,