There have only been a handful of advertisements throughout my life that have really tugged at my heart strings. One of these is an advertisement for Scope, a non-profit charity in the UK that provides service for those with disabilities. The ad itself is titled “Just Another Radiohead Fan” and focuses on two individuals inside a metro station as they wait for their train. One of the individuals is a wheelchair-bound man with cerebral palsy who is singing to himself as he listens to music, and the other is a girl who is watching the man from afar. The girl stares at him with a concerned look on her face in a way that is reminiscent of how many people react when they see someone in public who is mentally handicapped, not really knowing whether to feel sorry or not for them. However, the man seems pretty content and unbothered by the fact that he is alone. What he is singing is the opening segment of the song, “Paranoid Android”, by the band Radiohead. And he gets to the song’s dramatic chorus, a caption appears below telling the audience to “relax”, stating that he is “just another Radiohead fan”. The ad then concludes with the statement “See the person, not the disability”.
(The original ad aired on television back in 2005, but you wish to watch it yourself there is a reupload of the video on YouTube, which can be found below. The image above is a screenshot that I made from said reupload.)
The ad doesn’t just speak to me because I too am a fan of Radiohead, but because it takes me back to when I was in 8th grade. At the time, I was friends with a few classmates that had autism. I never saw them as autistic people, but as people that just happened to have autism. They had their own interests and hobbies that they liked, and I would conversate with them just like I would with anyone else. Whenever we hung out, I noticed that other people would try to talk to them as well. Only, these people weren’t trying to be friendly, they just wanted to get a reaction out of them so they could laugh at them with their friends. Unlike me, these people didn’t see my friends as the persons that they were, they saw them as a prospect of entertainment on the basis of their disability. In their eyes, the disabled were characterized purely by their disability and nothing else.
It is because of these experiences that I relate to the advertisement’s message.