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BBC Radio 4 In Touch |
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Listen to this programmeFactsheet of this programmeTranscript of this programme Print this page FactsheetBRUSSELS UPDATE Guest: Peter Barker , Guide Dogs for the Blind Association. News that a deputation of visually impaired people went to Brussels last week, to keep up the pressure to ensure that new European guidelines about aviation prevent a repeat of the incident where a party of blind people were removed from a Ryanair plane, because the quota of disabled people flying had been exceeded. The trip was organised by the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and Peter Barker of GDBA told In Touch this morning that the trip was very successful, with both parties remaining confident of a successful outcome. In Touch will be bringing you a full report on next week's programme. LYNN MANNING Lynn Manning is an award winning playwright, poet, actor, Paralympic Silver Medallist and former Blind Judo Champion of the World. He accomplished all of this after being shot and blinded in a Hollywood bar at age 23. He joins Peter White in the studio today to discuss 'Weights' the play he has written which is now touring in Britain. Information on the Play In the USA , Weights won three NAACP Theater Awards, including one for Best Actor. Since its debut in 2001, it has been performed all over the US as well as internationally: in locations such as Los Angeles , New York , Washington , D.C. , Canada , and Croatia . It now embarks on a National Tour of the UK and is being presented by the first British blind theatre company Extant. Weights is a powerful performance that utilises prose, poetry and live music accompaniment to tell the real-life story of Lynn Manning. A passionate and inspiring one-man show, Weights is about a man who has overcome tremendous obstacles in life. Lynn grew up as an impoverished child in the foster care system of South Central Los Angeles, the son of an abusive father and alcoholic mother. At the age of 23 he was shot in a senseless bar fight, losing his sight completely. Remaining Dates of Performances Oval House Theatre, 52-54 Kennington Oval, London . SE11 5SW Tues 29th Nov - Sat 3rd Dec Tues 6th Dec - Sat 10th Dec 7:45pm Box Office: 020 7582 7680 £12 / £6 conc www.ovalhouse.com BSL 1st & 3rd Dec. Post show Q&A with Lynn Manning 3rd & 6th Dec. Croydon Clocktower, Katherine Street , Surrey . CR9 1ET Mon 12th Dec 8:00pm Box Office: 020 8253 1030 £10 / £6conc. www.croydon.gov.uk/clocktower If you would like further information about the shows or the companies involved please contact... Shaun Dawson , Turtle Key Arts on 020 8964 5060 shaun@turtlekeyarts.org.uk For access information to venues visit: http://www.extant.org.uk/ ahttp://www.lynnmanning.com/ BLIND GARDENER OF THE YEAR Guests: John Hodgson , Alex Rigby , and Edwina Millis who are some of the winners. Lucy Murrell from Thrive. Mani Djazmi reports on the Blind Gardener of the Year 2005 competition. The skills and achievements of some of the UK 's most creative and talented gardeners have been celebrated by Thrive, the national therapeutic horticulture charity, and Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) in the Blind Gardener of the Year competition. The winners of the national competition have been selected by a prestigious panel of judges, including gardener and presenter Monty Don . Prizes in three categories - Young Gardener, New to Gardening and Old Hand - were presented at a special awards ceremony in London on 27 October 2005 . Getting on with Gardening Project and Contacting Thrive The competition is part of the Getting on with Gardening project, a partnership between Thrive and RNIB, supported by the Big Lottery Fund, to develop a national service to blind or partially sighted gardeners. Getting on with Gardening includes roadshows, publications, residential courses and a National Blind Gardeners Club to be launched next year. For further information on any aspect of the Getting on with Gardening project: - including ideas, techniques and advice on gardening if you are blind or partially sighted. Contact Lucy Morrell at Thrive The Geoffrey Udall Centre Beech Hill Reading RG7 2AT Tel: 0118 988 5688 Email: bgoty@thrive.org.uk www.thrive.org.uk or call the RNIB Helpline on 0845 766 9999 or www.rnib.org.uk This Year's Winners Young Gardener 1= Alex Rigby - win a Halls glasshouse, a set of Peta Easi-grip hand tools, £25 Suttons Seeds voucher and St Dunstan's trophy 1=Skillpower Group, Exhall Grange School win a Halls glasshouse, a set of Peta Easi-grip hand tools, and £25 Suttons Seeds voucher New to Gardening 1 John Hodgson wins Halls glasshouse, set of Peta Easi-grip hand tools and St Dunstan's trophy 2 Kay Watts wins cold frame, raised bed and compost tidy tray from Suttons Seeds 3 Mr P Wright wins £50 voucher from Suttons Seeds Old Hand 1 Harry Wardle wins Halls glasshouse, set of Peta Easi-grip hand tools and St Dunstan's trophy 2 Eric Crate wins £100 from St Dunstan's 3 Nina Phillips wins £50 voucher from Suttons Seeds 4= Valerie Parkinson wins £25 from St Dunstan's 4= George Wilcockson wins £25 from St Dunstan's 4= Edwina Mills wins £25 from St Dunstan's The BBC is not responsible for external websites General contacts Back to top TranscriptTX: 29.11.05 2040-2100 PRESENTER: PETER WHITE PRODUCER: CHERYL GABRIEL WHITE Good evening. Tonight, my main studio guest is a man who is currently pursuing at least four careers, most of them he thinks given impetus by his blindness, which is a story in itself - the result of a shooting in a Hollywood bar when he was 23. We'll be meeting Lynn Manning in a moment. Also tonight, Mani Djazmi meets the Blind Gardeners of the Year, that is if any of them can get a finger into the soil at these very low temperatures. CLIP It's very important to look after gardens because if you don't look after your garden it'll be all rotten and yucky and smell horrible. WHITE We'll be hearing more from those junior gardeners as well later on in the programme. Before all that though news that a deputation of visually impaired people went to Brussels last week to keep up the pressure to ensure that new European gu id elines about aviation prevent a recurrence of the inc id ent where a party of blind people were removed from a Ryanair plane, because the quota of disabled people flying had been exceeded. Well the trip was organised by the Gu id e Dogs for the Blind Association and Peter Barker, of GDBA, told us this morning that the trip was very successful and that talks had taken place, which he describes as "useful" and "productive". He went on to say that they've engaged in serious discussions with Ryanair and they're conf id ent of a successful outcome. Well we'll be bringing you a full report on next week's programme, by which time we hope we'll be able to confirm that an agreement between the association and Ryanair has indeed been reached - we'll see. But first my guest. American - Lynn Manning - actor, playwright, world class athlete - his sport is judo - and currently performing in Britain his one man show based on his life. He's performing with Extant, that's the blind theatre company, and there are still performances due to take place in Croydon, London and Coventry - news of the date on our action line. And quite a life it's been. Lynn , welcome to the programme. MANNING Thank you for having me Peter. WHITE I've got to ask you first, because I can't just drop a remark like I d id into the headlines and not follow it up, your blindness - the result of a shooting in a Hollywood bar, just tell us what briefly - what happened. MANNING At the age of 23 I went out to my favourite hang out in Hollywood to do some celebrating over a promotion I got and the guy, I guess, thought I was having too much fun, took a disliking to me, picked a fight, I body slammed him, threw him out of the place and he came back a half hour later with a gun. WHITE So it was totally he was premeditated basically. The extraordinary thing I gather is that blindness is something you'd had a fear or - a recurrent fear of. MANNING Yes I was visual artist all my life, from earliest childhood I always wanted to be a painter but I was also used to the things most precious to me being taken away from me. My life in south central Los Angeles that I talk about in this show sort of prepared for expectation that blindness might come along and rob me of my dream of being a painter. So I sort of prepared for that. WHITE And that's the extraordinary thing because when you - after the shooting - when you d id n't know quite what had happened to you, in the one man show that you do there's a description of what you were seeing and what you were thinking. Let's just hear a little bit of that. CLIP - WEIGHTS I sort of become aware that something's terribly wrong. There's this nebulous fog of colour swirling before my eyes. Whenever someone enters the room a reddish silhouette appears am id st the fog. As more people enter more silhouettes appear. No matter what the people in the room are doing these silhouettes stand stark still. If I lie back in bed they remain before my eyes, if I squeeze my eyes shut the apparitions are still visible. It's not until the last person leaves the room that they slowly dissolve into the fog. I'm both fascinated and terrified by these visions but I don't tell a soul about them. After the surgery comes the medicine. Alone in my hospital room and cruising on painkillers I discover that I can manipulate the colours in my mental canvas. I quickly progress from childlike finger paintings and primary colours to near photographic renderings of places and faces. It's a pleasurable distraction but is this blindness or madness? WHITE So the reference for madness is the fact that you wondered, in a way, whether this was really blindness or whether you were imagining it, this was this sort of fantasy that you'd created in a way. MANNING Yeah I was afra id I might be a hysterical blind and that terrified me more than blindness itself.. I figured I could handle blindness, I just couldn't handle madness. WHITE Which rather puzzled the doctors I think who expected you to be terrified at the prospect. MANNING Yes, probably the doctor and everyone else in my circle. WHITE I mean the point is you've gone on to do an enormous range of things - I mentioned at the beginning - writing, you're a poet, you're doing this one man show. Do you think you would have done - I mean all these things, because in a way your blindness has given impetus to that kind of thing? MANNING I couldn't imagine that I would be acting or performing and particularly the writing I was into where it would have led me I don't think it might have led me to playwriting because that came out of the acting. And acting I had suffered terrible stage fright when I was a young person coming up but I think my fear of the people looking at me isn't so difficult to overcome when you can't see them doing that. So I think it helped me in some degree to get over the stage fright. WHITE Fear is something that seems to play quite a big part in your psyche, your awareness, because you say that the way you were viewed when you went blind totally changed. MANNING Yes certainly the way people behaved around me was totally different. When I was a young man - I was a young black man in America means a lot of things to a lot people. Most people showed fear, were afra id of me on the street and strangers that d id n't know and white folks in particular and older white women in particular as well. But once I lost my sight I became I guess a sympathetic presence - folks would talk to me that never would have spent a moment with me prior to that. WHITE Which is quite complex isn't it emotionally because in a way you'd be - you'd want people to be sympathetic to you rather than frightened of you but in another way you probably felt that was slightly patronising as well. MANNING Exactly. And people who wanted to assist me at times when they probably needed more assistance themselves. I had a woman once, I was on a bus at a 11 o'clock at night, I was about to get off the bus behind her and she was getting off the bus, it was dark, it's Hollywood , it's dangerous for anybody. She says: "What are doing out this time of night?" She turns to me a six foot two black man, just because I have a white cane. WHITE We're also joined by Mani Djazmi who's going to bring us a feature in a moment. But Mani you drew our attention to Lynn , d id n't you, because you met in Croatia . DJAZMI That's right it was a Festival of Blind Theatre and I remember the first time I found out about how Lynn had lost his sight was in the interview that I d id with him and it left me completely gob smacked, which obviously is nothing compared to how you must have felt Lynn when it happened to you. But I wonder on reflection after the surgery how much anger d id you experience at the complete futility of the way in which you lost your sight? MANNING Well I d id n't experience a whole lot of anger about that because I sort of having adopted this existential acceptance of inevitability of losing those things precious to me, it was just another one of those things. The title of the piece "Weights" indicates that, it was just another weight to be tossed as id e or borne along life's journey. WHITE Lynn Manning is our guest, we'll take a quick break because Mani Djazmi has done a feature on something - a complete contradiction in a way from what we're talking about. But we'll find out whether it has any resonance for Lynn in a moment. The current climate of plummeting temperatures, rain and snow is hardly likely to make anyone feel much like venturing into the garden. But for those who regard the garden as something more than just a place to hold barbecues in the summer and as a step too far in the winter venturing out is exactly what's required. The winners of the inaugural Blind Gardener of the Year Award certainly fall into the second category, they're just a few of the million or so blind and partially sighted people who enjoy gardening and they're proof, if proof were needed, that gardening like most things is possible without sight. We cast our reporter Mani into the great outdoors to meet some of the winners. DJAZMI May 6th 2004 . Down in Cornwall the cottage newly acquired by John and Lorna Hodgson was forcing John into a decision. JOHN HODGSON I walked out of the kitchen door into the front garden and I was absolutely horrified - I have never seen such a large front garden in my life before and it belonged to me. Anyway I dec id ed to have a look around the back and I came round the back and sure enough there was the terrace and there were two fishponds and there was a greenhouse and I sa id : "Good grief there's a summer house as well." And then I saw this huge lawn and not only was it an enormous lawn but there was a very, very large formal flower bed to the left and one in front of me and one to my right. And I was absolutely thunder struck. I mean believe me I had never gardened in my life, if I couldn't sweep it or mow it or paint it then I wasn't interested in it. But here I was faced with almost an acre of garden and I had to do something about it. And so I became a gardener. We're now passing a formal border on the left, which is a very lovely border but ... DJAZMI John won the newcomer category in the first ever Blind Gardener of the Year Awards, organised by the therapeutic gardening charity Thrive and the RNIB. And no wonder. JOHN HODGSON ... the first year, which was last summer, we had the most wonderful show of wild grasses and then cornflowers and corn cockles, ox id e daisies, corn marigolds, clovers - we had just over 60 different kinds of wildflower growing. We put up lots of nest boxes for the birds and we have increased the bird population of the garden by a hundred fold. A fox lives in the corner of the garden, we've got some voles, we've got some other little field mice living around here. There's a tremendous feeling that not only do we live here but we've actually created something here. DJAZMI Someone who's slightly more experienced at gardening than John is 10-year-old Alex Rigby. Now Alex has been a member of his school's gardening club come rain, shine or in today's case lots and lots of wind for the last three years. You don't mind coming out in the cold wind and rain? RIGBY No I don't mind. This is gardening - we grow carrots, we grow parsnips, beetroot and onions. It's very important to look after gardens because if you don't look after your garden it'll be all rotten and yucky and smell horrible. DJAZMI Wise words indeed. The trouble is, as Lucy Morrell from Thrive has discovered there are lots of people who once they lose their sight think gardening is beyond them. She regularly goes out on road shows and is spreading the gospel but meets with a lot of despondency. MORRELL Some people do think that and certainly I think some sighted people think that blind people are not able to garden. But by showing people and letting them actually try the techniques at the road shows we hope that they feel conf id ent enough to then take those techniques home and use them in their own garden. DJAZMI And what better role models to inspire than the Blind Gardeners of the Year. Edwina Mills who won the old hands category has been gardening for over 50 years and even though most of her sight has gone colour still plays a central role in her plans. MILLS You think of the different sections in your garden like rooms in a house. And you can create a different colour scheme each year in that particular room. This year I dec id ed to do the theme of purple and orange together. So I d id lots of coloured pots - purples, mauves, misted yellows, with purple and yellow in - and it gives me such pleasure to create that colour. At one time I could see all the flowers so I know all the flowers names and what sort of colours I'm putting together and that way I'm still creating a true picture of what I want. DJAZMI But as useful as the mind's eye is in animating a visually impaired gardener's plans sooner or later everyone has to get their hands dirty. Of course there are some issues to overcome but as John Hodgson explains there's always more than one way to plant a seed. JOHN HODGSON I could initially as a VIP plant a row of seeds and finish up with a straight row of seeds. Now I find it very difficult to put anything in a straight line but I do find that some of the seed makers now produce seeds in long strips of narrow paper like sticking plaster, a cross between sticking plaster and toilet paper, with seeds planted every so many centimetres and I can peg one end to the ground and walk away and I won't necessarily have them in the right place but at least I'll have them in a straight line. MILLS The sound of water is lovely. The peace of going round touching the flowers, smelling the perfumes of some of the roses especially, it's quite wonderful really. And I feel close to God in a way. DJAZMI The last word though must go to 10-year-old Alex Rigby, Young Blind Gardener of the Year. But he's a master of the understatement as well. You know like on a day like today when it's really windy and really cold and horrible how do you feel when you go back ins id e? RIGBY Dry. WHITE Well if you ask a silly question you get a silly answer. Alex Rigby ending Mani's report. Lynn Manning is still with me and we're focusing I suppose today on people's achievements and doing the unexpected. You're doing this one man show, which is quite a challenge - you're on stage for almost an hour and a half. How do you make a relationship with the audience, how challenging is that as a blind person? MANNING Well it's - you've got to keep it interesting, do a lot of variation of voices and play the characters in the story as opposed to just straight storytelling. I do a dramatic storytelling so it pulls people forward and then pushes them away, make them laugh, make them cry, try to keep them off balance the whole time. WHITE Do you have much - do you have to move around much on stage? MANNING I do move around to a limited degree, I have the stage marked out in ways that I can feel tactilely with my feet. And I also have musical accompanist with me who also adds flavour to - an undercurrent to what I'm saying or what I'm doing at times. Yeah, I try to keep them engaged that way as well. WHITE Well, as I sa id , there are a number of performances in London, there's one in Croydon and Coventry and we'll give you details of that on our action line. That's it for today but we'd like to end with one of your poems Lynn which you've chosen because it's one of the most requested pieces. Can you just explain briefly what it is? MANNING It's a poem that took me years to sort of deal with the juxtaposition of other people's expectations of me from my transition from how people saw me when I was just a black man to how they see me as a blind man. WHITE Well we'll hear it in just a moment. But as always if you have comments or suggestions or you want to know about those venues do call our action line on 0800 044 044. Lynn Manning many thanks for joining us and good luck with the rest of the tour. From me Peter White, producer Cheryl Gabriel and the rest of the team goodbye. MANNING Quick change artist extraordinaire I whip out my folded cane and change from black man to blind man with a flick of my wrist It is a profound metamorphosis From God gifted wizard Of round ball dominating black boards across America To God gifted id iot savant composer Hounding truck busters on a cockeyed wind From sociopathic gay banger with death for eyes To all seeing soul with saintly spirit From rape deranged misogynist to poor motherless child From welfare rich pimp to disability rich gimp As the white man's burden to every man's burden It's always a profound metamorphosis Was it from cursed by man to cursed by God Or from scriptures condemned to God ordained? My final poem is never of my choosing I only wield the wand You are the magicians Back to top |
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