About halfway through Otto Baxter: Not a F***ing Horror Story, we see a snippet of a speech given by the screenwriter Jack Thorne at the Edinburgh TV festival a couple of years ago. “TV has failed disabled people, utterly and totally,” Thorne said, as part of his MacTaggart lecture. This documentary, which follows a man with Down’s syndrome who writes and directs his own horror film, is a testament to the slow changes that are, hopefully, beginning to emerge. Nestled in between its many layers, one of the main themes seems obvious, in hindsight: Baxter should be telling his own story, and deciding how he wants to tell it.
Baxter is 35, but explains that he has been on TV for most of his life. His mother Lucy, who adopted him when he was a baby, regularly appeared on television to discuss life with her four children, all boys with Down’s syndrome, “to show everybody how amazing they are”. There are clips from TV vaults, of Baxter and his family on TV-am or The Real Holiday Show. But it was in 2009 that he first worked with Peter Beard and Bruce Fletcher, on a BBC documentary called Otto: Love, Lust and Las Vegas, about him trying to have sex for the first time.
