TV COMES TO TERMS WITH DISABLED

Most of TV dwells on human exteriors. Perfect shapes. Perfect faces. Perfect smiles. Perfect teeth. Perfect skin. Perfect hair. Perfect voices.

Perfectly boring.

No wonder, then, that persons with disabilities have mostly been shut out of TV. And when not omitted, they have been depicted as freaks or stereotyped as either bitter or inhumanly inspirational. They were never just . . . people.

Slowly, that is changing.

Movies have helped. “Coming Home” tenderly--and erotically--explored the sexuality of a paraplegic. “The Elephant Man” and “Mask” unmasked prejudice and found the soul beneath the unique exterior.

TV is where the biggest progress is being made, though. More and more, characters with disabilities are being intelligently depicted on TV. And more and more, actors with disabilities are being cast in those roles.

“There’s definite improvement in terms of quantity and quality,” said Tari Susan Hartman, former executive director of the now-defunct Media Office of the California Governor’s Committee for Employment of the Handicapped. “When you change behavior and the attitudes that change behavior, it’s always slow. But this (TV) is becoming a collaborative art.”

For example:

--Christopher Templeton, who limps because he had polio as a child, has a recurring role on the CBS daytime soap opera “The Young and the Restless.”

--Victoria-Ann Lewis, another actress with an atrophied leg due to polio, plays a recurring character on CBS’ prime-time soap opera “Knots Landing.”

--Paraplegic Hugh Farrington has a recurring role on “T.J. Hooker,” now on CBS’ late-night schedule.

--The CBS daytime soap series “Capitol” has regularly explored disabled-oriented issues through a character who walks with crutches (and is played by able-bodied actor Michael Catlin).

--ABC’s “The Fall Guy” last season cast a boy with Down’s syndrome as a boy with Down’s syndrome.

And on and on it goes, as TV executives and series producers are finally getting the message, thanks mostly to intensive lobbying by the Media Office and Hartman, who is now helping to form a national organization to work on behalf of the disabled.

Aaron Spelling got the message several months ago. “I thought that my production company had done all that we could have done, but I realize now that we haven’t done enough,” an obviously moved Spelling said at last summer’s media awards dinner held by the California Governor’s Committee for Employment of the Handicapped.

TV’s most successful producer making such a statement about his own multitude of ABC series (“Dynasty,” “The Love Boat,” “Hotel,” “Hollywood Beat”)? Spelling sounded sincere. And if he follows through, he could have an immense impact.

Though commendable, commercial TV’s progress on behalf of the disabled is just one small step in the right direction. Another is public television’s “The Skin Horse,” at 10 tonight on Channels 28, 15, 24 and 50.

What a remarkable British-made program, creative and at once blunt and poetic in its use of real-life segments and film clips to show the need of severely disabled persons for human warmth.

That includes love and sex.

There are some joyous scenes from a club where the disabled can meet, socialize and dance with able-bodied persons. Then a severely disabled 52-year-old woman with a severe speech impediment describes her life for 34 years in Britain’s Home for Incurables: “At 7:13 in the morning, I am washed, dressed and put in my chair. . . . Can you imagine being trapped here for 34 years?”

When we hear her own faltering voice, there seems to be no connection, the distance between us too great for communication and understanding. Yet how different is our perception of this woman when her words are spoken by a sweet-voiced female narrator. Same twisted body in a wheelchair. Same thoughts. Same person. Different voice.

It’s an effective way to make us look past the exterior to the inner person, who has the same wants and needs as the rest of us.

The program takes its title from a dialogue in a British children’s story in which a leather-covered toy horse and a toy rabbit discuss the nature of reality.

“What is real?” the rabbit asks.

“When a child loves you for a long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real,” the skin horse replies.

“Does it hurt?” the rabbit asks.

“Sometimes,” the skin horse says. “But when you’re real, you don’t mind being hurt.”

This program is real. It was co-written by host Nabil Shaban, a severely disabled actor.

What about the sexuality of severely disabled persons? Shaban bemusedly turns the question on himself. “Has he got one? And if he has, can he use it?”

Another severely disabled man recalls his first sexual experience at age 34, when an able-bodied friend drove him to a brothel, then carried him upstairs and plopped him on the bed. “I don’t think I got the smile off my face for three days,” he says.

PBS has furnished an addendum to the program consisting of a discussion hosted by Betty Rollin, a former NBC correspondent who wrote a book (“First, You Cry”), later made into a TV movie, about her recovery from losing a breast to cancer.

A woman with one breast in a society obsessed with female breasts? Articulating the feelings of many women in her situation, Rollin wrote that she initially regarded herself as a freak.

“I was damaged goods . . . and I knew it. It had begun to dawn on me . . . that underneath the bandage was something very ugly. I didn’t know yet how ugly. But I didn’t have to. It was enough to know that I was mutilated, a deformed person. If you feel deformed, it’s hard to feel sexy.”

It’s society, though, that defines damaged goods, ugliness, mutilation and deformity. And TV, more than any other medium, can teach society to open its eyes to all shapes and sizes . . . and skin horses.