³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

The show will, apparently, include such scenes as an amputee running out of the sea shouting "Shark!", a man with restricted growth asking unsuspecting members of the public for help reaching the top shelf in a newsagents, and a wheelchair user stuck up a tree. Hidden cameras will then capture the 'hilarious' reactions of bewildered passers-by.

But ask most disabled people, and they'll soon reveal that it's all too easy to find yourself in real life situations with the potential to amuse, baffle and even shock members of the able-bodied public - whether or not it's deliberate.

Long before Andy from Little Britain was doing it, certain wheelchair users around these great isles had discovered that jumping out of their chairs could provide interesting results. Who would have thought that Tanni Grey-Thompson, now Dame Tanni and an upstanding member of the sporting community, had a misspent youth frightening shoppers in Cardiff?

"I'd sit on one of the benches in the main street, and my friend would jump into my wheelchair and push herself around for a bit. Then she'd suddenly leap to her feet and run up the street shouting, 'I can walk!' There were a real mix of reactions - some people were just shocked, others went 'Oh my God!', while the rest of them walked past open-mouthed. But they very rarely did anything; they thought she was a nutcase really."

Since then, the public expectations involved in being a champion wheelchair athlete have put paid to Mrs Grey-Thompson's fun. But not so for Damon Rose. As editor of Ouch, he has a responsibility to educate the public - in the Ouch house style. And where better to start spreading the truth about disability for the benefit of enquiring minds than amongst London's cab-driving fraternity?

"One taxi I got into, the driver did the classic: 'Hello, how are you? Where do you want to go?', and then straight away: 'Have you always been blind?' So he immediately turned me against him. I thought: 'All right, you want the harrowing details? I'll give you the worst blinding you can imagine!' I told him that I'd been living in Israel because my Dad was 'in oil', and that I had been blinded by the authorities there. He asked why, and I replied that it was because I'd stolen something. 'What did you steal?' he asked. I said it was a loaf of bread. 'That's awful, I can't believe they did that just for a loaf of bread! Oh my God!' he started saying. But he still wanted all the gory details about how they did it, so I told him that they didn't gouge my eyes out, they just injected my eyeballs. I went into ridiculous detail, because once I'd started I just had to draw it out for the whole cab journey. And as he got more and more angry with the Israelis, I began to realise that if he found out the truth he'd probably beat me up... It wasn't my intention to create a racist that day but I may have done."

Apart from the desire to 'educate' annoyingly curious members of the community, the other temptation involves the various apparatus of disability, which provide such perfect tools for pranksters. And nowhere is this more of a hotbed of potential than in the sobering environment of the Special School, as author and journalist Lyn Berwick recalls.

"In my school for the blind, the initiation of a new teacher would involve placing one of our artificial eyes in an unexpected place to give them a shock - usually in their cornflakes in the morning. If we were feeling truly wicked, we'd put one down the loo, so they had to put rubber gloves on and fish it out."

But the very tools of trickery can, just as easily, be turned against you in the most horrific of ways.

"I was meeting my prospective mother-in-law when my artificial eye dropped out and landed right in the coffee cup, eye side up. My mother fished the eye out and tried to laugh it off - what else can you do in those situations? - saying 'I don't suppose you want to drink that now!' But my brother-in-law was horrified, and soon after that I didn't have the boyfriend anymore either ..."

And then there are the situations disabled people find themselves in which, let's face it, just don't happen to anyone else - where the practical applications of impairment can so easily be mistaken for something quite, quite different ...

"I once went out for a meal with a friend - a wheelchair user who can get around short distances on sticks," says journalist Ian Cook. "By the end of the meal we'd both had quite a bit to drink, and he wanted to use the loo. So I took one arm and guided him into a cubicle and left him there.

"When I returned to help him back to the restaurant, he shouted out that he had fallen over inside the cubicle and was wedged on the floor against the cubicle door, unable to get back on his feet. He told me to try and push open the door and get inside, then drag him to his feet. I managed to get inside the cubicle, and then he started to shout instructions for me to push and pull harder.

"It's always at these moments that you become aware of someone else entering the room. Another man was at the urinals listening to the shouting of two men coming from the cubicle. As I emerged, dragging my friend back onto his feet, I saw the man staring at us. I felt duty bound to point out that it wasn't what he seemed to think it was, but he was amused to point out that my friend wasn't wearing his trousers. In our haste to get out of the loo my friend had failed to button up his trousers and they were falling down..."

For some, like stand-up comedian Francesca Martinez, who has cerebral palsy, being mistaken for being drunk and disorderly can come in handy. When she was in 'da club', with the lights down low, men always assumed from her movements that she was either inebriated or on drugs. "I wouldn't put them right - I quite liked being mistaken for someone able-bodied, so I just let them carry on assuming!"

Francesca's impairment has also let her get away with, among other things, jumping airport queues and evading fares on buses. "I just put my hand in my pocket and shake it a bit, and they say: 'Don't worry love'. I've saved about £3."

So are disabled people all secretly evil, comic geniuses, having a laugh at the expense of the non-disabled and their pitiable emotional reactions to impairment? Damon Rose: "Clearly there's a lot of latent disability humour out there and a lot of disabled comic geniuses about to emerge. I'm not sure that disability humour will ever be properly understood before we're all cured, though."