A charity has cheered Rose Ayling-Ellis’s Strictly Come Dancing victory and said her success is changing attitudes towards deaf people.
And the actress herself told the media she hoped her performances will “challenge perceptions”
Laura Thirwall from the Staffordshire-based dDeaflinks charity told the BBC Rose’s achievement in becoming the first deaf contestant to win the TV competition had taken people by surprise because of a lack of understanding about deafness.
She said: “As a society we’ve grown up not seeing the deaf community, so we don’t fully understand it, we’ve not been educated and that’s why we’re surprised.
“They’re not disabled. The environment they’re living in is disabling them. It’s the environment that isn’t waking up and catching up.”
Rose, who plays the part of Frankie Lewis in EastEnders, told The Guardian that being on the show had been “life-changing”.
She said: “On the first week, I was really shy, but now I can be myself, and I definitely feel more comfortable in my own skin. The first week, I was like, ‘Everyone’s going to be expecting a deaf person to dance really badly.’
“But I definitely proved a lot of people wrong.”
The Guardian reported that after Rose’s appearances on Strictly, online searches for British sign language courses went up by 300 per cent, and one training company told the BBC that the number of people enrolling had gone up by 2,000 per cent.
She also received a lot of messages from deaf people, and parents of deaf children, who said how much watching her meant to them.
Rose told The Guardian: “That’s made me quite emotional. It’s 2021, and, finally, they’ve got something like that. It’s really good that it’s happening – but why has it taken this long? I didn’t have that growing up, and a lot of deaf people didn’t have that. So it’s really nice that we’ve got somebody out there. I can’t believe it’s me.
“Hopefully, it will change the way people look at deaf people. That if they come for a job interview, they won’t freak out about it and will be more excited. I’m glad that it’s happening. We’ve been fighting for so long.”
To read the full article in The Guardian visit https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/dec/19/strictly-exclusive-winner-rose-ayling-ellis-on-the-glitter-ball-giovanni-and-the-joy-of-being-deaf
