Paddy Smyth has won praise after fronting an emotional BBC documentary about his disability, titled ‘Should I be fixed?’
The disabled activist and social media star was born with cerebral palsy, which affects a person’s ability to move and maintain balance and posture.
In the documentary, Paddy delves into the scientific advances available to him for his cerebral palsy whilst also asking himself the question: if he could fix his cerebral palsy, would he even want to?
Sharing a clip from the documentary on Instagram, Paddy wrote: “I can’t believe the day is finally here…”
“Ever since I was a child I always felt that in some way I’m broken due to my disability. So during in covid I wrote this short documentary ‘SHOULD I BE FIXED’ that got picked up by @bbc_reel and they decided that they wanted to allow me to explore that question.
In this documentary I meet with doctors, An identical twin with Cerebral Palsy and I have a very candid chat with my amazing sister @valeriegaughran on how my family felt when I was diagnosed,” he continued.
“This was such a personal and emotional journey if you like the documentary please get behind it and support ( like/ share/ comment / link) the more traction it gets the more likely that media with that making more disabled content for us to consume. Representation is key and we need to normalise these conversations…”
“You can put ‘SHOULD I BE FIXED’ to a lot of labels that society puts on us if you think about it. ( Gender/ sexuality/ beauty standards/ disability and so on) So the question is… Is it you that wants to be ‘fixed’ or is society that wants to ‘fix’ us?”
Paddy was inundated with supportive messages in the comment section, as a host of well-known faces praised his new project.
Comedian Anna Clifford commented: “Finally 🫶🏻 well done it’s so good. Love the strut at the start and really teared up talking to Val xx.”
Roz Purcell also wrote: “CANNOT WAIT TO WATCH THIS 👏👏👏.”
You can watch Paddy’s documentary in full here.
