This ground-breaking TV documentary on sex and disability was directed by Nigel Evans, a noted campaigner for people with disabilities, and John Samson. Samson was also co-writer along with actor and narrator Nabil Shaban.
John Samson died aged 58 in 2004. This is one of 5 documentary films made by him during an intense 8 year period from 1975 to 1983. All of his films take as their subjects people who were marginalised by society at that time (and often still are).
Samson was a working-class young man who left school to become a shipyard worker on the Clyde. Here he became a spokesperson for the shipyard apprentices before becoming involved in wider political activism in the Scottish anarchist community. He then fell in with an artistic circle and attended the National Film School in London, subsequently becoming a documentary filmmaker. His work, almost lost to obscurity, is now being critically reappraised following a major retrospective in Glasgow in 2016 - the first time his films had been screened publicly in Scotland.
The Skin Horse is widely considered to be his best work. It was screened in 1984 on the UK's new Channel 4 and won a Royal Television Society Award. The film mainly focuses on the Outsiders Club, an organisation of that period designed to allow disabled people to meet and experience romance and intimacy at a time when the idea of a disabled person being a sexual being was considered 'frightening' or 'distasteful' by mainstream society. The film deals with this subject in a non-judgemental and sensitive manner. Nabil Shaban is outstanding as the narrator, displaying a natural wit and warmth which allows him to be challenging and forthright about a subject that still made many viewers of the period uncomfortable. Well-chosen clips from Tod Browning's Freaks and David Lynch's Elephant Man are used to illustrate Shaban's central point that disabled people are characterised as either 'monsters' or 'children'. He goes on to demonstrate how mainstream society makes a rigid dichotomy of the disabled as abused/patronised or fetishised/sexless. Other disabled people are also given space to discuss their sex lives in a frank and open manner.
The title, The Skin Horse, is taken from a character from the much-loved vintage children's novel The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. The Skin Horse is the wisest and oldest toy in the nursery who, although physically shabby, can be relied on to answer the other toy's questions with a profound wisdom and absolute honesty. These are qualities which he shares with this wonderful documentary film.
