Aspies For Freedom

This is scheduled to be shown on Australian TV on SBS on Sunday Feb 10th at 8.30pm.

http://www20.sbs.com.au/whatson/?date=20...hannelID=1

It's about a pianist with Tourettes, but autism will also be mentioned, and as you'd expect Oliver Sacks will be in the documentary. I believe this is from the "Horizon" series from the UK.

There seems to be an unwritten law that if you are making a documentary or TV piece about creativity and brain "disorders" in the UK or in the US, you have to interview Dr Oliver Sacks, and if you are doing a doco on this subject in Australia, you have to interview Dr Snyder from Sydney.

Okay, but why don't they interview some of us on the spectrum who are artistic? Then again, I suppose they are really looking for the prodigies rather than the fairly talented.

Yeah; they really are more interested in the savants. There's more "amazing" effect to somebody who can reproduce a skyline he's seen once, in minute detail, than to somebody who simply has good visual-spatial skills, enjoys drawing, spends a lot of time doing it, and consequently is well above grade level in skill. That second one is much more common; but it's also not nearly as well known as savant syndrome. It's also more "approachable" to the NT mind, I think--they can understand more easily a natural talent developed through interest and practice, than they can understand what it might be like to be a true savant.

In terms of what makes 'good telly', some kind of excellent performance such as virtuosity in piano playing, or someone with savant artistic abilities, such as fantastic recall and ability to draw incredibly detailed buildings would be preferable to, say, someone who could recite pi to a million places in a fortnight, or someone who had encyclopaedic knowledge about dinosaurs or Star Trek, or someone who was a whizz at computer programming.

For 'good telly' you need to be able to see and/or hear to appreciate something, usually in 'soundbites'.  Watching Bill Gates tap away at a computer in the early days of Microsoft programming Windows would not have made riveting viewing.

TV programme makers need something visually appealing or interesting.

So did anyone see the doco? We had an unexpected change of plans, and we missed it! I hope they repeat it.