When Labour won the election with a landslide majority last summer, comedian Rosie Jones found herself surprisingly torn. For six years, under successive Tory governments, she’d been working on her new sitcom Pushers. The Channel 4 series, co-written by Jones and Peter Fellows, follows an ensemble of disabled characters who start selling drugs when their benefits are slashed.
While the left-wing comic was happy that Labour had finally come into power, she was also worried that her sitcom had just lost all relevance. She imagined that, by the time it came out this month, “we’d nearly be a year into a Labour government, and living in a utopia where every disabled person is treated fairly. Unfortunately, here we are. And it hasn’t panned out that way. And I hate to say it, but I think we need a show like this more than ever.”
She is referring, of course, to Labour taking a £5bn sledgehammer to disability benefits in the biggest cuts on record. The move, announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves in her spring statement this March, came as a “huge shock” to Jones, who has cerebral palsy.
“It’s a sad state of affairs,” the 34-year-old says. “As a disabled person, I feel like we’re going backwards, and it’s scary. So although I want the overriding feeling when you watch this to be joy and having a good giggle, I also really hope it makes people think about the situation of the country right now, and how disabled people are getting treated so unfairly.” She shrugs. “It’s s***.”
So not only is Pushers truly groundbreaking – the first British sitcom to have a cast in which the majority of actors are disabled – but it couldn’t have arrived at a better time. It’s also very funny. Jones stars as Emily, a charity worker who has a crush on her boss and, in an unlikely turn of events, becomes a criminal mastermind heading up a drug gang.
Jones brings impeccable comic timing to her first lead acting role. By deftly subverting Emily’s perceived status as an “invisible” disabled woman, she slowly peels back the layers to reveal a force of nature, one armed with a hilariously deadpan delivery. It’s an authentic turn no doubt informed by lived experience.
While Emily is a natural leader, she’s not so good at dealing drugs. Bags of cocaine keep bursting all over her. Discretion isn’t in her vocabulary, and she hasn’t got a clue how to launder money. But she can hold her own. And she’s a lot smarter than the able-bodied bully who persuaded her to start pushing powder in the first place. “Welcome to the inner rectum,” he tells a new recruit. “Inner sanctum,” Emily corrects him gently.
The show is heartwarming, too, and follows a long and lovely tradition of misfit comedies, from The IT Crowd to This Country. Of course, Pushers isn’t really about selling drugs; it’s about, as Jones says, “a group of people who normally go through life on their own, finding a family within each other”. “We wanted it to be fun and collaborative,” she explains. “When you say you’re writing a sitcom about drugs and what it’s like to lose your disability benefits, it doesn’t sound like a laugh a minute.”
Most will recognise Jones from her continual appearances on British panel shows, from The Last Leg to 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, where she is always warm and lively company compared with some of her more curmudgeonly male co-stars. In person, she is just the same. Wearing a bright blue jumpsuit and heavy Doc Marten boots, brunette waves flowing across her shoulders, she is all smiles and hearty compliments in between sips of a Diet Coke. There’s a cosy exuberance to her. She’s tactile, too.
No wonder she’s in a great mood today. Used to years of being the only disabled person on set, Jones relished working with a disabled cast. “I get so annoyed with TV shows and films that have one disabled character,” she says. “You just know that the creator and the writer have gone, ‘Great! We’ve got one! Move on.’ Then they give all these disabled storylines to that one character. But disability is not a personality trait. And on top of that, 24 per cent of the UK has a disability. A quarter. That is much more than one and move on.”
Because of this, Jones and Fellows – a frequent collaborator of Armando Iannucci – were intent on filling Pushers with as many disabled cast and crew as they could. “Once you do that, you’re not only fairly representing the world we live in,” she says, “but you are able to go beyond disability. I really hope people will watch it and, within half a minute, forget about disability altogether, because every single character is so much more than that.”
The sitcom’s sheer existence on Channel 4 will also show streamers with much bigger budgets that not only is it possible to make a set fully accessible, but the resulting show can be both droll and reflective on the state of the nation.
“Talking about disability is more difficult and nuanced than other minorities,” says Jones. “If you want more women, queer people or non-white people in your workforce, for example, you simply employ them. But if you want to fairly represent disabled people, you’ve got to go, ‘Well, what does the building look like? What are the access requirements?’ Employing disabled people does take more time, money, effort and thought, but I think through Pushers we have shown that you can do it.”
Places like X are more full of hate than ever. It’s not a place I ever want to be
Jones, the daughter of two schoolteachers, was raised in Bridlington in east Yorkshire. When she introduces herself at stand-up shows, she tells the audience: “I feel like I need to address my voice. I get that the combination of the cerebral palsy and the strong Yorkshire accent is a f***ing minefield.” Growing up, she loved the work of comedy legends Victoria Wood and Caroline Aherne; she has also cited her “bloody funny” mum as one of her biggest influences.
In her twenties, Jones worked as a television researcher while studying comedy writing at the National Film and Television School, and now performs on the very same shows on which she used to work. In the past few years, she has become one of the most important voices on disabled issues in the country – since 2021, she has been writing The Amazing Edie Eckhart children’s books about a girl with cerebral palsy, and in 2023, she made waves with her documentary Am I a R*tard? on ableism and abuse.
It wasn’t just the documentary’s shocking title that made headlines. The film was full of lid-lifting revelations about Jones’s life as a disabled person. The fact that she wears headphones in public to protect herself against the ableist abuse hurled at her when she’s walking down the street. The fact that she receives rape threats online. The fact that strangers tell her she should die, or should be “in a cage”. It also held social media companies like X (formerly Twitter) to account for failing to properly address online discrimination and abuse (Jones is no longer on X, but she does use Instagram).
Two years on from the film, has anything changed? “No,” Jones says simply. “Places like X are more full of hate than ever. It’s not a place I ever want to be.” But she has a much healthier relationship with social media than she used to. “When I was starting out, I wanted to read what people thought of me, but it’s the nature of the job that you’re going to read a lot of negativity about you. It wasn’t good for my mental health, and it didn’t help me do a better job.”
She keeps Instagram at arm’s length, only using it for work. “Because at the end of the day, it’s strangers. I don’t need validation from strangers when I have great friends. I have a job I love. I know I’m a hard worker, I know I’m a good person. I don’t need validation from some angry people who I will never meet.”
There was a point when Jones’s dad would “not only read all the hateful tweets about me, but answer them”. “I hated that,” she says. “Because no person should read about strangers hating their child. And I had to tell him in no uncertain terms to stop doing that.”
Pushers is less concerned with outright attacks than with a more insidious kind of ableism: the way that disabled people are chronically underestimated and overlooked. “I am underestimated every single day,” says Jones. “So me and Peter really thought about how we could push that in terms of comedy, and that idea that even the police wouldn’t suspect a little lady with cerebral palsy to be shifting a class-A drug.” She pauses, leaning in. “But I need to say, for the record, I’ve never dealt drugs.” Evil genius face. “Or have I?”
She is at pains to point out, though, how different she is from Emily. “Emily’s a very complex character because she’s invisible,” says Jones. “I grew up in a loving, happy, healthy home where my parents supported me and told me I could be anything, so I went out into the world fighting and became the person I am today. Emily’s definitely had a very different upbringing, and she’s got to a point in her life where no one believes that she can achieve anything, so once she gets that taste of power and the idea that she can be feared, she takes that and runs with it. Well, maybe doesn’t run with it, but wobbles really quickly with it.”
Jones admits that she struggles with internalised ableism, something that grew out of not seeing positive depictions of disabled people on TV as a child, and that it has stopped her from forming romantic relationships. “The disabled character was always portrayed as the victim, the vulnerable one, the one-dimensional one, the one who is asexual, the one who needs to be cared for and pitied,” she says. “It’s so damaging over time. If you never see a three-dimensional disabled character who is in a happy, healthy, romantic sexual relationship, it’s hard to believe that could ever happen to you.”
Being queer only made things more complex for Jones. “I knew I was gay when I was bloody four years old – I remember seeing a lady and thinking, I want to kiss her like boys kiss girls – but then I went, ‘But I’m disabled, and disabled people don’t get married,’” she explains. Jones was 26 when she came out as gay. She didn’t feel she needed to tell anyone about her sexuality before that, as she assumed she’d never act on it. “It’s taken me a lot of years of therapy and undoing internalised ableism to get to a place where I believe that I’m worthy of love and a relationship.”
Dating, says Jones, is “very complicated”. “I feel like my disability and queerness, and how my job and fame impact daily life, means my Venn diagram of women who are suitable and who I want to get to know is not a pool, it’s more of a puddle.”
Jones tackles the tribulations of single life in her new stand-up tour, I Can’t Tell What She Is Saying, which kicks off in September. She’s also busy with her new charity – The Rosie Jones Foundation, which empowers those with cerebral palsy – and continuing to work on herself. “I’m still on the journey,” she says. “Like everything in life, I don’t think you should ever get to a place where you go, yep, I’m perfect, I’ve done all the work. So I’m still putting the time, effort and work into therapy. But,” she grins, “I am in a good place.”
‘Pushers’ premieres on Channel 4 at 10pm on Thursday 19 June
