So long as I was operating among the alternatives of society no one came up and confronted me with my disability
“So long as I was operating among the alternatives of society no one came up and confronted me with my disability. It was only when I became an actor that that happened.”While he has had some work in theatre and radio in the years since Graeae, and a role in Carlton’s First World War drama Unknown Soldier (“I played Private Baker, arms blown off above the elbow, sah!”), he worries that the disabled are not properly represented in soaps. “It’s lovely that fact-based TV is first past the post at employing disabled people Let’s hope drama is next. Now he has gone solo with a rap album, Survival of the Shittest, full of songs about disability issues. The songs have titles like “Don’t Fuck With Us”, “Civil Rights” and “Blacking Up”, which is “about able- bodied actors playing disabled people”.The son of two actors, Fraser chose to follow in their footsteps at the age of 30, joining Graeae, Europe’s leading disabled theatre company That is when he started to get angry. He has also done time in a speed-metal band and met his girlfriend, Patu – with whom he shares a “a very happy monogamous relationship” – while playing with a 12-piece dub reggae outfit, the Grateful Dub. only hippie girls seemed to be interested in me, because they `saw beyond my physical imperfection’.” (He uses the phrase self-mockingly.)In the Eighties Fraser was the drummer in a band called Living in Texas.
They toured Europe on a tide of sex and drugs, and he seems to have had his fair share of both. I realised that alternative people look at other things, and so I became a punk immediately … But on the other hand you’re the only disabled kid in the school and you get treated like shit for five years.”His parents separated – his father was gay, which his son says he accepted at once. His mother lived in or near London, apart from a stint in New Zealand when Fraser was 10, and later spent some time in Wales.
It was there, in a lesbian hippie commune, that Fraser made the breakthrough with girls. “The glam-rock years were awful for me because it was about physical perfection. It’s good because your aspirations are the same as your able-bodied peers. Imagine being binned with short arms.” He remembers getting no special treatment from the school – Kent College in Canterbury – and was included in all the long-arm sports “Hockey was ridiculous I was bent double For better or worse, they meant well by it.