The caption at the start seems to promise the most exploitative reality television show yet made: “Eighteen months ago Channel 4 marooned six disabled people on a remote island . . .” Two months after the station finally killed off Big Brother, has it really come to this?

Not exactly. The reality TV show is fictitious, but Cast Offs, a comedy drama about the making of a disabled take on Survivor, is about to become one of the most talked about programmes of the year when it begins this month.

Disability is one of television’s last taboos and Cast Offs tackles it head on, with a script stuffed with sex and politically incorrect jokes by writers from Skins, Shameless and The Thick of It. Each of the six episodes is from the viewpoint of a different character in the fictional show: a blind man, a deaf woman, a paraplegic man, a woman with dwarfism, a thalidomide-affected man and a woman with cherubism.

In each case the character is played by an actor with the same disability whose experiences were fed into the story. The aim was to get away from the usual patronising division of most disabled people on screen into “acerbic or tragic”, according to the lead writer, Jack Thorne, one of the original Skins writers whose screenplay for The Scouting Book for Boys won him the Star of London award for Best British Newcomer at The Times BFI London Film Festival last week.

Instead the series “tries to tell the story of contemporary disabled identity from the perspective of contemporary disabled people. In most cases they are not defined by their disability so it becomes a story about a group of people surviving on an island.”

Or, as Joel Wilson, one of the producers, puts it: “I hope that this will do for disability what Queer as Folk [the 1990s drama about gay men in Manchester] did for gay people: make people see that disabled people are no more and no less f***** up than anyone else.”

It is supposed to be both funny and provocative. When one character complains about the number of able-bodied actors portraying disabled people on screen, he declares: “Spacking up is the blacking up of the 21st century.”

Two of the three writers of Cast Offs are disabled. Alex Bulmer is blind and Thorne has a heat allergy. They wrote most of the series after the six principals had been cast.

Thorne asked the actors frank questions, such as “what is the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to you because of your condition, the worst and best things that people have done for you because of it, and what are common misapprehensions?”

The blind actor said that people tended to assume that he had supersensitive hearing; Mat Fraser, who is thalidomide-affected, said that it was often assumed that his arms hurt.

Victoria Wright, who plays April, the research scientist with cherubism, said: “This is not something that’s really been seen before, showing us as adults who drink, swear and have sex. I am sure there are going to be a lot of people saying, ‘My goodness, I didn’t know disabled people could do that’.”

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