Blindness has been no handicap to Ryan Kelly making his name in soapland. Roz Laws meets the trailblazing Archers actor

Ablind actress has joined the cast of Emmerdale, while EastEnders has cast its first regular disabled actor.

The soaps seem to be finally catching up with the real world – but there’s one blind actor who has been working in a serial drama for years.

Ryan Kelly has been playing the role of Jazzer McCreary in the long-running Radio 4 soap The Archers since 2000.

While Emmerdale’s Lizzie Lakely, played by Kitty McGeever who lost her sight through diabetic retinopathy at 33, may well be the first regular blind character in a soap, she’s certainly not the first blind soap actor.

But then Ryan, who was born without eyes, is used to being a trailblazer.

He was the first totally blind student in the history of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School when he won a place in 1997, beating off 3,000 other applicants, despite one of his teachers telling him he had more chance of becoming Prime Minister than getting in.

Meanwhile, EastEnders has cast disabled actor David Proud to play Manda’s son Adam, an Oxford University student with spina bifida.

Ryan, aged 33, is pleased that more disabled actors are getting work. He says: “It does annoy me when sighted people pretend to be blind in dramas. It can be a travesty when it’s faked.

“It would be awful if they’d got a sighted person to play the blind character on Emmerdale.

“Actually when I first heard her there was something in Kitty’s voice that made me think that either she wasn’t blind at all, or she’d gone blind a lot later on, as I now realise is the case.

“I don’t actually like her voice much, but that’s personal taste.”

Ryan has a strong Glaswegian accent, despite moving to the Midlands when he was three. He attended special boarding schools in Bromsgrove, Coventry and Hereford from the age of five and now lives in Nuneaton with his wife Sonia, who’s also blind, and their eight-year-old daughter Bethany.

He met Sonia, a holistic therapist, when they were teenagers at Exhall Grange School in Coventry and they married in 2004.

“She’s always been mine, that’s just the way it is. She’s all I want in life,” he says.

“I’m very lucky to have her and Bethany, who’s a real blessing, though no paragon! She’s like any other kid with lots of cheek.”

Ryan recalls how he used to play up his blindness while busking as a young teen.

“I wore scruffy clothes and put a cane prominently on display as I played an accordion,” he says.

“I’d go round Warwick, Coventry and Bedworth. Some days I only got £11 but one Christmas I made £96 in a day. My mum looked on it as begging and hated me doing it, but it was great fun.

“Too right I played on people’s sympathy to cash in! I still do, sometimes. When I travel by train I come across tricky porters who say I should have booked assistance 24 hours in advance, which isn’t always possible, so I have to act like I’m a little bit wanting in sense.

“People can be ignorant about blindness. Once I asked a woman the way to WH Smiths in Coventry and she knelt down and gave directions to my dog!”

Ryan’s faithful guide dog is Hadley, who patiently waits outside The Archers studio while he records his episodes. Other actors can read their lines but Ryan has to memorise his. His finger running over Braille scripts made too much noise, so now he gets someone to record the scripts and he learns them by playing back the tape.

Until very recently there were two guide dogs in the house, but Sonia’s dog Bliss had to retire through shellshock.

“She’s turned into a gibbering wreck. She had a few frights – a bus drove on to the pavement really close to her, to avoid crashing into a truck. Then kids came up behind her with an air horn which made her ten times worse.

“Now she can’t go out on roads without shaking so she’s gone off to the Forest of Dean to be a proper pet.

“Sonia will be getting another dog in a couple of months and until then she’s using a white cane, or as we call it in the trade, a granny basher! Sonia is devastated about losing Bliss.

“My Labrador Hadley will retire in about a year and I will miss him, but he’s here to work. I can be quite clinical about it. My acting training helps me, as I learn a lot of self-control.

“One advantage of having a guide dog is that you never have to watch them grow old and die. They are very clever but they’re not robots, they have their bad days and can be like moody kids.

“You have to be disciplined and keep to the rules. When they’re in harness, you shouldn’t touch a guide dog.”

Ryan hopes to continue playing Jazzer, who he describes as “mostly stupid, a fool to himself”, for many years to come.

“I’m a big fan of The Archers and have listened regularly since I was 11. I’ve always said it was my dream job to act in it, so how lucky is that?”