OK, I’m addicted. It’s not something that I like to admit to or even thought would happen to me, but it has.

I have become an ardent devotee of Strictly Come Dancing, even watching the sister programme It Takes Two most evenings.

I love to see people learning new skills but mostly I love it that there is a Deaf celebrity in the form of Rose Ayling-Ellis.

I count myself as a friend and ally of the Deaf community in Worcester and there has been a lot of Facebook activity about Rose. One of my Facebook friends said: “Wow! [Rose is] ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE. Deaf can do anything!!”

There is real feeling behind these words because for a long time Deaf people have been thought oppressed and thought of as educationally sub-normal. We laugh at this idea now but it has held sway throughout a large portion of history.

This arguably started with Socrates who stated that the Deaf are not capable of “language and ideas.” Natural sign language was seen as primitive gestures.

This view slowly declined in the 18th century during the enlightenment when schools were set up to teach Deaf children in their own language but this was short-lived.

At the infamous Milan Conference of 1880 it was decided (by hearing educationalists) that the deaf should be taught not in sign but in English, the so-called oralist method, which robbed the Deaf of their own language.

But the threat was far from over. And so when evolutionary debates came to the fore in the Western World, the Deaf were seen as evolutionary throwbacks to a primitive era.

This reached its culmination in the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany (which ironically had its roots in the USA) where 17,000 Germans were sterilised for being Deaf. The idea was that of weeding out the weak and aberrant in society because they were a burden to civic life.

We’ve moved a long way from and of course we now live in different times. But the fact is that such a history of suppression, oppression, and threat leaves a long shadow.

And even though we live in different times, I, myself, have witnessed people mocking a Deaf couple for signing in public and still hear of the struggles that Deaf have in society.

So for my Deaf friends, and their allies, Rose provides a fantastic role model for the Deaf community, young or old. So I agree with my Facebook friend: “Deaf can do anything!”