Introduction

I really do have Yorkshire TV to thank, in particular Carolyn Reynolds and Richard Standeven for fuelling my acting ambitions. ‘Blind Ambition’ was my first acting job. A local arts organisation alerted me to the audition and I went along to Tyne Tees TV studios not knowing what to expect. There I auditioned to Richard. He will probably remember how much I screamed with delight when he told me there and then that the job was mine. The role of Paula Simms was only a day's work, but I loved every moment. There I was - my first ever role - and I am sat around a dinner table performing with established actors such as Robson Green, Imogen Stubbs and Mark Womack. I just knew from that moment I had to pursue acting more seriously…and that’s what I did.

Kim Finds Her Role in Life
Journal September 2000

Budding actress Kim Tserkezie is in her element on a film set and a natural ability to shine on screen puts her in the front-running for roles on TV. But how many jobs are there for a romantic lead in a wheelchair? Arifa Akbar talks to her.

KIM remembers her first and only film audition more for her embarrassing reaction afterwards than for the jangled nerves before hand!.
A producer followed her to the doors of the TV studio and told her she'd got the job. Her answer came as an ear piercing scream a surreal response that alarmed even herself after being uttered.

But then most budding actresses don't end up standing next to Robson Green and Imogen Stubbs for their debut performances.

When the vivacious 27-year-old decided to kick-start a late entry into the tough world of acting, she reckoned on getting nothing more than hit parts here and there initially. So when she found out she'd be featured next to two Northern acting talents whose TV careers she's avidly followed as a teenager, she was ecstatic.
Months later, she was sharing jokes and casual banter with them in Leeds while filming TV drama Blind Ambition, broadcast at 9pm tonight on ITV. "I'd never acted before and I was just beside myself when I was told I'd got the part. I just screamed in the studio and then started phoning all my friends on my mobile. I'm never usually like that," says Kim, of High Heaton, Newcastle.

Despite a serious case of nerves before the cameras started rolling, she wasn't struck by stage fright and her voice didn't quiver on set. Kim felt she was in her element on the set of the one-off drama which features Robson as a blind athlete. She play Paula Simms, the wife of a blind high jumper, more a functional vehicle in the plot than a fully-developed character.
"I say all of three lines," says Kim. "But we had to film the scene over and over to get the angles right and the director never had to ask me to change the way I said my lines.
"In the taxi before the audition, I kept asking myself 'Why am I doing this?' but my fear dissolved when I got in the studio with Robson Green and Imogen Stubbs. They were really supportive and made me feel incredibly relaxed. Sometimes when you meet people in show business, they are not as you expect and you're slightly disappointed but they were both so down-to-earth. There were no big egos on the set at all."

Kim says the achievement of being picked for a prime-time TV slot makes up for the dearth of lines. However, those three lines served to change the course of her career.
She added: "I came away from the experience knowing exactly what I wanted to do. Now I've decided to become an actress so I suppose you could say those three lines were life- changing."
Despite being new to films, Kim is no stranger to the screen - though she's only played herself in the past as a TV presenter of disability programmes From the Edge and Disability Today. But while she recognised the screen audition for Blind Ambition as something of a dream opportunity, she's never actively sought an acting job before.

"I got a phone call from Northern Disability Arts Forum saying Yorkshire TV were looking for a wheelchair user for a new drama," she says. She phoned up the network and went from there. "I'd always been interested in acting and doing creative things. I came across notes I'd written as an 11-year- old child on a novel I was writing. "I always had projects like that on the go. I'd never miss a play or a film hut I never stopped to think I could actually go and do it myself."

She says an acting career was never pursued actively maybe because she lacked a role model on which to base herself.
"How many wheelchair-user actresses do you see on TV, in soap- operas and in films? And how many mainstream roles are there for someone with a disability?"
She says playing a disabled character isn't a problem for her, she is totally comfortable with the impairment she's lived with since birth, but she says there's more to life than her wheelchair.
"I'd absolutely love to play a well developed character, whether it be good or bad, in which I'm more than someone in a wheelchair. I'm not saying I want to be the next Julia Roberts but any developed character would be rewarding to play rather than a character with a one dimensional focus on disability," says Kim, mum to five-year-old Jay.

Despite shying away from acting, she embarked on a media career from an early age. She gave up a degree course in Combined Arts at the University of Sunderland to take up a TV offer and she now works as a freelance researcher which includes regular shifts at BBC Radio Newcastle.
For someone in her mid-20s, Kim herself admits to being incredibly focused on what she wants from life. She says her impairment may have added to the pressure she put on herself to achieve success. "Being in a wheelchair may have contributed to making me more determined, Perhaps I wanted to prove to myself and others I could actually do it."
She says living as a mum with a disability is incomparable for her or Jay to living any other way.
"It's what I am and it's what we both know. There's nothing to compare it to. I'm happy being a mum to him and I'm lucky I've got my parents to look after him when I'm working away to where ever my job takes me. And I still go on nights out causing havoc in Newcastle City Centre while my parents babysit him. I got nervous leaving him at first like any mum would but he didn't seem to mind being with his grandparents at all and I know I would be miserable in a nine-to-five job!"
As far as her relationship with disability stands, she says she went through guilty years while other teenagers were going through their self-absorbed angsty periods.
"I always thought I was the problem when I was a teenager but now I think it's access that's the problem. The fact that I can't get fair access somewhere isn't my responsibility. It's society's responsibility."
She says going to Heworth School, Gateshead did a great service in fuelling her self-confidence and made her feel she was part of mainstream society. But it was only after her school years that she truly confronted her impairment - and felt at home with it.
"I went to a mainstream school which was great and exactly what I needed at the time. I had the same aspirations as anyone else there but for a long time I didn't know anyone with a disability and I may have been denying my own impairment to an extent.
"Now I'm happy to talk about it when it is relevant. But I don't see that it's relevant all the time." And listenening to the exuberant actress talk about her passion for the screen, it does strike you how irrelevant a wheelchair can be to acting.