Permanently cash-strapped mum Gemma (Dolly-Rose Campbell) has set her sights on a wedding in upcoming Coronation Street episodes, but the problem is paying for it. She starts to keep a
wedding fund tin, but between the jobs that she and Chesney (Sam Aston) are already doing, there’s no spare cash at the end of the week after taking care of everything their five children need.
When Michael Bailey (Ryan Russell) asks her to look after his daughter, Glory (Eleanor Beckles), for the day Gemma is delighted when he pays her £60. She puts the money in the tin, and then she has an idea.
Her son Aled is deaf and she’s been learning BSL so that she can communicate with him. She decides she’s going to offer BSL-friendly childminding services to people in the local area as a way to make money and also use the skills she’s learning.
Dolly Rose Campbell is a passionate advocate of BSL and has been learning the language herself, having just completed level one and part way through level 2. She enjoys incorporating what she’s learning into the show, she told us.
‘For me it was never really an option not to learn to sign,’ she said. ‘If we were going to be working with a deaf child actor whose language was going to be BSL then for none of his colleagues to be able to sign didn’t make sense to me at all.
‘Because I am going to lessons and learning it as Dolly I am able to feed that into what I am filming. You will see Gemma signing a lot with people who are hearing, like in the pub with the staff and customers. That is because I sign with hearing people when I know the sign to make sure I remember it and learn it. I didn’t want to throw a sign in every few months just to remind the audience that they have a deaf child, that is not how it works when you have a child with specific needs.’
Source: Read Full Article
