The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
‘I’M STILL THE FREE SPIRIT I’VE ALWAYS
BEEN’ Paraplegic TV presenter Sophie Mogran on making the most elif, and her greatest challenge to date
IT IS TESTAMENT to Sophie Morgan’s boundless positivity that she is philosophical even about the car crash that snapped her spine when she was 18 years old, paralysing her from the chest down and radically altering the course of her life. ‘It changed me for the better, there’s no doubt,’ she says. ‘It’s such a cliché that your perspective shifts and you realise what’s important, but it’s true. I never feel sorry for myself. Life is precious and you really do have to make the most of it.’
Certainly, no one could ever accuse 31-year- old Sophie of not making the most of things. A talented artist (she has her own business as an illustrator), she has also modelled for Stella McCartney, is an ambassador and campaigner for multiple charities and a spokeswoman for a robotics firm that makes a cutting-edge walking aid. She has fronted documentaries for the BBC and taken part in global expeditions – all while in a wheelchair.
In short, she’s the sort of woman who fully deserves the description ‘fearless’. Today, however, she admits that she is terrified. Her newest role, and her most high profile by some margin, is in front of the camera again, presenting Channel 4’s Paralympic Games coverage from Rio this September. ‘It’s an amazing opportunity. I’m going to be live on television for four hours every day,’ she squeals in slight disbelief.
The day we meet, in her sunny flat in Bermondsey, London, where she lives with Magnus, her property developer boyfriend of three years, Sophie is in the thick of intensive on-air training. ‘There are producers yelling instructions in your ear while you try to look at the right camera and do a voiceover and be relaxed and yourself,’ she says. ‘But it’s fantastic.’
Charismatic, funny and highly articulate, as well as beautiful, it’s not hard to see why Sophie has been selected. ‘I’ve never been hugely sports-oriented,’ she confesses, ‘so I have to learn about all the Paralympians as well as how to be a live TV presenter. It’s a huge learning curve, like doing an A-level, but it’s fascinating and very humbling.
‘To become an Olympic athlete is extraordinary,’ she says. ‘But to do it with all the challenges that the Paralympians have faced is absolutely incredible.’ She is particularly looking forward to coming face-to-face with ‘the Weirwolf ’, Paralympic wheelchair racer David Weir, who was born with a congenital spinal cord condition that means he will never be able to use his legs. ‘He’s amazing,’ enthuses Sophie. ‘He’s been in a chair almost all his life and he doesn’t let anything stop him; he won four golds in 2012.’
This is the first time Channel 4 has appointed a presenting team for the Paralympics composed largely of men and women who have disabilities themselves. Former Paralympic basketball player Ade Adepitan, for whom a childhood bout of polio led to the loss of the use of his left leg, and the actor R J Mitte (best known for his role in Breaking Bad), who has cerebral palsy, will have presenting slots, too, while Sophie’s co-presenter will be J J Chalmers, a Royal Marine veteran who was severely wounded in a roadside bomb blast in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2011. ‘He’s a lovely guy and he hasn’t done any live presenting before, so we’re in a similar boat.’
It will be Sophie’s first trip to Rio and some have questioned how well the city is prepared for the Games and the influx of visitors, both disabled and able-bodied. Sophie, however, has experience of dealing with adversity abroad. Last year she presented a BBC documentary called The World’s Worst Place to be Disabled? in which she travelled to Ghana to investigate the brutal treatment meted out to people with disabilities. ‘It was horrendous,’ she says. ‘They were chaining disabled children to trees.’ The culture there sees people with disabilities as cursed and in need of ‘curing’ through brutal ritualistic practices. ‘People wouldn’t look at me or shake my hand. They thought I needed to be “healed”.’
Returning to London, she says, she ‘wanted to kiss the soil’, although living with a disability in the UK is far from perfect. ‘I am a lot luckier than people in Ghana, obviously, but I can’t get out of a tube station if it doesn’t have a lift,’ she says.
Far too many bars, restaurants, nightclubs and music venues remain inaccessible to people in a wheelchair, and Sophie (second from left) with the Channel 4 Paralympics presenting team Sophie has become used to the indignity of being carried in and out of such places. Earlier today, she has also done battle with Eurostar’s customer relations. Having planned to travel to the South of France to visit her parents, who have retired there, she had called the train company to ask them to book her a boarding ramp. She was then told that there was no disabled toilet accessible from the seat she had already booked. The train was completely sold out, so they could not allow her to travel. ‘It’s become second nature to assume that things are not going to work,’ she sighs. ‘I’ve investigated the worst places to be disabled, but I’ve yet to find the best.’
Along with her younger brother Tom, 28, a photographer to whom she is extremely close, Sophie enjoyed a privileged, outdoorsy upbringing in Crowborough, East Sussex. Her father John was a wine broker and her mother Carol worked variously as a nurse, gun-dog trainer and air stewardess.
At boarding school in Scotland, Sophie was, by her own admission, ‘bright, popular, fun and naughty’. She loved festivals, parties, travelling and camping. In her final year, she won a place to study law at Manchester