Helena Bonham Carter drew on her own life experiences to play a handicapped character. Her own father was wheelchair-bound for years.
This was the first unsolicited script to be greenlit by the BBC in fifteen years. The BBC regularly receives in excess of 20,000 such scripts every year.
This was the final film that Gene Siskel reviewed on Siskel & Ebert & the Movies (1986) before his death on February 20, 1999 at the age of 53.