Code of Silence is England’s newest up-and-coming crime drama starring Rose Ayling-Ellis, who you might recognize as the first deaf contestant in BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing. The synopsis is described as “a deaf worker from the police canteen is called-in as an emergency lip reader for an investigation.” Once she’s in, she ends up getting deeper and deeper into the world of crime.
Not much else is known about the show at this time.
Does the premise of the show sound familiar to you? If you thought about Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye, you would be correct. Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye is based on the real life Sue Thomas, a deaf woman who was an expert lip reader who worked for the FBI. Sue herself grew up in oralism and wasn’t fluent in American Sign Language (ASL), which brings us to this question: how many deaf characters in the media are expert lip readers? Or at least give the illusion of being one?
You see this happened to the character Daphne Vasquez in Switched At Birth, a very popular show on ABC Family/Freeform that dare I say got Americans to be very interested in Deaf culture and ASL for a period of time.
Daphne seemed to be an expert lip reading teenager on the show. Sure, she had her moments of misunderstanding and asking people to repeat themselves, but for the most part, the show made it seem like lip reading was a breeze for her.
Marlee Matlin has also played characters where she was able to lip read easily. One of the shows I always think of is Law and Order: SVU where she was in a dark and dreary hospital room and lip reading Detective Munch, who mostly spoke to her while sometimes using a little bit of ASL. That type of setting would be hard to lip read someone in, especially when you’re ill in the hospital (at least, I’m going to assume that’s what the lighting was supposed to look like, but who knows when the earlier SVU seasons were always so dark?).
So how easy is lip reading in real life? Research says that only 30-40% of the English language can be read on the lips. That 30-40% is under the best conditions for doing so.
We need people to be facing us, no loud background noises, great lighting. The people we’re speaking to ideally don’t have any facial hair because it’s hard to see their lips when they do. When people don’t enunciate well, it’s hard to tell the difference between words. When people over enunciate, words become cartoonish and it’s just as difficult to see the words properly.
But these facts typically are not mentioned in these shows. So what tends to happen is hearing people expect deaf people in real life to be able to read lips like the deaf people in the TV shows and movies do, and then they get upset when we don’t.
Some people are really good at lip reading, but then there are deaf people like me who aren’t. The only two people I’ve ever been able to lip read well are my parents. Of course I would. I’ve known their speech patterns all of my life with the progression of my hearing loss. I can usually understand the most common phrases that are used in a restaurant setting. And then there’s the swear words because, well, why not?
But I still mess up. Even in the best recommended conditions, I still mess up from time to time.
In detective shows (and in real life), the police force is working at all hours, and in all seasons and weather. Working at night will be less accessible than working during the afternoon, but the sun can also block one’s line of sight. Wind can make it difficult to hear if one has residual hearing that they use alongside lip reading. You tend to shield your face away from the wind, and the rain as well, so you can’t see your peer’s faces very well.
The Silent Hour shows this very well. When Detective Frank Shaw returns to work after losing his hearing, the audio is muffled with sirens, and the darkness makes it harder to see. Frank was not able to lip read very well. Of course, he’s not an “expert lip reader” to begin with, but this still shows the difficulty.
In Sound of Metal, they cover this as well when Ruben loses his hearing.
So it’ll be interesting to see how Code of Silence does. Judging by one very short clip of a scene, Rose’s character doesn’t look down at this man’s lips once while they’re having a conversation in an establishment during the evening hours. They look to be making eye contact the entire time. I know when I’m lip reading someone, my eyes are mostly at their lips, even with my hearing aids in.
Code of Silence is expected to air May 18, 2025 on ITVX in the UK and BritBox in North America.