Coronation Street actress  Cherylee Houston receives MBE for services to people with disabilities

Former Morecambe High School pupil, Cherylee Houston, picked up her honour for services to drama and to people with disabilities, at Buckingham Palace.

Cherylee, who plays Izzy Armstrong in the ITV soap, received her award from the Princess Royal.

The star was the first actor to use a wheelchair among the Coronation Street cast. She has long campaigned for greater representation of disabled people on TV and in films.

Together with fellow actor Melissa Johns she has set up the influential Disabled Artists Networking Community (DANC) which has a data base for disabled creatives. It is a community of just under a thousand disabled artists working in TV and the arts.

DANC brings together disabled professional and key decision or change makers in the industry to improve representation.

Asked how important it is for viewers to see disabled people on prime time television programmes, she said: “If you think when you were growing up who your role models were, who influenced you, if you as a disabled child don’t have that, how do you know what you can do?”

She said role models are needed so that every disabled young person can live to their full potential.

Houston said the last decade has been difficult for disabled people, but she expressed fears for the future too.

She said the cost-of-living crisis will have a massive impact on disabled people.

“But that’s why I firmly believe the more we’re on our screens, the more we’re going to be understood, the more people care and empathise and will ensure that we will have equal rights and equal opportunity, because it’s about equality,” she said, adding that “it would be nice if the world was a bit more physically accessible”.

Cherylee’s parents used to have the photography studio at Bare Lane train station in Morecambe.