Hold My Hand focuses exclusively on signers – who can be refreshingly blunt and extremely revealing. Heroda and Hermon Berhane, the deaf identical twin presenters, say it reveals their community in a way never seen before
It may not be the first TV programme to describe itself as being “more than just a dating show”, but Hold My Hand is undoubtedly the first to focus exclusively on British Sign Language.
“We’ve been waiting to get a show of our own for such a long time,” says Heroda Berhane, one half of the deaf identical twin presenting duo, Hermon and Heroda. “People have never seen our culture, our identity, the way we discuss the things. So it’s a dating show, yes, but it’s not just about dating; it’s also revealing our identity and our culture, and that has never been seen before.”
The twins – who have more than 125,000 followers on their shared Instagram lifestyle account Being Her – are hoping to bust what Hermon calls “a lot of myths around deaf people being unable to do things because they think that we can’t communicate the same”. Their collaboration with the dating app Tinder in 2023 led with the headline statistic that 71% of 18- to 24-year-olds would not feel confident dating someone who uses BSL as their primary form of communication. According to the British Deaf Association, the UK has 150,000 BSL signers, of which 87,000 are deaf themselves.
