‘The Office’ producer says he regrets Ricky Gervais jokes about his disability

Ash Atalla, who produced the UK version of The Office, has admitted that he has questioned his own stance on having Ricky Gervais make jokes about his disability.

It comes after he previously insisted that Gervais mock his disability while picking up an award at the 2001 British Comedy Awards. Atalla contracted polio as a child, and the disease left him unable to walk.

“We still need more money. It’s a very low budget,” Gervais joked at the time, pointing to Atalla. “He was the runner – no, that’s the producer, he wanted me to tell you that so you didn’t think he’d won a competition.”

In another award acceptance speech, Gervais also compared Atalla with Stephen Hawking, saying: “You’re just the same… but without all the clever stuff.”

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, when asked about how he felt about the jokes now, Atalla said: “I felt good about it at the time. The joke that people remember, the first one, was a line that I gave to him, because I said to him, ‘Make sure they know I haven’t won a competition to be here.’”

“Because I was suddenly concerned at the optics of… people in wheelchairs weren’t on stages back then. And he did that joke at the British Comedy Awards. There was this huge roar, and that kind of started the double act of that material on stage,” he continued.

“I tried to make the point a couple of times that it’s about nuance, and because I think I play fast and loose with the rules around my wheelchair, I’m really happy to use it when I want to, like, I haven’t queued at an airport in years, and then other times I get annoyed that other people might even bring it up.

“I’m a producer, and people don’t normally notice the producer, but there I was on stage, and I got a profile, a lot because of the stuff that Ricky and I used to do on stage.”

Reflecting on the jokes he admitted that “maybe I realise, or I feel I sold a bit of myself in that moment, I put the wheelchair front and centre because I knew it was something that would set me apart in that instance. Set me apart in a good way.”

“And, just in recent years, as I’ve thought about it, it’s made me consider whether I was right to do that,” he said.

Elsewhere, Gervais recently said that producers sometimes question his jokes, as “they don’t know whether it’s OK or not”.

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