The Office producer Ash Atalla says Ricky Gervais’s disability jokes made him ‘uncomfortable’

‘I wouldn’t allow so many jokes to be made about my wheelchair now,’ he said

Ash Atalla, the producer of The Office, has said that the jokes Ricky Gervais made about his disability made him feel “a little bit uncomfortable”.

Atalla, who has also worked on The IT Crowd and People Just Do Nothing, uses a wheelchair after contracting polio as a child.

While accepting a prize for The Office at the British Comedy Awards in 2001, Gervais joked that Atalla was the show’s runner. He also referred to Atalla as “my little wheelchair friend” and quipped that he was “just the same as Stephen Hawking, but without all the clever stuff”.

Looking back on the event, Atalla told The Times in a new interview: “I felt a little bit uncomfortable. There was a period of late Nineties comedy with the likes of Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle where the game was – see what you could get away with and then reverse intellectualise it.”

He added: “Those jokes didn’t bother me at the time, but they would if they happened now. I wouldn’t allow so many jokes to be made about my wheelchair, I wouldn’t want to be defined by that.”

The Independent has contacted Gervais’s representatives for comment.

Atalla also called for disabled roles to be played by disabled actors. “It shocks me that Bryan Cranston played a quadriplegic in The Upside in 2017,” he said. “Eddie Redmayne playing Stephen Hawking was just about forgivable as the film had Hawking pre-wheelchair but it was still iffy.”

The 2021 Diamond report, which researches diversity across British television, found that disabled people are “the most under-represented group” of all. While around 17 per cent of the UK’s working age population is disabled, disabled people make up just 5.8 per cent of the off-screen workforce and 8.2 per cent on screen.