The Office producer Ash Atalla left ‘uncomfortable’ by Ricky Gervais’ disability jokes

Ash Atalla, third from left, said while the jokes didn’t bother him at the time, they would now (Picture: Gareth Davies/Getty Images)

The Office producer Ash Atalla has recalled being the butt of Ricky Gervais’ jokes about disability after the pair worked together on the BBC series.

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

Speaking about the gags Gervais would direct at his disability, previously referring to Atalla as ‘my little wheelchair friend’, the producer said while they didn’t bother him at the time, looking back he wouldn’t allow so many jokes to be made about him.

Atalla told the Times: ‘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.

‘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.’

Atalla has won numerous awards for his work (Picture: David M. Benett/Getty Images for Universal Music)

It’s not the first time Atalla has shared his discomfort at being the centre of Gervais’ jokes, as well as his complicity, with the After Life star (who said if The Office was made today it would be cancelled) previously referring to Atalla as the show’s runner, while also saying he was ‘just the same as Stephen Hawking, but without all the clever stuff’.

In 2019 he told Edinburgh Television Festival: ‘I was complicit in him making fun of the wheelchair. But I don’t really look back at it with an enormous amount of pride. I feel a little bit uncomfortable about some of the stuff we did together.’

Adding he often made jokes at his own expense to make people feel comfortable around his disability, he went on: ‘But the question I get asked quite a lot about it is when Ricky was doing it there was another level of awkwardness to it. I was the producer of the show so I was not unpowerful in that dynamic, but he did then go on to make quite a few shows about disability so maybe he is obsessed with it.’

Atalla previously called out the disability jokes (Picture: J. Vespa/WireImage)

In 2003 Atalla also spoke of his work on The Office, in which character Brenda (played by Julie Fernandez), uses a wheelchair, and said elements of the script written by Gervais or Stephen Merchant ‘may have come from being around me’.

Recalling a scene where she is pushed away from a pub table by people wanting to get past, he told The Guardian: ‘It happens to me quite a lot, I told them about it and they’ve probably seen it.’

Atalla added at the time: ‘I’ve never had a bee in my bonnet about the way disabled people are portrayed. I’m probably a massive disappointment to the disabled community on that front – I didn’t come into television to change that, I just thought it was a great career.

‘With regard to my wheelchair and my career, I’ve had a pretty complex relationship with my disability and job. I was always very conscious about not being the guy who works in TV in a wheelchair and only makes and talks about disabled issues. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. I was nervous about that. But the fast success of The Office has changed that for me.’

However, speaking now, in his Times interview Atalla called out the lack of disabled representation on our screens and criticised the appearance of actors on screen who are defined by their disability.

More: Ricky Gervais

He said: ‘It cannot be right that you can barely point to a disabled character that is not defined by their disability on TV,’ before referring to Years and Years’ Ruth Madeley, who was born with spina bifida: ‘She barely talks about her disability but when she does she basically says, “I’m brilliant, I don’t need fixing”.’

Metro.co.uk contacted reps of Gervais for comment.

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