The television producer who worked on Ricky Gervais‘s sitcom The Office and was the regular butt of his wheelchair jokes has said the comedian might be “obsessed” with disabled people.
Ash Atalla, who has also worked on The IT Crowd and People Just Do Nothing, uses a wheelchair after contracting polio as an infant.
When he appeared on stage with Gervais at the British Comedy Awards to accept a prize for The Office, Gervais joked that Atalla was the show’s runner. He also referred to Atalla as “my little wheelchair friend” and joked that he was “just the same as Stephen Hawking, but without all the clever stuff”.
According to The Times, Astra told the Edinburgh Television Festival last week: “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.”
The 47-year-old said he often made jokes about his own disability to put other people around him at ease: “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.”
Gervais’s jokes about disabled people have drawn controversy on a number of occasions. In 2012 he came under fire for his one-off comedy Derek, which was billed as the story of a “simple, vulnerable man working in an old people’s home”.
Some, including fellow comedian Stewart Lee, said the character made fun of the “mentally handicapped”. Early reactions described the sitcom as “mawkish and misjudged” while a piece for The Guardian in 2013 suggested it would revive the view that the show was “an exercise in bigoted cruelty”.
Gervais has also been accused in the past of going out of his way to cause offence, from material about disability in Life’s Too Short, based on lead actor Warwick Davis’s experience of dwarfism, to jokes about race and trans people.
The Independent has contacted Gervais’s representative for comment.
