{"id":264057,"date":"2025-07-14T11:09:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T11:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/264057\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T11:09:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T11:09:09","slug":"the-office-producer-says-he-regrets-ricky-gervais-jokes-about-his-disability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/264057\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Office’ producer says he regrets Ricky Gervais jokes about his disability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ash Atalla, who produced the UK version of The Office<\/a>, has admitted that he has questioned his own stance on having Ricky Gervais<\/a>\u00a0make jokes about his disability.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still need more money. It\u2019s a very low budget,\u201d Gervais joked at the time, pointing to Atalla. \u201cHe was the runner \u2013 no, that\u2019s the producer, he wanted me to tell you that so you didn\u2019t think he\u2019d won a competition.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another award acceptance speech, Gervais also compared Atalla with Stephen Hawking, saying: \u201cYou\u2019re just the same\u2026 but without all the clever stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking to BBC<\/a> Radio 4\u2019s Desert Island Discs<\/a>, when asked about how he felt about the jokes now, Atalla said: \u201cI 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, \u2018Make sure they know I haven\u2019t won a competition to be here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I was suddenly concerned at the optics of\u2026 people in wheelchairs weren\u2019t 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,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tried to make the point a couple of times that it\u2019s about nuance, and because I think I play fast and loose with the rules around my wheelchair, I\u2019m really happy to use it when I want to, like, I haven\u2019t queued at an airport in years, and then other times I get annoyed that other people might even bring it up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a producer, and people don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the jokes he admitted that \u201cmaybe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd, just in recent years, as I\u2019ve thought about it, it\u2019s made me consider whether I was right to do that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, Gervais recently said that producers sometimes question his jokes, as \u201cthey don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s OK or not\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ash Atalla, who produced the UK version of The Office, has admitted that he has questioned his own…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3937],"tags":[77,382,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-264057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114851280576821803","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}