Wheelchair-bound The Office UK producer Ash Atalla says Ricky Gervais' disability jokes about him went too far

The Independent

Atalla, who produced all 14 episodes of The Office UK, uses a wheelchair after contracting polio as a child. While accepting a prize for The Office at the British Comedy Awards in 2001, Gervais made several jokes about Atalla's disability, calling him 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 of London 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.”