Office producer: I let Ricky make my chair a punchline

THE PRODUCER of The Office says the TV show changed his life but he “sold” a bit of himself in allowing Ricky Gervais to make jokes about his disability at the time, writes Jaymi McCann.

- By Jaymi McCann

Ash Atalla, 53, who developed polio as a baby, worked at the BBC when a young Stephen Merchant talked to him about his and Gervais’s new “mockumentary” idea.

He told Desert Island Discs of the comedy: “It was so raw and so unformed, and I felt an evangelical belief in it. [It’s] a detailed exploration of mundanity.”