Comedy producer on his childhood polio, and letting Ricky Gervais joke about his disability

Ash Atalla has told of the difficulties for him and his family   after a childhood bout of polio left him unable to walk.

Speaking on Desert Island Discs this morning, the Cairo-born comedy producer behind The Office, Stath Lets Flats and People Just Do Nothing, told how he contracted the disease when he was six months old, when he and his mum were in Egypt and his father had come to England to finish his medical exams.

‘I think I got polio pretty hard,’ he told presenter Lauren Lavern. ‘I was in hospital and essentially expected to die. In fact, they sent me home to die. With an oxygen tank – bit of a downer.’

Saying the story was ‘insane’, the 53-revealed that his mother never told his father the news, ‘which is something I only found out recently’. 

‘She said she didn't want to disrupt his studies,’ Atalla explained. ‘I know that she would have made that decision for all the right reasons. She was also a doctor herself. She had four older brothers who were all doctors and so I was having very good medical care.

‘But I think the expectation was I was’'t going to live.  I said to mum, "So what were you just going to tell dad that I had died?" and I think that was her plan. They didn’t really tell him for a year… mum did eventually say to dad, ‘Bit of news for you, there’s been a mishap with Ash. Very bad polio. Now he’ll be confined to a wheelchair."

‘I can't really even begin to understand what a shock it was to mum because it's such a record scratch to happen in your life. It's so sudden and so brutal and just obviously not the life that they had planned.’

They then decided to move the family to Britain, where they believed young Ash would receive better care.

His dad got a job in Belfast – where the family got a surprise because they knew nothing of The Troubles –  and then to Hampshire, where Atalla went to Lord Mayor’s Treloar’s College. The boarding school for children with disabilities is now at the centre of the contaminated blood scandal as several pupils died from HIV following blood transfusions,

Atalla revealed: ‘Chris, who I shared a bedroom with, died of it, and by the time I was about 13 or 14, I think I'd been to like seven or eight funerals of kids that were at my school. So that was tough.’

More broadly, he felt the environment there was not best for his development and subsequently went to a mainstream sixth form college.

However, he was full of praise for his parent for preparing him for adult life, saying; ‘Even as a four- or five-year-old,  my life was sort of a Rocky montage of getting ready for being an adult. There was a strong sense from dad that nobody was going to come and help me and that it had to be me helping myself. It was never arduous and it was never without love… [but] I had a very strong sense that life was going to be difficult, or could be difficult.’

Atalla said that background plus his dad’s ‘immigrant mentality’ meant he was always determined to try hard.

But he added: ‘When I look back, I slightly worry if I sucked the oxygen a little bit out of the family…. I think my mum and dad maybe bent the whole family aroun  what worked well for me, so I wonder if my brother and sister felt marginalised a little bit. ‘

But he admitted he had never spoken to them about it, joking: ‘Why would I have a meaningful, deep conversation? Let's have the conversation here on the radio!’

However, Atalla remains at least physically close to his brother – revealing they live in the same building.

The producer also spoke about feeling as if his wheelchair stopped him from having girlfriends in his youth. He audibly choked up as he recalled asking a girl out when he was about 14, and explaining: ‘I remember that she laughed, not a cruel laugh, but a laugh of like, "obviously not"… I remember thinking "Yeah that makes sense actually, why would she?"’

As an adult he got a job as a stockbroker for an investment bank ‘to make the wheelchair disappear, really, to make life more palatable, to be more comfortable.’ But he admitted he was terrible at the job and got fired for buying when he should have been selling – even though the mistake actually turned out to be profitable. 

He then got into TV, initially as a runner on Mysteries with Carol Vorderman, before moving into the comedy department 

Atalla, 53, also revealed mixed feeling at allowing  Ricky Gervais to make jokes about his disability.

Most notably the stand-up poked fun at Atalla’s wheelchair   at the 2001 British Comedy Awards. Identifying him as The Office’s producer as they collected their accolade, Gervais added:: ‘He wanted me to tell you that so you didn’t think he’d won a competition.’

In another award speech, Gervais compared Atalla to physicist Stephen Hawking, saying: ‘You’re just the same... but without all the clever stuff.’

Atalla said he ‘felt good’ about the jokes at the time, revealing that the competition-winner line was his ‘because I was suddenly concerned at the optics of... people in wheelchairs weren’t on stages back then.’

He added that he plays ‘fast and loose with the rules around my wheelchair,’ explaining: ‘I’m really happy to use it when I want to, like, I haven’t queued at an airport in years, and then other times I get annoyed that other people might even bring it up. 

‘I’m a producer, and people don’t 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.’

Looking back, Atalla admitted: ‘Maybe 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.’

But he said more recently he had considered ‘whether I was right to do that.’

Elsewhere in the episode, Atalla also said able-bodied actors should not play disabled people, while acknowledging it is ‘a complex issue’.

He said: ‘I think it’s a very simple rule now to have... just make it a 100 per cent rule, and nobody will get hurt. Disabled people should only play disabled people on television.

‘You can make an argument to justify why an able-bodied actor should do a disabled role… It’s just that, for me, it’s an argument that falls apart really quickly. It’s just not one that I believe in."

The tracks Atalla chose included The Universal by Blur, the 1965 Egyptian hit Enta Omri by Umm Kulthum, which meant a lot to his parents, and Handbags and Gladrags by Rod Stewart - the theme to The Office.

He picked Rewire Your Anxious Brain as his book for the fictional island he was ‘scared about my thoughts being the thing that derails me’, admitting that he was not good without other people around and ‘my brain can be quite an unforgiving place’.

And his luxury item was ‘a massive curry house, four-storey garish neon-lit, nothing classy’.

• Desert Island Discs is available now on BBC Sounds and will be repeated at 9am on Friday. 

Published: 13 Jul 2025