Ricky Gervais

You could get some idea of how nervous the BBC was about Life's Too Short (Thursday, BBC Two) by the documentary it put out beforehand which made it perfectly clear that its star, Warwick Davis, had not been cruelly press-ganged into appearing in a comedy about a dwarf. No, he'd actually done it of his own free will.

While Davis himself was very good, somewhere along the line co-writers Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais seem to have forgotten to give him much of a character. Instead, he was another bumptious, insecure actor, forever puffing himself up - albeit one who's only 3ft 6in tall. Easily the best scene came, not with Davis, but with the appearance of Liam Neeson playing a wonderfully humourless version of himself.

What made this so good was that it tapped into the dolefulness to which Neeson, one suspects, is prone. Yet while he and Davis suffered from the lack of self-awareness that's the hallmark of Merchant and Gervais's comedy, Davis's brimming optimism in the face of divorce and bankruptcy just seemed a bit sad by comparison.

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So, are we laughing at the dwarf or are we laughing with him? Once you'd decided which side of the height-challenged fence you were sitting on, you could get on with the rather more important business of deciding whether new Ricky Gervais comedy Life's Too Short is any good or not.

And it is - good, that is - in a 'law of diminishing returns, it's not The Office', kind of way. Gervais and Stephen Merchant are masters of the faux-documentary genre and, in Warwick Davis, Life's Too Short's dwarf-in-residence, they've found the perfect vehicle for taking the rise out of egotistical self-delusion. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what all their stuff is about.
Built around a video diary documenting Davis's disintegrating life and career - from the heights of a Star Wars Ewok, he's now reduced to begging for crumbs from agents Gervais and Merchant - Life's Too Short has as little to do with life as a dwarf as Towie does with Essex. It's about scrambling for survival on life's seething ant-heap: and if that means a spot of Ricky - grovelling, so be it.

'How does he get away with it?' pondered Liam Neeson of Gervais's career. He'd stopped by at Gervais's office for comedy tips and proceeded (hilariously) to reveal a total sense of humour bypass. How indeed? Gervais's smug style hovers on the jokey butt-cheek of self-parody but, even though you know he's laughing at us, not with us, you can't stop yourself from giggling.

One of the questions you might ask about Life's Too Short, the new comedy from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, is how it would have worked if its central character wasn't a dwarf. Life's Too Short is built around an actor called Warwick Davis, who plays a comically tweaked version of himself. Like the real Warwick, this one was an Ewok in Return of the Jedi and runs a talent agency hiring out other dwarfs ("I've had a lot of success and this is my chance to pay that forward"). Unlike the real Warwick (I assume), this one is in the middle of a messy divorce and looking for a way to pay off a massive tax bill. And one of the striking things is how much of the comedy depends less on his physical stature than on his status, as a man whose opinion of himself is considerably larger than the world's. Warwick is playing Warwick but he's also playing Brent/Millman/Gervais, that slippery amalgam of real character and comic invention that props up nearly everything Gervais does.

You saw it again and again, in the unmistakably Brentish way that Warwick added self-serving footnotes to embarrassing footage ("Oohh..." he said nervously, as his estranged wife lets rip. "Showing off"); in the little sideways glances at the camera; in the unwitting revelations of his self-centredness. None of those jokes would be substantially different if Davis was two feet taller. Similarly, Warwick's incompetent accountant (who doesn't know how to do percentages on his calculator) would be equally funny with an averagely sized client. And the cameo in which Liam Neeson turned up at Gervais and Merchant's office for advice on comedy improvisation didn't even need Warwick to be in the room (though he actually was there, keeping a chair warm). A lot of it, in other words, would have worked in exactly the same way, though it would have been a good deal more vulnerable to charges of recycling.

Which leaves us with the jokes that are inextricably related to Davis's height. Some of these play mischievously with prejudices. "You're a dwarf. How can you not know 'Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho'?" Warwick said to one of his performers incredulously. Others exploit his height, such as a long sequence in which he had to enlist a scornful passer-by to help him get into Gervais and Merchant's office (the door buzzer was too high). And one or two edge us uncomfortably close to simply laughing at little people. As Warwick pompously compared himself to Martin Luther King and talked of his dream that "one day dwarfs will walk equally", his rhetoric was undermined by the sight of him falling out of his car. It's a punchline moment, but is it a joke about a self-deceiving man or one whose legs don't reach the ground? I'm still not entirely sure, and I suspect that Gervais in particular would be happy about that. If you want to take offence, be his guest. He's certainly made it easy for you. But be warned that you may have to suppress a laugh as you do it, and then think about what exactly you're suppressing.

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