Ricky Gervais

Rosamund Hanson: Ricky Gervais had me in stitches

Rosamund Hanson, star of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's new comedy Life's Too Short reveals why the duo are the perfect comedy dream team.

TV review: Life's Too Short; Rev

Same old characters; same old celeb cameos: it's time for Ricky Gervais to move on.

Life's Too Short and Rev reviewed

Benji Wilson gives his verdict on the first episode of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's new mockumentary series Life's Too Short and the return of the sitcom Rev.

'Life's Too Short' premiere amuses nearly 2.5m

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's new comedy Life's Too Short premiered solidly on Thursday evening, while Rev returned with nearly 2.3m, the latest audience data has shown.

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.

I sat before Life's Too Short, arms crossed and daring it to be funny because I really wanted to be offended AND unamused. A comedy series about dwarves? Who the hell would write such a thing? (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.)

But Life's Too Short isn't a comedy about dwarves, though it does have a dwarf star - the urbane, winning Warwick Davis, a dwarf actor (Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter) down on his luck. His wife's thrown him out, he's almost bankrupt and the work has dried up. Even clients at his dwarves-only casting agency are bad-tempered and resentful.

Though it stars Gervais doing his Gervaisy thing (the sly looks to camera, the faux puzzlement) he is eclipsed by Davis playing a version of himself. But everyone is overshadowed by Liam Neeson, who is majestically unfunny as a humourless Liam Neeson ("I'm always making lists. That's probably why Steven Spielberg
cast me as Oskar Schindler") who earnestly wishes to become a stand-up comedian.

Life's Too Short: Me, Johnny Depp and Ricky Gervais

Of all my career achievements, I am most proud of Life's Too Short.

Life's Too Short review: Small steps

After spending the last few years bullying Karl Pilkington, making the odd movie and getting themselves blacklisted from American award ceremonies, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant return to British TV with their latest feverishly-anticipated mockumentary this evening.

The dwarf actor dilemma

This week sees the start of Ricky Gervais's new series Life's Too Short, a comedy about a dwarf acting agency and its self-important owner. In real life the star, played by Warwick Davis, really does run such an agency. But how easy is it to be an actor with restricted growth and keep your integrity intact?

Anticipating the flak Life's Too Short might provoke and opting to get his revenge in first, Ricky Gervais last week announced that he embraced the haters. After last night's first episode, it's not the haters Gervais need worry about. It's the thoroughly indifferent. The problem with this new series is not that it's offensive; it's that it's just not very funny. It took over eight minutes to raise the first smile - Warwick Davis falling out of the 4x4 - and the only real laugh came near the end when Liam Neeson tried to pitch a stand-up routine about Aids.

It all just seemed too familiar; partly because any element of surprise had long since gone thanks to the endless preview trailers and the PR campaign to reassure everyone that the show was basically politically correct, but mainly because it felt like the show you'd have written yourself if you were trying to write like Gervais. Push the boundaries of taste. Tick. Blur the real and the imagined. Tick. Rope in a few celebs. Tick. Take the money and run. Tick.

For those fortunate enough to miss all the hype - there must be one or two of you, I guess - Life's Too Short is a mockumentary about a dwarf actor whose career and marriage has hit the skids and is hoping to revive both by making a reality show of his life. In theory, this is as good a starting point for a comedy as any other. Failure, anger, hubris and self-delusion are key building blocks of much humour and there's plenty of potential for all four. Only it's seldom realised.

It's not so much Warwick Davis as the dwarf who is the problem, but Gervais and, to a lesser extent, his sidekick, Stephen Merchant. There's only so long you can go on writing and performing the same type of characters without boring your audience and the pair have passed the point of no return. We've seen Gervais humiliating Merchant in Extras, we've seen them both humiliating Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad. And the joke has worn thin by the time they play Warwick Davis's agents and bully him.

Increasingly, also, Gervais' own ego is getting in the way. There used to be a tension when real celebs started showing up in Extras because there was a lingering sense that they didn't quite know what they had let themselves in for and that the joke might be some way on them. That ambivalence is now long gone.

Gervais' own desperation for fame is now utterly transparent. Having seen him crave Johnny Depp's approval on The Graham Norton Show last week, it's become impossible to believe in his indifference to celebrity. Which rather kills the gag. And while you can't not be happy for Gervais that he's achieved the recognition his genius deserved, it's a bit of a shame for the rest of us that it seems to have - temporarily, I hope - nobbled his talent.