Stephen Merchant

Obviously, The Office was brilliant. Still is. Even now, I'll stumble across a repeat - the night out at the disco! Bacardi Breezers £1, Wonderbras get in free! Gareth leaving in a sidecar for a threesome! - and before I know it I'll have watched the lot, again.

Fawlty Towers is the only other show which has that effect.

Some people preferred Extras, reckoning it to be sweeter because of the Andy-Maggie relationship, but for a long time I thought Ricky Gervais was just showing off with cruel put-downs and star walk-ons in a lazily showbizzy setting. The last episode, though, was brilliant on the nature of fame - sweet ending, too. Nevertheless, I seemed to have cooled on the idea of the main man as Ricky Genius (notwithstanding Stephen Merchant's contribution). So, as he got louder and ruder, did a few others. Thus, in advance of Life's Too Short, Gervais was issuing the challenge: "Bring on the haters."

Because Extras won me over, sort of, I'm loath to criticise this after one half-hour. But it has to be said that, uninspiringly, we're back in the biz (Warwick Davis, the lead, plays himself as an actor running a theatrical agency). That Gervais also plays himself, smirkingly, in a plush office, where he does that Brentian double-take for the docusoap camera underneath a giant Extras poster. That Davis is really playing another version of Gervais. Oh, and did I mention he's a dwarf?

Some, though not all, of the jokes were to do with height or lack thereof. Did I laugh when Davis fell out of his high-sided 4x4? Yes I did. He's a role model for dwarves, he says, who's trying to improve their, er, standing in the world and in this he feels a bit like Martin Luther King. "You say a dwarf wasn't taken from his homeland, chained and whipped and forced to change his name - no, maybe not, but then I've never seen a black man fired from a cannon."

Liam Neeson, also playing himself, hustled Gervais and Merchant, also playing himself, for stand-up work and was perceived to be even more berkish. Suddenly Davis' size was no longer the issue, he'd completely blended in, and maybe this is Life's Too Short's honourable intention. But it still feels like a safe, easy show. A safe show about the vertically challenged (with supplementary Aids and cancer gags)? How very Ricky Gervais, you might say, but on this evidence it isn't going to be the funniest series about a self-referencing comedy double act which sends up Liam Neeson. That award has already been claimed by The Trip. I'll love The Office for ever, though, so I'll never be a hater. I'm just, like Gareth after his health & safety demo failed to wow the Wernham Hogg sexpot, disappointed.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Life's Too Short, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's much hyped new comedy starring Warwick Davies as a deluded, out of work actor.

An amalgam of The Office and Extras, presented in the once pioneering mock documentary format, it comes complete with all the comedy tics, touches and glances to camera associated with Gervais/Merchant productions. There are even moments when the excellent Davies, as the self-styled "UK's go-to dwarf", behaves and sounds exactly like Gervais' most celebrated creation David Brent.

Life's Too Short has a familiarity that breeds, if not quite contempt, a genuine sense of disappointment at the lack of ambition. Even Gervais' trademark assaults on political correctness - a blacked up woman dwarf impersonating Stevie Wonder, for example - come over as contrived.

But when it is funny, Life's Too Short is funnier than anything else currently on television and Gervais appreciates the crowd pleasing value of a good star turn. I suspect people will be discussing Liam Neeson's inspired cameo, playing himself as an aspirational stand-up comedian, long after the show's weaker moments are forgotten.

Liam Neeson was playing gloriously against type in the opener of Life's Too Short. He was pitching, to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant (who play the successful comedy partnership Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant) a change of career; Liam wanted to branch into comedy. It took guts and no small talent from Neeson to come across as the world's most dour, egotistic, pedantic and, crucially, utterly humourless actor; his deadpanning of this alter ego made for five deeply funny minutes of comedy. I bet they fell about between takes.

I still like Gervais but perhaps wisely, given that a couple of odd little, ahem, misinterpretations by lesser minds, and the preponderance of that infuriating giggle - oh God, I've just thought of its screech as he falls about between takes - had begun to manage the impossible and take the sheen off Ricky Gervais for even diehard fans, he's put himself well in the background. Instead, the star is, of course, Warwick Davis, Britain's self-styled "go-to dwarf".

Warwick is immense. That's not a cheap sizeist joke, though I'm sure he wouldn't mind; he makes enough of them himself, mainly just by default, by being there physically, letting the camera show the absurdities. Not only is he a good actor, he's a terrific comic. He plays a far less likable version of himself, lacking in self-knowledge and overburdened with ego. In fact, he plays himself as David Brent. With the added size advantage, the contradictions become even more excruciating, as in his disdain for his tall, pretty wife. When he basically falls out of his Range Rover while voicing something about Martin Luther King, we're back, thanks this time to a brave and talented dwarf, to golden Gervais territory, with just-so timing and direction. This could be, you'll excuse me, huge.

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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