Ash Atalla, producer

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ash Atalla is a television producer whose first hit was the BBC sitcom The Office, starring Ricky Gervais. He followed it up with the IT Crowd, People Just Do Nothing, Big Boys and Stath Lets Flats. His haul of awards from these programmes include six BAFTAs, four Royal Television Society awards, a Golden Globe and an Emmy. Ash was born in Cairo and when he was six months old he contracted polio. He has been a wheelchair user all his life and believes the challenges he faced in his early life ignited his drive and ambition.

Ash graduated from the University of Bath with a degree in Business Administration and became a stockbroker for an investment bank. It was a fleeting career as he soon realised he wasn’t a natural when it came to numbers. His next stop was the BBC where he eventually joined the comedy department.

Ash produced both series of The Office and, after leaving the BBC, moved on to the award-winning Channel 4 comedy series the IT Crowd and later the BBC’s People Just Do Nothing, the sitcom about a London pirate radio station.

He co-founded the production company Roughcut TV in 2007 and recently produced the six-part drama series Little Disasters, starring Jo Joyner and Diane Kruger.

Ash lives in London.

DISC ONE: Everything She Wants - Wham! DISC TWO: Enta Omri (“You Are My Life”) - Umm Kulthum DISC THREE: At Night - Shakedown DISC FOUR: Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) - Phil Collins DISC FIVE: My Ever Changing Moods - The Style Council DISC SIX: Handbags and Gladrags – Rod Stewart DISC SEVEN: The Universal - Blur DISC EIGHT: The Girl is Mine - Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney

BOOK CHOICE: Rewire Your Anxious Brain: Stop Overthinking, Find Calm, and Be Present by Nick Trenton LUXURY ITEM: An Indian restaurant CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: The Girl is Mine - Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney

Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:04.8	Hello, I'm Lauren Levern, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4.
0:09.6	Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:17.0	For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
0:24.4	Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
0:28.8	I hope you enjoy listening. My castaway this week is the television producer Ash Atala. His first hit was The Office, starring Ricky Jervais. He followed it up with the IT crowd. People just do nothing, big boys and staff let's flats. His hall of awards from these programmes includes six BAFTAs, four RTS Awards, a Golden Globe and an Emmy. He started out in an office of his own
1:12.5	as a stockbroker, but found words more fun than numbers, so packed in that job and became an
1:17.7	intern at the BBC. He eventually joined the comedy department where he began to pick, polish and
1:23.3	push projects, almost crying with relief that he'd found his calling.
1:30.1	His childhood wasn't without its challenges.
1:34.6	He was born in Cairo in 1972 and contracted polio as a baby.
1:39.7	The disease left him unable to walk and his parents made the decision to relocate to the UK in search of better opportunities for him.
1:42.5	He says, I've always been worried about being invisible.
1:45.6	It's GCSE psychology to say the guy in the wheelchair wants to make sure he's noisy enough
1:49.9	that people take notice. Working in comedy is one way of making sure you're invited to the party.
1:56.2	Ashtela, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thanks for having me. So there are a lot of different elements to your job. You know, you can be actually working on a script. You can be trying to get something commissioned and get it on air. But obviously, you've also got to wade through a pile of scripts to find the next big thing. What are you actually looking for? And how do you know when you found it? This is a cliche, you don't know what you're looking for but what I do know is when I found
2:21.5	it I'm quite instinctive. Yeah I think when I know I know I can be like maniacally sure about a show.
2:28.3	But that must be absolutely critical to what you do because you've often got to go in and
2:31.6	have the argument with some you know a broadcaster for example who doesn't want to commission the show yeah that's exactly the right way of putting it
2:38.4	and the thing that exhausts me about my job is endlessly competitive i feel like i'm in just
2:43.9	different levels of 3d chess fights what i find difficult is trying to persuade somebody when i'm
2:49.2	sure i'm not always sure and you can't be sure all the time.
	...

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