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.

Gervais and Merchant's comedy is generally held to be the antithesis of this kind of thing - it's known as the comedy of embarrassment, because it creates characters so deluded they are unbearable to watch. Their new Walter Mitty is Warwick Davis, "Britain''s go-to dwarf" as he styles himself, who still thinks he's a big shot (dwarf puns being unavoidable in Life's Too Short) after starring as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi in the Eighties. The joke is that he's not a big shot at all, and all it takes is a camera trained on his existence for a few hours to show that his life is rubbish.

You feel a little bit sorry for Davis, not because he is portrayed as both feckless and conceited but because he has big shoes to fill (pun two). In Gervais and Merchant's previous two hits, Gervais was front and centre. His performances as David Brent and then Andy Millman are easily overlooked, because, aside from all the funny lines, they were really good. He invented a whole new screen language for faux documentary - a pained lexicon of glances and gurns, saying a dumb thing to camera and then realising it was slightly dumb but windmilling on anyway.

So when Warwick Davis starts blundering on about how he is not homosexual, and that in fact he has many a notch on his bedpost, that's a Brent-ish line delivered in a Brentish cadence and prompting a distinctly Brentish wince. And Davis is not as good at it as Gervais. I dare say had you watched Life's Too Short a decade ago you would have thought it matchless revelry. Now it's just not as good as The Office.

At least not yet. Gervais and Merchant's comedy does have a habit of growing on you (dwarf pun three. My sacking imminent). Extras, in particular, was sold to us as a series of celebrity spoofs and ended up being an affecting character piece about what happens when your friends make it and you don't. As that series proved, Gervais and Merchant have a gift for human drama as well as sometimes inhuman comedy. They have earned the right for us to see how Life's Too Short plays out.

Warwick Davis already eyeing second series

Warwick Davis is keen to film another series of Life's Too Short - but he will leave the decision up to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Ricky Gervais: Comedy and Controversy

In the many interviews I have done over the past few weeks to promote Life's Too Short, the same few questions always seem to come up...

'Life's Too Short': Meet the cast and celebrity cameos

Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Warwick Davis have hired in some of their best A-List pals for their third major sitcom project (the follow-up to Extras and The Office) Life's Too Short.

It's become clear that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are never going to make anything like The Office ever again. And, as they've said themselves, why should they: having created sitcom genius and revolutionised the genre, they are hardly likely to top it.

It's become clear that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are never going to make anything like The Office ever again. And, as they've said themselves, why should they: having created sitcom genius and revolutionised the genre, they are hardly likely to top it. What they did for an encore was Extras, which mocked their entry into the showbiz elite, yet celebrated it by bringing in all their new pals to amusingly send up their public images. They foisted the tedious witterings of their non-famous pal Karl Pilkington upon us, until he was in showbiz too. And Ricky made some disappointing movies and popped up in all his American showbiz mates' TV shows and on his pal Jonathan Ross' chat show and annoyed everyone by being offensive on Twitter (but maybe it was just him pretending to be offensive, except that still involved offending people, but they weren't his friends so they didn't really count). And meanwhile Stephen, er, did some "ironic" bank adverts.

OK, they did make the film Cemetery Junction, which wasn't about fame at all, but not many people saw that. Instead, Gervais in particular has seemed to relish spending his time in the public eye portraying a smug, annoying celebrity character to the point where the last line of Animal Farm seems to apply - looking "from pig to man and from man to pig ... but already it was impossible to say which was which".

So it is, ahem, small wonder that the pair's latest venture returns to that well, starring their showbiz chum and Extras guest star Warwick Davis, in a faux-documentary sitcom about a dwarf actor who runs an agency for other short actors (as Davis actually does) but who can't get any work for himself, even when he begs Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to write him something. Confused? Yes, that's the point: life's too short revels in the boundaries between the real and the not-real, with most of the characters using their actual names, while playing themselves as venial twits.

The similarities to Extras can barely be overstated. While Davis has the starring role - and it was apparently his idea - the dialogue makes him actually sound like Ricky Gervais: you can hear those Brentian speech rhythms leaking out. It's oddly reminiscent of the recent films of Woody Allen, where he drafts in various young actors to play the "Woody" character and they all end up imitating those familiar nervous tics. Here, it's difficult not to hear Gervais's voice behind Davis's lines, such as: "I'm a bit like Martin Luther King, because I too have a dream that one day dwarves will be treated equally ... you say, oh no, it's not the same ... but I've never seen a black man fired from a cannon. Every day for a whole season and twice on Saturdays."

It's not the fault of Warwick Davis, who's absolutely fine in the role of a hapless fictional version of himself and clearly well up for any resulting confusion it may cause. But there's just so much of Gervais and Merchant, both in the references and on screen, that he's in danger of being squeezed out of what's meant to be his own show.

The show shares Extras' fascination with celebrity cameos and when Liam Neeson pops up to consult Gervais and Merchant, playing "themselves", on his stand-up comedy plans, Davis is relegated to the background while they milk the scene, surrounded by posters reminding us of all their previous work. Like Extras' Andy Millman, Davis' character has a useless hanger-on: instead of an agent, it's his accountant (Steve Brody, who was David Brent's useless agent in The Office Christmas Special). Even Barry Off Of EastEnders turns up, still playing the same loser.

Well, plenty of people loved Extras, of course, but given that it was a self-referential take on Gervais's own rise to fame, isn't making a meta-parody of it just a post-modern gag too far? But worse than that, the joke isn't all that funny anymore. There are a couple of laughs here, for sure (mostly from Neeson's bit), but the whole thing just seems like an indulgent, back-slapping waste of talent.

"My name is Warwick Davis. I'm the UK's go-to dwarf." Four years on from Extras - and eight since the last episodes of The Office - Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant return to their mockumentary roots with this excruciatingly funny sitcom starring 3ft 6in actor Warwick Davis as a rather down-at-heel version of his real self. Trailed by a camera crew making a documentary about his life as a film star and dwarf talent agent, Warwick - who's been in everything from Return of the Jedi to the Harry Potter movies - has hit hard times and is keen to brush over embarrassing realities and make a good impression. "I want people to see a sophisticated dwarf-about-town who carries himself with dignity. I'm a role model, a bit like Martin Luther King..."

Making viewers feel as uncomfortable about their political correctness as their prejudice is Gervais and Merchant's stock in trade, and the cringe-making moments pile up relentlessly. They also revive a key ingredient of Extras, cramming the series with as many celebrity guest appearances as possible. Liam Neeson gets the lion's share of the self-deprecation tonight, although Extras regular Shaun Williamson also gets to make a familiar contribution.