'It's a cheap laugh - but offensive'

Warwick Davis has called on comics to stop using the word ‘midget’ to get a 'cheap laugh’.

The 3ft 6in Life’s Too Short and Idiot Abroad star says the preferred term to describe little people like himself varies from person to person.

But speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today, he says that the word ‘midget’ is ‘highly offensive’.

When asked by host Kirsty Young about the correct terminology, Davis said: ‘It is individual preference sometimes. As someone with dwarfism, I don’t mind the word "dwarf". I don’t mind the term "little person" – that’s my favourite actually – or "short person". 

‘But some people might not like "dwarf"; they might not like "little person".  It depends on the individual, but accepted terms are "someone with dwarfism" or "little person".

‘There is a term which I’ve been trying to educate people about, mostly used by comedians after a cheap laugh, and that’s the word "midget".

‘It is, in America, highly offensive and here is very offensive, and we’re moving toward the highly offensive category.

‘But, really, at the end of the day why do we have to label people? I have to constantly remind people that even though I’m short I still feel the same feelings.’

Davis said that over his career, he found it heartening that he was increasingly cast for his acting abilities, rather than his height.

But he admits that early on, ‘there was a point in my career when people would be taking photographs and I wasn’t quite sure whether I was being recognised, or whether it’s because I was short.’

In an emotional segment, Davis spoke of his son Lloyd, who died after nine days in 1991, after inheriting the genetic conditions of both Davis and his wife Samantha, who has a different form of dwarfism. The couple also had a baby who was stillborn.

However, the couple now have two children: Harrison, 13, and  Annabel, now 19, who stars in the CBBC show  The Dumping Ground, and who inherited Davis’s extremely rare condition called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita.

Davis’s music choices included the theme from Star Wars, which gave him his big break when he played an Ewok in Return of the Jedi, A Groovy Kind Of Love, his and his wife’s first song at their wedding, and  Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, which he sang in the Monty Python stage musical Spamalot.

His luxury item was a pencil and paper, and his book was the Guinness Book Of Records.

Desert Island Discs airs on Radio 4 at 11.15am and is repeated on Friday at 9am.
 

Published: 12 Jun 2016