A few years ago I had a chat with the actor Jimmy Vee while he was playing one of the seven dwarves in panto.

He told me that as a small actor (he's 3ft 8in) he is only ever offered two types of roles - dwarves in Snow White or monsters in Doctor Who - but insisted there was no reason why he always had to be in parts defined by his height. Was there anything, he asked, to stop him being in Coronation Street or EastEnders?

The answer is no, except that even Jimmy himself could see there were some obstacles to overcome. He grew up in Lanarkshire and told me it wasn't until he was 21 that he saw another dwarf and that his first reaction was: ain't he funny? This is often the way we react to small people: to see them as cute or amusing, and it helps explain why producers do not consider them for regular, straight roles. The fear is that the audience will giggle or go aww. And every year we get more productions of Snow White which encourages us to keep on doing it.

The solution is to just go ahead and use small actors in regular roles and eventually audiences will accept it, which is partly what Warwick Davis, the small actor who has appeared in Star Wars and Life's Too Short among other things, intends to do with his new project The Reduced Height Theatre Company. His aim, he told Modern Times: Warwick Davis' Big Night (BBC2, Thursday, 9pm), was that within five minutes of watching a play, the audience would forget they were watching little people, and just follow the plot. There would be a kind of invisibility cloak; difference would disappear.

In an attempt to achieve this in his first production, Davis shrank the set itself so it was the same scale as the cast, the idea being there would be nothing to make us laugh except the jokes in the script. It was a good idea, although the documentary didn't really put it to the test. The obvious next step would have been to speak to the audience and ask them for their reaction but that didn't happen, leaving the production looking like an experiment without a conclusion.

Davis's first choice of production, the farce See How They Run, was also tricky considering his aim was to prove small actors can do more than be funny. Sure enough, on the first night, there was lots of laughing from the audience, but what were they laughing at? The whoops-vicar script? The little people? A bit of both? Again, the documentary could have put this to the test, but didn't.

This lack of rigour left the documentary feeling like an idea with no proper historical, cultural or political context, although the story of Jon Key, one of the small actors who appeared in See How They Run, was fascinating. Jon revealed he had spent a lot of his life divided into two people, the physical and the emotional. And then he tried to unite the two, reducing the boundaries before finally scrubbing them out. It was moving to hear him describe the process because it was similar to the disappearing act Warwick Davis wanted to achieve on stage: the disappearance of prejudice, but also the disappearance of self-doubt.