Tough Crowd by Graham Linehan review — memoirs of a monomaniac


Tough Crowd by Graham Linehan review — memoirs of a monomaniac

The Father Ted creator is a comedy genius but his vituperative advocacy for women’s rights does more harm than good. By Janice Turner

Graham Linehan created the beloved comedy Father Ted
Graham Linehan created the beloved comedy Father Ted
JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE TIMES
The Times
Whatever online grief I’ve had in six years reporting on the medical transition of children, or rapists in women’s jails, I know that the slightest criticism of Graham Linehan will earn me far more. Ironic really, given that the first objective of what has evolved into the gender critical movement was to defy Stonewall’s mantra “no debate”. But to some, the beloved comedy genius who created Father Ted and sacrificed everything — career, wealth, reputation, marriage, even sanity — to champion women’s rights against trans ideology is Gender Jesus.
For the (mainly) women in academia, the arts or public sector who were bullied or sacked simply for the belief that biological sex is real and salient, the support of this famous man, while their friends turned away, has been a huge solace. No one questions Linehan’s sincerity, only his behaviour, which has horrified even those who agree with him.
His book Tough Crowd, frank about much of his life, dissembles the scale of his gender monomania: the hundreds of tweets a day, sent through the early hours, picking fights with the most extreme and litigious trans activists, posting photos of transwomen on lesbian dating sites, even joining up himself in a bad wig to prove any man can, and spraying invective at showbiz folk who cross him, most recently calling the actor David Tennant “a groomer”.
Such is Linehan’s hyperbole, the book contains more than 20 uses of “Nazi/Nazis”. He is not only a stranger to Godwin’s law, but invokes the murderous Stasi too and even drafts an open letter that crassly references the killing of Milly Dowler. How can such an accomplished writer be so tone deaf? He describes his “endgame” in Old Testament terms: “To reveal the havoc gender identity had wrought on society, expose those who had enabled it and help bring about its end.”
How did he get this messianic? This memoir of sorts charts his journey. He grew up in Dublin with loving parents, a devout father who ended up the manager of a shipping company and a mother whose hilarious tall tales inspired Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle. Taught by “mainly benign” priests, he saw Catholicism not as oppressive, as his fellow Irish comedian Dave Allen did, but ridiculous, as the Pythons did.
His childhood passions — films, sci-fi, Fawlty Towers, comics and records — led to him being bullied as a nerdy misfit, but also into writing for Hot Press, the Dublin music paper where he became a local celebrity and met his long-time collaborator Arthur Mathews.
The pair began in stand-up, but Linehan found he was too thin-skinned for performance, lacking the patience to charm a crowd. So the pair headed for London to make their name in TV comedy, first writing gags for at Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
The first half of Tough Crowd is a masterclass for young writers.“If everyone was doing a certain kind of comedy, you should be doing the opposite,” he writes. (He believes current shows are unfunny because in striving to represent everyone, writers produce bien-pensant blah written “for an HR department”.)
For someone with five Baftas, who co-created Motherland, Black Books, Big Train and The IT Crowd , he is endearingly honest about his failings and artistic dead ends. Paris, his and Mathews’s first sitcom, about the 19th-century art scene, flopped when they refused to compromise and listen to older, wiser producers. Then Linehan happily recounts developing Father Ted from a stand-up character into a rich comedy world. “Even now, if people meet me and their faces light up, 99 percent of the time it’s because of Father Ted.”
The IT Crowd evolved from Linehan’s early-adopter passion for technology and, like all successful sitcoms, reflected real social change: how we were suddenly being served by a nerd help-desk class with few interpersonal skills. It made stars of Chris O’Dowd and Richard Ayoade and is still a cult hit. But Linehan’s next project, Count Arthur Strong, flopped, while decades of Father Ted royalties were petering out. “The sobering truth hit me that the skillset I had honed for years, namely the creation and production of television sitcoms, was no longer a reliable source of income,” he writes. Moreover the stress of filming “nearly finished me off”.
Linehan was recovering from having a cancerous testicle removed when he entered the gender wars. This issue brings so much new craziness every day — a man in a dress suing women for not waxing his balls, double mastectomies for troubled teenage girls dubbed “healthcare” — that it turns the sanest into Ancient Mariners, ranting to anyone who will listen. For Linehan it so obsessed him he couldn’t even enjoy his wife’s birthday; it filled a void left by his writing career.
The more he tweeted, the faster potential work fell away until his golden egg project, a Father Ted musical, was cancelled after he lost his rag with a West End impresario who said he was “on the wrong side of history” and Hat Trick Productions, where he had worked for decades, tried to pay him to no longer be involved.
In Tough Crowd he admits he was sometimes “thoughtless and cruel”, to which I’d add solipsistic. He makes no reference to feminist groups such as Woman’s Place UK, which was formed calmly (and successfully) to defend sex-based protections in the Equality Act, and barely mentions writers such as Julie Bindel who have fought this issue for many years at great personal cost. Rather, he’s Good Sir Graham up on his charger, nobly defending maidens.
In 2019 when I blocked him on Twitter, Linehan email me to ask why, and was enraged when I replied it was because he was doing more harm than good and clearly needed help. His wife, friends and many former colleagues have all said the same. But Linehan cannot hear them. Playing to an adoring new audience on social media, he is deafened by their applause and, as odd flashes of this book show, it is a great loss.
Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy by Graham Linehan, Eye Books, 288pp; £19.99. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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