Until relatively recently, Graham Linehan was best known as the creator of the much-loved sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. For the past half-decade he has been engaged in an online quarrel with members of the transgender community and their supporters, which has culminated in his ostracisation by swathes of the entertainment industry. Linehan’s new autobiography, Tough Crowd, comprises two distinct narratives corresponding to these two phases of his life.
It starts off like a typical showbiz memoir, recounting, in briskly anecdotal prose, the author’s journey from obscure critic to successful screenwriter. There are some mildly amusing vignettes from his Father Ted days: we learn that Dermot Morgan, who played Ted, had a habit of taking phone calls during rehearsals; Frank Kelly (Father Jack) often had lunch alone on set because he looked so hideous in make-up that no one would sit with him.
These reminiscences are interspersed with reflections on the craft of comic writing. Linehan likes shows that have a “punk” energy – a slightly dated shorthand for a blend of irreverence and chaotic whimsy – and believes his predilection for surreal humour may have held him back from writing a more sophisticated show in the style of Seinfeld or Frasier. He offers sensible tips for aspiring comedy writers: a good script must have “an almost poetic density”; “anything that muddies the plot, disrupts its flow or puzzles the audience” should be cut.
With the advent of streaming, Linehan’s income from royalties fell, prompting him to fear for his future: “the skill set I had honed for many years ... was no longer a reliable source of income”. Then he discovered Twitter, and enjoyed a new lease of life as one of its more prolific banter merchants. It did good things for his profile – until it didn’t. At this point the narrative transitions abruptly into a breathlessly polemical account of his exploits as a campaigner against “gender ideology”.
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Linehan has concerns about young people having gender reassignment treatments, and about safeguarding issues in relation to women-only spaces. These are subjects on which decent people may legitimately disagree. But in this most delicate of terrains, tone and bearing matter a great deal, and bad manners usually suggest bad faith. Some of Linehan’s behaviour on Twitter, which earned him a ban from the site in 2020 (rescinded when Elon Musk bought the site this year), is hard to square with his idea of himself as an unfairly maligned Cassandra figure, a concerned citizen who was merely asking questions.
His précis of what he terms “gender ideology” in these pages is disproportionately focused on the antics of a small number of sometimes over-zealous activists, and the criminal activities of a handful of transgender sexual predators – a distasteful choice of emphasis, pandering to the same reactionary prejudices that were routinely deployed against gay people not so very long ago. Is he simply misunderstood? Reading sentences like “The internet ... provided every Jimmy Savile with a global constituency of Jimmy Saviles”, or “Like National Socialism, gender ideology is a movement that attracts the worst of people”, one feels disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
In the first half of the book, Linehan is admirably candid about his temperamental shortcomings, conceding that he has “a lot of stored-up anger from being bullied at school”, that he is “too easily hurt” and has trouble managing his emotions. It is therefore all the more conspicuous that his account of his activities in the culture war is utterly devoid of self-criticism: at no point does he acknowledge that he may, on occasion, have gone too far. He seems genuinely bewildered that so many former friends and colleagues have forsaken him, preferring to attribute these “betrayals” to social cowardice and the Orwellian machinations of “the laptop classes” rather than entertain the possibility that at least some of these people may have had sincere misgivings about his conduct.
Tough Crowd is a discomfiting read not because it contains hard-hitting home truths, but because its author clearly hasn’t worked through his issues. Linehan waxes lyrical on the importance of chivalry – something he learned from his late father – and stresses that he has the best interests of women at heart. But manliness, of the sort he is invoking here, also entails other qualities besides gallantry: self-control, magnanimity, emotional intelligence. People adore Father Ted not just because it sent up the church, but because it did so in a way that was fundamentally affectionate and warm-spirited. Linehan had this in his locker, once upon a time. Somewhere along the way he contrived to dig himself into a hole – and then kept digging.
