Black books: the trans cancellation of comedian Graham Linehan
Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy By Graham Linehan. Eye Books. 2023. 286 pages. Following its publication earlier this month, my much-anticipated review copy of this book arrived a week or so later than originally expected, following receipt of a very vague email apologising for the “unexpected delay” from Amazon. What had gone wrong? Hoping to see if anyone else had been affected, I came across a rather paranoid thread on the popular British chat-forum mumsnet, implying Amazon had deliberately staggered distribution of the product to its pre-order customers in order to prevent it appearing in the ‘Top Ten Bestsellers’ list. Apparently, typed some mumsnetters, the online books giant had pulled this very same trick before with other “controversial” titles they had previously purchased When gossip website popbitch then reported (seemingly inaccurately) that the distinctly samizdat-style product had sold only 390 copies, failing to even make Amazon’s ‘Top 1,000’, never mind their ‘Top Ten’, it looked as if Amazon’s nefarious plan had worked. Then, however, Tough Crowd’s author, Graham Linehan, went on Twitter/X to explain the true reason for the delay in distribution was actually that it had proved so popular that it had sold out of its initial 10,000 print-run immediately, hence Amazon’s delay in getting the thing to me in the post. Yet direct sales to stores do not necessarily equate to actual sales to the public, muddying the waters a little. In its own story about this confusion, leading gay website PinkNews (which Mr Linehan feels has something of a vendetta against him) gleefully informed its readers that “on the Kindle ranking, Linehan’s book is trailing nearly 200 places behind a compendium of knock-knock jokes for kids.” What could have been so controversial about a book which, to all surface appearances, looked like little more than the amiable memoir of an Irish-born co-writer of several successful and much-loved 1990s and 2000s British sitcoms and comedy sketch shows, such as Father Ted, The IT Crowd, Big Train, Count Arthur Strong and Black Books? Quite simply, it is because, as the opening line of Linehan’s Wikipedia biography now has it, he is generally described in the British media these days as an “Irish comedy writer and anti-transgender activist”, albeit very frequently with those two professions switched around in their running order, as if his later path in life was somehow more significant than the other. Imagine if Oscar Wilde were to be listed as an “Irish homosexual and comic playwright”, and you get the general idea of how twisted this particular angle would be. Thanks to the best efforts of deranged online trans activists, Linehan’s life today has been successfully split down the middle every bit as much as that of a Batman supervillain. If mild-mannered Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent had penned his autobiography during his early years, it would have focused upon his entirely blameless life putting local criminals safely away behind bars. Had he written it following his sudden transformation into Two-Face following a gangster throwing acid in his face, sending him completely mad, however, then his life story would have focused upon his subsequent life in extreme organised crime instead. Linehan’s autobiography is likewise very much a game of two halves. As the book’s subtitle has it, the first is about how he made his career in comedy, the second about how he later lost it. Canned laughter Of the two, I have to say, as a big fan of Linehan’s work, I much preferred the first half of the book, which focuses upon his early existence in Ireland and subsequent success in the big wide world of the London TV comedy scene, back when it still had one. (As Linehan correctly observes, political correctness has now utterly destroyed the whole genre.) By the very nature of its subject matter, the writing here is simply much more amusing and entertaining than in the second half, which focuses more upon how leftist lunatics set out to ruin his entire life for the non-crime of disagreeing with them about what a woman actually is – i.e., an adult human female, not an adult post-human cosplayer or blatant gender-grifter. As someone happily raised on the programmes Linehan helped create, I loved reading about the making of some of my all-time favourite shows like Brass Eye, Jam, The Fast Show and I’m Alan Partridge, and the actors, writers and producers involved – many of whom, shamefully, later turned on Linehan after he had been publicly burned at the stake, even though he had been the man most responsible for making some of them famous in the first place, a bit like with J.K. Rowling and those ungrateful little brat child-actors from the Harry Potter franchise. Some of these classic programmes, it must be said, would stand no chance of being commissioned or broadcast now. I recall a segment on fake TV news show The Day Today in which a “Gay Desk” reporter named Colin Popshed reads out “today’s gayness” before cameras cut-away to the show’s anchor Chris Morris solemnly reassuring appalled viewers not to be alarmed as “He’s not gay, by the way: we would never employ a homosexual!” A sequence on spoof chat-show Knowing Me, Knowing You in which hapless host Alan Partridge tells a transvestite guest had been given away by his “great big flapping hands, like a goalkeeper!” would now no doubt be classified as an outright hate crime. Actors and comedians who were once perfectly happy to create and participate in such now-verboten (and to my mind now even more hilarious because of it) sequences, but have since turned on Linehan now the prevailing pinks winds have changed, are nothing but cowards, quislings and hypocrites in my opinion. Then again, those who did stick with him through thick and thin – such as the comedy actors Richard Ayoade and James Dreyfus – ended up being cancelled or criticised too, so no doubt their fears and actions were not wholly baseless. Just craven and immoral. Low comedy Nonetheless, most readers of this book – and this review – will doubtless be most interested to hear about Linehan’s subsequent cancellation, being perhaps less nerdishly interested in the ins and outs of his early failed and forgotten sitcom Paris. Instead, they will want to hear about how Harvey Dent became Two-Face. The answer is that, in 2018, whilst lying in a hospital bed doped up on painkillers following surgery to remove a cancerous testicle, he used his phone to post a tweet telling the blindingly obvious truth about The Emperor’s New Bra. It was not long before Linehan was receiving replies to the effect that “I wish the cancer had won” (some Queer Theorists do like their cancer, as I have shown elsewhere on Mercator recently …) To such trolls, Two-Face Linehan really had now become a supervillain. He provides a handy list of the kind of things these lovely, ‘tolerant’, #BeKind people have since done to him, including a pro-trans doctor creating a fake medical prescription implying Linehan had gone clinically insane before spreading it all over the Internet, and another weirdo ejaculating over a photo of him and posting it online for all to see. Although you may think these acts are blatantly crimes, it seemed as if the ideologically captured British police force were more interested in calling on Linehan himself, in order to provide him with intimidatory ‘advice’ about his future conduct.
