For roughly half of its 286-page totality, Graham Linehan’s Tough Crowd reads much like any other showbiz memoir. The Irish writer-comedian was once known for co-creating Father Ted and The IT Crowd. He recounts quarrels with hecklers at edgy comedy clubs, and boozy workdays with Dylan Moran writing Black Books. Now, though, he’s best known for his social media attacks on so-called transgender ideology, which take his book on an almighty detour halfway through: it morphs into a lengthy, repetitive rant about transgender rights instead. If you were to strip away the context from Tough Crowd – if you were, say, an avid fan of Father Ted, and hadn’t looked at social media in a decade – the whiplash would be baffling.
Linehan views his life through the prism of someone who has been, in modern parlance, cancelled – a pariah whose dogmatic beliefs have supposedly exiled him from the liberal dinner party circuit. “Some time before I lost everything” begins the book’s very first sentence. His life has been “smashed to smithereens”, he laments. When formerly sympathetic journalists turn on him, it’s a “prison stabbing”. And all this at the hands of the “terroristic” trans rights lobby, which he brands the “gender Stasi” and likens to “nascent Nazis”. (Linehan sees himself as a “campaigner for women’s rights” rather than an “anti-transgender activist”, and is infuriated by Wikipedia’s refusal to allow him to edit his own page accordingly.)
