When Graham Linehan was starting out as a comedy writer in London, he would go to see standup where he would upbraid audience members who were “talking or otherwise being rude”. Once, while watching Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt’s The Mighty Boosh in a pub theatre, a drunk man began shouting, so Linehan told him to “shut the fuck up”. Later, the man followed him into the toilets where he smashed down the cubicle door. “Thankfully,” Linehan recalls, “he’d expended all his energy on kicking the door in so I was able to see him off with the force of my terrified stare.”
Wading into other people’s fights has proved a theme for the co-writer of Father Ted and writer-director of The IT Crowd. A vociferous critic of the transgender rights movement, Linehan’s views have, in recent years, cost him friends, his livelihood and, he claims, his marriage. But, despite having been given a verbal warning by police after a complaint from a trans campaigner, he remains uncowed. Tough Crowd is, then, his memoir-cum-defence statement in which he recounts his years making TV sitcoms before he was “perceived as toxic” and lays bare his grief at all he has lost.
The book speeds through his Dublin childhood, during which he reveals he was bullied at school for being too tall and that he lost his faith in God after looking up masturbation in his parents’ encyclopedia; contrary to what Catholicism had told him, he discovered it was “perfectly normal”. We learn how he began his writing career as a film reviewer on the Irish magazine Hot Press, where he met fellow Father Ted creator Arthur Mathews. Moving to London, the pair hawked their wares as a writing duo, cutting their teeth on the 1990s sketch series Smith & Jones.
Linehan’s memories of making Father Ted, where he digs deep into the craft of comedy writing, brim with verve and charm. Rather than take the view of the Irish comic Dave Allen, who depicted religion as oppressive and cruel, Linehan and Mathews were closer in their outlook to Monty Python, who saw religion as “a chance for men to dress up in giant hats”. The character of Father Ted had been dreamed up by Mathews when he was the warmup act for a spoof U2 band, The Joshua Trio, while Mrs Doyle was based on Linehan’s mother.
But all charm evaporates in Linehan’s exhaustive recounting of the past five years as an “activist”, during which memoir is largely replaced by polemic. He is oddly sage-like on the early dangers of social media, though this doesn’t prevent him from being hypnotised by the heated online exchanges between trans campaigners and gender critical feminists. In 2018, while lying on a hospital trolley, of all places, fresh from surgery for testicular cancer, he picks up his phone and posts a series of tweets “[nailing] my colours to the gender-critical mast”.
The more he is abused for his opinions, the more entrenched and maniacal those opinions seem to become. Here, as on his Twitter page, he makes a show of misgendering trans men and women, and says he is stunned at his “inability to make people care about the daylight theft of women’s rights, or the greatest safeguarding scandal since Rotherham, or the greatest medical scandal since thalidomide”.
The final chapters, which detail the derailing of his plans for a Father Ted musical and a tentative foray into standup, find him simultaneously high on martyrdom and desperately lonely, his nerves “shredded”, castigating ex-friends and colleagues whom he feels abandoned him by not joining in his crusade. “Each betrayal sits in my memory like crows dotted along a telephone wire,” he says. Tough Crowd reads less like the story of a man heroically cleaving to his principles than a document of a peculiar and self-defeating obsession, a sad coda to a once towering talent.
•This article was amended on 3 November 2023 to reinstate the original subheading.
• Tough Crowd by Graham Linehan is published by Eye (£19.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
