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.
