Graham Linehan interview in The Times (17 March 2023)

[IwantToRetire]

From both ends of the trans debate, I am told his interventions are “counterproductive”, “a net bad” and “unhinged”. Some gender-critical women — that is, women who agree with him — believe he craves attention, martyrdom and leadership of a movement whose fight is not even his. One mentions that he was once pro-porn and sex work, which he admits to being before “talking to feminists” changed his mind. Over on the other side of the battle lines, an activist dismisses him as a fringe character full of hot air. None of these people is prepared, however, to go on the record, mostly saying they fear he will retaliate in his customary style.

There is one admirable exception. She is Kathleen Stock, the radical feminist philosopher who resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 after a campaign by “queer, trans and non-binary” students who wanted her fired. “Graham and I have clashed in the past,” she says, “and we probably aren’t each other’s favourite people. But I think it’s fair to say he’s genuinely committed to fighting what he believes is a woman-harming and child-harming ideology (and I agree with him on that); and he talks to some demographics — particularly ordinary blokes, who don’t really care so much about niceties of language and aren’t put off by his sometimes bludgeoning style — that others don’t necessarily reach.”

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/broke-shunned-and-cancelled-father-ted-creator-graham-linehan-and-the-trans-debate-cgv8gqpjk

Sorry no share token

(If you paste the Times link above into archive.ph/ it has been archived)

Thank you, will have a read. Glinner is a good man.

It's interesting to read a variety of opinions, but I find it grating when prominent GC men are accused of wanting to be leaders or adored.

If they just stayed at home and kept their claps shut, we would have a lot more to complain about.

Just renewed my subscription to his substack and feel it is money well spent. Thank goodness for Graham Linehan. If more men had spoken out sooner on behalf of the women and children in their lives, we wouldn't be so far down this 'illogical rabbit hole'.

Here's a share token:

Graham Linehan: the trans debate left me cancelled and broke.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/86b1af72-c25d-11ed-8e20-0f5794810aad?shareToken=b47a7c455c31fa1ac0aeebf4226428622_

Thank you Graham

Thanks Poppyseed

I agree - he’s a good man, and he’s sacrificed a lot to add his voice to our campaign for women’s rights. That doesn’t make him ‘our leader’, but I’m grateful for everyone who has a public platform and is willing to call out this madness. Far too many people know damn well what a woman is, but are too scared to say so out loud.
Every time someone points out the emperor has no clothes, it makes someone else think about it, or gives someone else the courage to voice their own views. Democracy needs people to speak, totalitarianism demands people’s silence

This is good article. I wish Kathleen Stock hadn't denounced Glinner way back when. It was so divisive.

A really nice article.

I was at graham's stand up show. A bit of a dingy place, but Graham took the roof off - he was incredibly nervous and very sweet but very very funny and there was so much love and affection for him in the room, everyone had obviously come to see him.

And I spoke to him afterwards, as we were both stood at the back, a quick, gushing, awkward conversation and he was lovely, really kind and sweet.

This whole horrid business is on the verge of crumbling, I really hope Graham gets the recognition he deserves but I can certainly say, he is well well loved in the circles he now moves in!!

By the way, give a little to his crowd funder to defend himself against a certain actor if you have a few spare pence.

It was a really good article.

I hope he gets more work, he really is funny and does not deserve the backlash.

Excellent article. It was very good of Kathleen Stock to provide a quote and I think she was astute about his appeal, particularly to blokes who are new to all this and aren't put off by the lack of performative kindness.

What's happened to Graham - his career, his family - as a result of his support for women and children is shocking. I can't think of a better example of the cruelty of TRAs and their determination to completely annihilate anyone who opposes them.

What's happened to Graham is not right. It doesn't matter if you don't agree with his views or feel suspicious of a man who is taking on this fight. No one should have their future taken because they question something that makes very little sense.
I've subscribed to his sub stack, which I hope helps.

I'm such a massive fan of Glinner's comedy writing, I would absolutely love to see him working again. In the meantime I follow all his ro-women work, and am grateful for it.

As for the Ted musical, if it happened without Glinner, there's no way I would go and see it.

I think Graham is an important voice and it's a travesty that his involvement in the fight against:

• stopping kids going through puberty
• men in women's spaces
• men coercing lesbians
• the tearing down of child safeguarding
• woke homophobia etc.

has caused him so much harm and cost him so dearly.

If anything, I don't think he goes far enough! It doesn't really matter if a man is genuine in his belief that he is "really a woman" or is using trans as a cloak for nefarious means. One is a man pretending to be a woman and one is a man pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Neither is a woman and we don't want them in our spaces.

Graham Linehan is plainly right. He’s got more moral fibre and integrity in his toenail clippings than those dolts in the media who still inexplicably believe he’s cancelled. No he’s bloody not cancelled. They are on the sexist, homophobic, wildly misogynistic authoritarian wrong side of history.

Andrew Billen’s his mealy mouthed attempt to interview Linehan as a good for clicks while condemning him (for what real transgression exactly?) on faint praise is merely showing his own journalistic efforts towards misogynistic and authoritarian appeasement. The shame is Billen’s. Linehan has done nothing wrong in speaking up in support of women and children.

People love Linehan’s comedy writing work. Those who share his views in gender identity politics also know a feminist ally, supporter of safeguarding and freedoms of speech when they see one. I think Linehan’s real crime has just been to point out than men can be dangerous. He’s said the quiet bits out loud and worse, said it wittily and engagingly too . That’s so uncomfortable for a lot of people who should really be looking hard at themselves to think why they feel that way.

His speaking out makes the sheep at the top who are only there for the financial bottom line, and who believe what some out of touch privileged teenager tells them is the real world (because it’s on their social media feed); fear for their audience figures. When neither those big cheeses nor their interns can read a room.

it reminds me of Chris Morris and Cake with Linehan’s words as the Cake. Unfortunately though for Linehan, its worse for him than just being embarrassing and showing up personal gullibility and the mercenary professional scrabble to get ahead.

Linehan works in a fiercely back stabby and ultra competitive writing and producing world- like academia, like the arts and theatre- where the rationale to pick off one big beast like him leaves more room for the established figures who want more and for the up and comers growing desperate for their big break to take attention and get work. So of course they’re all going to gun for him to keep him out. Even though the paying public would want to watch him.

Andrew Billen at the Times clearly thinks he’s landed some validating coup by getting Kathleen Stock to denounce Linehan on the record- saying what, that she agrees with what Linehan is saying but she doesn’t much like how he says it? So what? I think he’s a professionally brilliant communicator and comedian. So what? Nobody can or would say he’s lying about what he’s said or he is a hate monger, because he’s evidently not.

And that was the very worst Billen could dredge up. Hopefully The Times’ comment section will show Billen’s editors that Billen wasted a huge opportunity to write something intelligent about the fact that Linehan is speaking the opposite of hate, what he says is backed up by facts, most people would agree with what he says so it’s actually uncontroversial… and yet a shitty UK industry has nonetheless blackballed him and why is that?

I can well appreciate that for anyone in hard professional times it’s hard to have faith in yourself and to think much, much bigger professionally but if Linehan could do that now he’d be able to demonstrate his audience pulling power with numbers and his industry would all be rushing to add him back into their UK contact books and say that they’ve always really said he’s always been a stalwart of women and children’s rights and free speech.

His misfortune has been to come from a professional background that’s all about keeping rivals out- that’s why his support has come from people who Linehan’s not competing for work from. We need all the talented pro choice, anti- misogynist, pro-safeguarding men out talking in the public sphere we can get, Linehan’s wit gets an audience that we need to wake up (make and female). So more power to his elbow.

Great article. Cancel culture is shit.

I’m clearly going to have to re-read this great article after coffee, because I thought it was completely the opposite!

Haven't read yet but had fingers crossed this was Hadley's work. Would love to see that conversation!

Glinner and is a good 'un. And I'm disappointed in Stock.

Have just rewatched the IT Crowd episode entitled “The Speech” (season 3, Netflix)

It was cancelled from all 4 but still on there. Hilarious and perceptive.

Democracy needs people to speak, totalitarianism demands people’s silence

this

and thats what people like glinner do even when it’s incredibly bad for them

Without Glinner I wouldn’t have become aware of this issue when I did.

he’s been absolutely monstered and yes on occasion he puts things in a way I wouldn’t but you know what he’s lost everything and for what? Pointing out that men cannot magically become women, that women’s rights cesse to exist once men can identify into them, that there are safeguarding flags everywhere

he could have buckled and recanted for an easier life but he hasn’t. Huge respect for that.

The final line of that article tells me this fight is a long way from over. The journalist seems to think that unless Glinner stops talking about this issue and even his own cancellation then he won't find work again. Maybe he's right but it's a shocking admission that he thinks the people who have let Glinner down and enabled the cancellation will continue to sideline him if he dares to talk about how appallingly he has been treated by people he once thought were friends. I'd like to think that those people feel ashamed.

There is no doubt in my mind that Father Ted the musical would be hugely popular and profitable. I can't respect the stupidity of the people who are preventing it from happening.

I don't mind Kathleen Stocks comments, she was honest about why they don't get on and she is convinced of his sincerity even if she doesn't approve of his methods but at least she hasn't lied about him to justify her opinion. I'm bored with the idea that there is only one way to raise awareness about the erosion of women's rights and the harm gender ideology does to children so I'm glad that KS acknowledges she probably wouldn't reach the people Glinner can.

I hope that, in the not too distant future, Glinner can get back to doing what he does best and claim his life back. No one should have to pay the price he has for telling the truth.

Interesting article. And very sad.

I think Andrew Billen was not the best person to do the interview because, having read previous pieces by him, he is at best ambivalent on the trans issue, at worst seems to think that it's a generational divide, with older people on the wrong side of history.

I was very interested to read Jimmy Mulville's quote. He clearly thinks the Father Ted musical script is great and that it would do well in the West End - as long as Linehan's name isn't associated with it. I'm not sure he's right about that. Who are the main Father Ted fans - young people, sympathetic to trans ideology? Or older people, who watched Father Ted in the 1990s? And who are the main demographic for West End theatre - older people or young people? The trouble with Mulville is that he imagines that everyone thinks the same way as people who work in theatre or post angry tweets on Twitter, whereas in fact the vast majority of people (certainly the vast majority of the theatre-going demographic) either couldn't give a damn about the issue or are actively sympathetic to Linehan.

Also interesting that Billen couldn't get anyone apart from Kathleen Stock to speak on the record. I thought Stock's quote was quite generous, actually, given that the two have argued in the past.

I thought Billen's comments about the dating app were odd. Clearly Linehan was simply taking the piss out of all the heterosexual men forcing their way into a lesbian-only space. Why would you consider this cruel to those men - instead of being angry at those men for trying to force same-sex attracted women to have sex with them?

I love both Glinner and Stock. In a sane society there's room for many voices.

Did you know there's a Michael Jackson musical on the way?

Interesting that the delicate pure souls of theatre land can countenance that, but not Father Ted???

I was very interested to read Jimmy Mulville's quote

On the whole this feature just went over old ground really, it felt like I'd read it all before. But that's the bit that stood out as so unfair. Glinner "has a right to speak his mind and is sincere", it's "tragic", the show would be a hit, "I hate cancel culture", but we've already prepared the statements cutting you loose.

So much contradiction. A rotten way to treat him.

Payday today - that reminds me there's some gardening to be done.