Graham Linhan is back in the flesh for the first time since returning to Father Ted after a five year absence. In this episode, he talks about his return to the show, what it's like being a trans actor in a male-dominated industry, and why he decided to speak out about his concerns about transphobia.
00:00:39.340I mean, you're back on the show, of course, but first time in the flesh.
00:00:42.700It's been years of what must feel like an arduous battle for you, expressing your concerns about trans ideology, losing a hell of a lot of opportunities.
00:00:53.860Some would say your career to a large extent.
00:00:56.300And here you are, probably feeling, certainly in terms of what you were saying, quite vindicated.
00:01:01.500Yeah, well, you kind of have to tell me.
00:01:04.200I always think every shocking news story I hear about rapists in women's prisons or men in women's sports, I always used to think, oh, this is the one.
00:01:15.020This is the one that will show people that it's like when Martina Navratilova broke cover and started talking about fairness in sports.
00:03:19.480And, yeah, all I've been doing is I've been saying exactly the same thing that I've been saying for the last five years.
00:03:28.160But I had to write a book before people started actually listening to the content of what I was saying.
00:03:34.460One of the things I found genuinely really striking and unpleasant about the way that people were treating you is there were some people who I would have thought owed some loyalty.
00:03:48.540And this is what happened with J.K. Rowling as well, where the actors who got massive breaks from acting in Harry Potter then essentially stabbed her in the back or suddenly turned their backs on her.
00:03:59.020Likewise with you, there are people who got big breaks with roles in things that you'd written.
00:04:04.260People like Graham Norton, for example, coming out and saying there's no such thing as cancel culture, having watched you be cancelled for, like, several years in a row.
00:04:18.160And not only that, but people go out of their way to attack me.
00:04:22.660Bill Bailey said it was, who I cast in Black Books, said that my activism was baffling, you know, as if it was like just a kind of, you know, a thing I was doing for recreation.
00:04:39.880You know, the issues here are extremely high stakes, you know, the health of children, the safeguarding of women, fairness in women's sports.
00:05:25.880It's just that for some weird reason, this ideology has kind of taken over in certain areas, publishing, the theatre, journalism.
00:05:41.320For some reason, it's these middle class pursuits is the wrong word, but it's these middle class industries that have been, you know, captured.
00:05:54.300And everyone outside of these industries, no one believes it.
00:06:00.640No, everyone believes that women should have fair sports, that men shouldn't be able to go into women's toilets or changing areas or rape crisis centres, whatever it happens to be, simply because they identify as a woman.
00:06:13.720No one believes this outside of these industries.
00:06:16.180And also, you cannot speak to anyone about it.
00:06:20.800If you talk to people about it, they do the equivalent of putting their hands over their ears.
00:06:25.760And I think it's because, I think it's because, because it's a middle class phenomenon.
00:06:30.400You know, everybody in the middle class knows somebody whose child identifies as non-binary or, you know, or has some sort of similar identification thing going on.
00:06:44.160And these kids are kind of feeding their parents a line of nonsense, you know, that the parents, you know, who love their kids are just swallowing whole.
00:06:54.820So, Graham, when I was growing up, I used to watch Father Ted, loved it.
00:07:00.160One of my all-time favourite sitcoms, brilliant.
00:07:03.440So many of your shows I watched and I loved.
00:07:07.600How did you get involved in going from that to this?
00:07:13.080Well, I kind of always had my ear to the ground in terms of things that were coming down the pipe.
00:07:20.720When I was, when I was just starting out in comedy, I went to see a comedy masterclass by Danny Simon, who was Neil Simon's brother.
00:07:31.000And I remember at the time someone said a funny thing.
00:07:34.020They said, because he was listed on the ad as being one of the greatest comedy writers in the world.
00:07:39.160And a friend said he's not even the greatest in his own family.
00:07:42.220But this was kind of unfair because he actually did know his onions.
00:07:46.680He worked on the Mary Tyler Moore show.
00:07:48.220He worked on Bilko, which is one of my favourites.
00:07:52.320Much better known over here than it is in the US, even though it's an American sitcom.
00:07:56.240So I wanted to hear what he had to say.
00:07:57.780And one of the things he said was anyone who's writing sitcoms should be aware of changing social trends.
00:08:06.180Because a very good place to set a sitcom is at the edge of something like that, something new coming along.
00:08:14.240And his example was the Mary Tyler Moore show, because there were a greater number of women entering the workplace suddenly because of the pill.
00:08:21.700And so they wrote this show about a woman, career woman who comes and works on a news programme, you know, except he used the word women's livers, which was really funny.
00:08:32.180But, but, but I always felt that that was really good advice.
00:08:37.260So I always kept my antennae up for things that were changing.
00:08:40.620And it also kind of naturally aligned with my, I'm just a very curious person.
00:08:50.980I don't read the classics as much as I read stuff that's supposed to be very good now.
00:08:55.380Um, and yeah, there were a couple of things like the only reason I'm, I'm, I'm a poker player is because I was just an early adopter of the kind of, um, the poker boom that happened when, uh, Chris Moneymaker won the world series.
00:09:12.240Um, because he, he entered into a competition for 10 quid or something or free.
00:09:17.560It was a free ticket, span it up into a series of tournament entries, kept winning, and then won the world series.
00:09:23.880So it just completely, uh, created a poker boom.
00:09:27.180And I remember getting into poker thinking, oh, it's very special, very special.
00:09:34.320It was just because I was kind of always on the lookout for new things I could get involved with.
00:09:39.380Um, and in the same way, I kind of, uh, realized that the, there was a big thing happening with the internet, uh, which was that some people knew exactly what it was and exactly what was going on.
00:09:54.760And other people hadn't a clue, like they didn't know the words for things.
00:09:59.120They didn't know that, you know, I don't know.
00:10:02.200I'm trying to think what's a good example.
00:10:03.840Uh, well, you know, you like, oh God, this is one from the book, but, but like, um, you.
00:10:09.380You could say to someone, oh, what browser are you using?
00:10:12.020And someone won't have a clue what you're talking about.
00:10:15.280So I realized that was a good, uh, someone who knows a lot about computers and who doesn't know a lot about computers is a good conversation that will, uh, mark that new social change.
00:10:35.520I was still trying to see what was coming down the pipe.
00:10:37.360And, uh, it was actually an episode of the IT crowd I wrote, uh, that had a trans character in it.
00:10:43.880And I noticed that the, the pushback was extraordinarily vicious, uh, much more so than any other joke I'd written that had got, got a kind of any kind of pushback.
00:10:54.680In fact, I'd never really got any pushback for a joke before.
00:10:57.040This was the first time which marked it out as, oh, this is interesting.
00:11:00.640And bear in mind, you were joking about Catholic priests in Ireland in the 90s.
00:11:10.800Catholic priests don't try and destroy your career, you know.
00:11:13.640But like, um, but, uh, I noticed that happening first of all, and then, uh, Gamergate came along.
00:11:24.280And on Gamergate, I was sure I had completely, um, uh, I completely absorbed what the issue was, what was going on.
00:11:33.980And I dismissed it as to everyone who would listen to me, and I had a lot of followers, as a misogynistic hate campaign, which on some levels it was.
00:11:42.780There were people kind of, um, tagging along with it for that reason.
00:11:47.620But there were also a lot of guys who thought that they were fighting, uh, uh, uh, corruption in gaming journalism, you know.
00:11:55.500And I just kind of became a node, one more node of people who were saying, it's just a misogynistic hate campaign.
00:13:45.260And they will do anything they can to undermine them and troll them and get their own back for all sorts of real and imagined slights in their, in their past.
00:13:53.380You know, and they just switched horses.
00:13:56.600I'm not saying they're exactly the same people.
00:13:58.500It was definitely a crossover, you know, and they just started abusing women online, targeting their work, doing all the Gamergate tactics, you know, which included swatting.
00:14:11.480Swatting is when, uh, do you, well, do you want to, I, well, I, I, it's very simple.
00:14:15.900So in, in a, for example, if, um, people are watching somebody who plays computer games on Twitch, they will find out what their address is and then they will report a very serious crime as allegedly happening at that location.
00:14:36.340Like, like the camera is just an added bonus in that, in that particular case.
00:14:40.220It was done to a lot of women during Gamergate, apparently, you know, and apparently one of the things that swat teams do when they go into a situation is they immediately kill the pet.
00:14:50.420So even if the, even if it doesn't result in the death of their targets, they've still caused a lot of distress and all this sort of stuff.
00:14:59.780Anyway, again, this was a tactic, terrible, worst thing in the world, uh, when it happens on the, um, on the right.
00:15:06.840But when it happened, when the left were doing it, as happened to Tim, uh, what's his name?
00:15:14.320There's not a, there's not a word about it, you know?
00:15:17.020So I saw these kind of internet war tactics being used against the latest target, which was left-wing women who were being called TERFs, who were, uh, being subjected to work tribunals.
00:15:34.600Um, uh, they were, they were being reported to the police, uh, all sorts of things were going on.
00:15:41.780Um, and I just thought, I had what I thought was a natural thought, which was, this is not right.
00:16:19.040Um, the women who are being targeted this time were left-wing, uh, were left-wing women who are, who are really the backbone of a lot of left-wing activism in the, in the UK.
00:16:29.140You know, like, uh, two of the people who were targeted were Helen Steele, who is the woman who single-handedly sued McDonald's, you know, whatever you think of the, the action.
00:16:41.220It was an incredible feat for her to do it.
00:16:43.720And she was hugely respected, uh, among the left for it.
00:16:47.540And Linda Bellos, who came up with, I think, Black History Month in the, in, in the UK.
00:16:52.320You know, these are two significant figures in left-wing activism.
00:17:37.820But then when the left started doing it, exact same tactics, men pretending to be women online, targeting livelihoods, targeting, uh, uh, you know, one of the things that happened to me when I came out was people would literally just kind of contact all my friends and say,
00:17:55.680can I just ask why you're still following Graham Linnard, you know?
00:17:59.500And it was just like a kind of a, everything was done except talk about the issue.
00:18:04.940The issue itself, you couldn't, you couldn't, you couldn't bring it, you couldn't talk, talk about it because, yeah, sorry.
00:18:12.020I was going to say, and when was the moment you came out?
00:18:15.080When was the moment you stepped forward and went, enough's enough, I'm going to make my voice private.
00:18:26.900Well, apparently a lot of, I heard one guy tweeting recently that gay men are more frightened of saying they're GC than they are of coming out, than they were of coming out.
00:18:35.080But, well, again, sorry, sorry to bring up another bit in the book, but I guess it is kind of, you know, central, but I was on morphine.
00:18:43.500I just, I've had an operation to get a testicle removed, like Hitler.
00:18:49.240And, and I was on morphine and there was a wound on my side that was covered by a bandage.
00:21:01.660You know, one of the first stories I heard about in this fight was Vancouver Rape Relief, which had a dead rat nailed to the door because it won't accept men into the space because it's just for women only.
00:21:13.640And it includes trans-identified men in that.
00:21:16.560They nailed a dead rat to the door, you know.
00:21:18.600And then, like, there's other stories that have happened since.
00:21:21.520Amy Ham, who is a Canadian nurse who put up a poster saying, I love J.K. Rowling.
00:21:27.620She's still in a work tribunal three years later, you know, fighting for her job.
00:21:32.860And so I just thought, well, clearly we have to help these people.
00:21:39.880And it never occurred to me that people would go, well, actually, no, we're not.
00:22:50.440Yeah, but I've found that it is completely standard for this fight.
00:22:56.540People will do anything to avoid having this conversation.
00:23:00.340And Graham Norton has just kind of decided that I've just popped out of existence.
00:23:04.680And the issue is such a non-issue that he won't even discuss it.
00:23:09.760You never hear him saying why women shouldn't have fair sports or Vancouver Rape Relief should have a dead rat nailed to the door.
00:23:18.440Because they know their positions are indefensible.
00:23:21.900So what they do to save their own skin, which is what he's doing, is, you know, they genuflect every so often.
00:23:29.140And one of the things you can genuflect, you know, one of the ways you can genuflect to the mob is by saying there's no such a thing as council culture.
00:23:37.060Even when your immediate colleague has had his life destroyed by it.
00:23:42.620We'll be back with Graham in a minute.
00:23:44.820But first, do you remember the Canadian trucker protest in 2022, where thousands of Canadians came out to protest COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates?
00:24:07.740But once the Canadian authorities had started to criticise the crowdfunding platforms, ramping up pressure to close the campaigns,
00:24:15.480it didn't take long for the biggest crowdfunding platform, the one we've all heard of, to completely capitulate and shut the campaigns down.
00:24:23.480Now, this is where our partners, Give, Send, Go, come in.
00:24:27.200They stepped in when the other platforms backed off and raised millions of dollars for the truckers.
00:24:32.820When they were criticised and dragged through the Canadian courts, Give, Send, Go said it respected diverse views and believed hope and freedom are values worth fighting for.
00:24:42.440This is why we're proud to partner with Give, Send, Go.
00:24:45.200So, if you need to crowdfund for whatever means the most to you, then don't go to the big tech platforms.
00:24:52.380We recommend you do it on Give, Send, Go.
00:24:55.380Starting a campaign on Give, Send, Go is easy and intuitive.
00:26:07.640Well, again, first of all, I have a daughter, and I have a mum, and a, you know, and I had a wife, you know.
00:26:19.940I thought their rights were important.
00:26:25.500And again, I just find it, I think sometimes I find that conservative spaces still don't realise how key this is.
00:26:32.880You know, this is like the door that unlocks everything else, critical race theory and everything else.
00:26:37.420If you can, if half the population can dominate the other half and take big slices of the pie that over 100 years after the suffragettes we'd worked out how to create a little bit of, I know it's a dread word, but equity between men and women, right?
00:26:53.100And suddenly there were a group of men who were suddenly grabbing pieces of this pie.
00:28:08.640Yes, justifiably a well-regarded book.
00:28:12.360He told a story of Justine Sacco, I think her name was, who famously told a joke that was deliberately interpreted in the worst possible light while she was on a plane flight going from somewhere to somewhere.
00:28:28.800She said, I'm going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS.
00:28:33.560Actually, I won't because I'm white, lol.
00:29:18.020Why do you think that this industry has been captured to such an extent, particularly comedy, Graham?
00:29:24.300Because if you think the greatest comedy, in my opinion, I'm sure it's probably yours as well, are the ones who point out the things that nobody is talking about.
00:29:34.980Saying the emperor has no clothes, et cetera, et cetera.
00:29:37.140A great hulking bloke playing basketball with a load of 14-year-olds.
00:29:41.980I mean, that to me seems a pretty ripe, you know, pretty ripe territory for comedy.
00:29:47.280Like, Eddie, I find it, what I find really funny, I remember once, what's his name?
00:29:52.260Nish Kumar did a list of people who were joking about, I call them the Smiths.
00:31:18.800We have this YouTube channel called The Mess We're In, where I talk about these issues with a Canadian gay man named Ardy Morty and a Welsh feminist, Helen Staniland.
00:31:29.580And they're really smart, and they're really funny, and we have a great laugh on it.
00:31:34.120And that was important to me, to break the spell, you know.
00:31:38.040It's like Nish Kumar saying we can't make fun of ridiculous people, you know.
00:35:04.780That seems to me a big part of it as well is like there's one narrative.
00:35:09.120I mean, Andrew Doyle, who is a mutual friend of ours, of course, always makes this point about Nika Burns in 2018.
00:35:16.180This is the woman who runs the Edinburgh Comedy Festival said, you know, I look forward to the woke future of comedy where comedians decide what isn't isn't acceptable.
00:35:26.620And if that's one person and there's three others who happen to, you know, be TV commissioners and whatever, sort of between the four of them, they can basically set the agenda.
00:35:40.980And also, you know, the thing that happened to me is was, you know, as a warning for the others, you know, it's like, it's like you're the head on a spike.
00:35:52.180And so, you know, everybody is being frightened out of engaging in this conversation.
00:35:58.000And one of the things that I've been desperately trying to get across to people for the last five or six years is if we all do it, they can't win.
00:36:07.280You know, have you ever heard of this?
00:36:09.300Oh, God, this may and this may end up on the cutting room floor.
00:36:12.740Maybe just keep this for your Patreon people.
00:36:16.340Have you ever heard of a game called Werewolf?
00:38:46.380It's happening in every middle class industry because there's always one or two or three people who think they themselves are non-binary, have a kid who's told them they're non-binary, or whatever it happens to be.
00:38:59.700And those people are controlling the conversation.
00:39:03.080So when Rachel Rooney, who is a children's author, wrote a beautiful book called My Body Is Me, a little book for toddlers.
00:39:13.640Like, you might call it an anti-dysphoria book, a book to make you comfortable in your own bones for little toddlers.
00:39:44.300Because there's a couple of werewolves going, hold on a second, this is a bit transphobic.
00:39:47.960And then everyone else is too afraid to say, no, it's not, because then you become the werewolf suspect, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:40:34.720It's destruction in other ways, right?
00:40:37.560A small, motivated minority, willing to play by a different set of rules, will often be able to cower the majority because of the collective action problem, which is what you were talking about.
00:40:49.100And it's played out in various mass movements before, you know, from Christianity to communism to national socialism.
00:41:01.620These say, Scientology is the best example, where even the people at the bottom level didn't know some of the actual teachings of Scientology.
00:41:10.100They were kept in the dark until the very last moment.
00:41:13.580The best, funniest example of that is when Paul, I think it was Paul Haggis, who wrote Crash, a not very good Oscar winner, reached the highest level once.
00:41:23.340And he went in for a meeting and they said, well, this is what's going on.
00:41:28.160A god called Xenu put planes inside volcanoes.
00:41:31.940And he just suddenly realized, after years of working for the Scientologists, these people are insane.
00:43:06.860And that could range from Eddie Izzard, right?
00:43:10.600To someone who has debilitating gender dysphoria, has an obsessive, uh, uh, recurring, invasive thought that they need to get rid of this to make themselves, uh, okay.
00:43:24.140And, um, and it's like, these two have nothing to do with each other.
00:43:30.500They have nothing to do with each other.
00:43:32.380So why are there, so, so it seemed to me that suddenly you've created this informed minority who can, like, there's a very famous, um, sorry, this is probably,
00:43:43.480please do cut out any of this where I'm rambling, but as to the werewolf's point, there's a very famous, um, document called the Denton's document.
00:43:54.940It was a law firm called Denton's who, who worked pro bono on advice to give trans rights activists.
00:44:03.540And it was literally for this, for this reason on, on pushing through, uh, laws or, or bills or whatever that would not be popular with the public.
00:44:14.520And there's a, a number of bits of advice given, including avoid the media.
00:44:20.580Don't get drawn into debates, uh, target young politicians, you know?
00:44:26.420And when you think about some of the people like Nadia Whittingham and, uh, and, uh, Mary Black, who are pushing this stuff, they're all, they're all really young.
00:44:46.380And, um, uh, and so the Denton's document laid all this out in very bald terms, you know?
00:44:52.660And I, as I always say, this is the first civil rights movement that has been told to avoid the media.
00:44:59.460And when you think of it, when have you seen figures who are supposedly on the other side of this issue, right?
00:45:06.780Like Susie Green or, or the, the, um, Nancy Kelly late of Stonewall.
00:45:12.440When have you seen them on panel, not panel shows, on news shows discussing this issue?
00:45:16.660They don't do it because the, the, um, the desire is to create a completely suffocating, um, uh, the desire is to completely suffocate the conversation.
00:45:32.240And Graham, on that point about werewolves, I think what has been very instructive to that issue is the revelation of how exactly did our civil service become convinced about all of this?
00:45:45.300How exactly did the police become convinced of all of this?
00:45:48.860How exactly did other government and sort of quango-like structures become convinced that this ideology is the right way to go?
00:45:59.000All the tactics that were used in this, uh, in the Denton's document.
00:46:02.680And you could download it, you can read it yourself, and there's some very good pieces about it online.
00:46:06.740But specifically, I mean, mermaids, et cetera, being heavily involved in this organization and essentially teaching them these highly contested ideas, to put it very mildly.
00:47:26.520She put him on hormones, put him on puberty blockers and hormones.
00:47:30.840In fact, there's a very famous excerpt of a documentary about her where she's laughing because her 16-year-old son's penis wasn't large enough to create the inverted vagina.
00:47:41.900This is another reason why people don't like to talk about this issue, because it's horrible.
00:47:47.440So this woman went into Mermaids, you know, she'd obviously spent too much time into the night on forums listening to other people who think they have trans kids and believing everything they say.
00:48:01.360And she entered into Mermaids and she changed the culture at Mermaids.
00:48:06.200Similarly, you know, I used to follow, there was a social worker, her name's Lisa Muggler.
00:49:32.940There may be some people who just think I'm great and think I'm completely on the right track, but I can't call them to be to face another disappointment.
00:49:40.520You know, and people, you know, yeah, they just didn't announce, well, Graham Lennon's a non-person now.
00:50:03.680They have half the rights and the other half are owned by me, Arthur and Neil Hannan.
00:50:07.820And they're sitting on it in what I think is an act of kind of preemptive cultural vandalism, simply because I've stood up for women's rights.
00:50:16.160You know, and I've stood against the medicalization of children, which I would argue is everyone's should be everyone's priority.
00:51:36.380One of the most beloved sitcoms of the last 30 odd years, which is still shown, which is still quoted, which the comedy, the character of Father Dougal is now a staple when people talk about comedy and modern comedy.