Take a quick look at the reviews of Graham Linehan’s new book Tough Crowd and you will gather that he is what we might call a ‘controversial figure’. Depending on which publication you read, you will find that the book is both brilliantly and poorly written, Linehan is both compassionate and dangerously heartless, and his comic genius is both unassailable and tragically wasted.

Graham Linehan is most famous for being a writer and creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, as well as having involvement with a string of other television comedies including Black Books. Linehan is now almost equally famous for being cancelled for his stance on what has become known as ‘the trans issue’, but if you were to ask him, you would be told he is involved with the issue of women’s rights.

In the first few chapters of Tough Crowd, Linehan talks about his path to success in comedy writing and how his skills were honed as his career progressed. From the beginning of the book, you know that Graham Linehan is clearly the funniest guy in the room by nature, the guy who is the best at telling a funny story, the kind of person who practices the craft of telling the story for the perfect emphasis – the perfect timing – and the buried moral that will hit you in its subtlety long after the story is told.

Tough Crowd begins with a collection of stories of Linehan’s years rising to success in London. He tracks his journey of learning his craft of developing television characters and the situations in which those characters can be engaging and funny. Reading the book initially gave me the feeling of pulling a chair over to the corner of a pub where I was being regaled with a man’s unlikely tale of success and adventure, all while I waited for the man’s sure encounter with the dark dragon. I wondered if the man would be rescued by the moral good that is its own reward. But Tough Crowd doesn’t let the reader off that easily.

Linehan continually reminds the reader that he is a storyteller, that he is telling you a story, that storytelling is what he wants to do the most, and that he is still in the dragon’s keep. Graham Linehan’s book is genuinely funny and interesting, but it is also an engagement with a frustrated storyteller, telling the reader that he’s been robbed and he’s pretty bloody angry about it. This makes Tough Crowd a less comfortable read than it might be, but this book is not designed to make the reader comfortable.

The second part of Tough Crowd is the painful recollection of how Graham Linehan went from being at the top of his game to losing his dream job, his social existence, and his marriage over a difference of opinion with polite society about what a woman is.

Linehan admits that he hasn’t been polite in his objection to gender identity ideology. He has ruthlessly documented the dark underbelly of the trans movement to his half million followers on Twitter, in his blog The Glinner Update, and on his YouTube channel The Mess We’re In. He records that he has made himself ‘hoarse from repeating the same things: they’re mutilating gay and autistic children; they’re destroying the careers of anyone standing up to them; they’re erasing female language’.

Vulnerability is important for the authenticity of any story, and Linehan hasn’t shied away from the parts of his character that have made his path less elegant than it may have been. It is the collision of this character with modern progressive middle-class society, that was for me, the most compelling part of the book.

The intersection of Graham Linehan with the miracle of the internet initially took the shape of him spending his time on Twitter sharing his ‘dipshit opinions as if they were written on tablets of stone’. When Linehan took an opposite view to the establishment left on the gender issue, internet life took a hammer to his comfortable middle-class existence and the political territory he was so certain of.

An arrogance remains in Graham Linehan, even after a sustained battle with trans activists, chronic anxiety, cancer, and personal tragedy. He is not only unrepentant about his adoption of the gender-critical fight but convinced that a day will come when broader society recognises his plight has been a noble one and his treatment unjust.

It is neither Linehan’s stubbornness nor arrogance that sealed his fate in such thorough cancellation, both attributes abound among writers. Beneath the nervous exterior of a tragic comic genius, we find in Tough Crowd a man who is unable to deny the principles placed in him by his father’s extravagant love for his mother. ‘[M]y dad had always taught me,’ Linehan tells us, ‘[that] when a woman cries for help, you help.’

This chivalrous motivation doesn’t always sit well with the feminists in which Linehan now allies, but I got the sense from his book that to abandon this principle would have been a greater personal disaster for Graham than he is now facing. Ultimately, Linehan credits his inability to keep his mouth shut to his refusal to abandon his daughter, to whom the book is dedicated.

Seinfeld has a joke about the less enthusiastic Nazis giving a half ‘heil’ – not a full salute – just a brief lifting of the hand to indicate the person is broadly on side. Graham was given more than one chance to offer the half-heil to the gender movement. There was a time when he may still have been able to craft some words that would guard his conscience while saving his comfortable life. Instead, when he was offered opportunities to come over to the ‘right side of history’, he didn’t so much politely decline, as he told history to ‘go f- itself’.

If Tough Crowd has a legacy, I don’t think it will be the cruel shunning of a former elite, but in the power that trans activism holds in the 2020s. Trans activists are a (mostly anonymous) swarm of grifters and misogynistic abusers who are enabled by our progressive elite to behave in an appalling manner toward people who hold the most ordinary of opinions.

Linehan has spent his cancellation years documenting the stories of the people (mostly women) that trans activists (mostly men) target. For platforming these women and exposing some very sordid details of the characters of the trans movement, Graham Linehan has been labelled an obsessive crusader and ‘high on martyrdom’ by The Guardian.

If Linehan reveals a superpower, aside from comedy writing, it is the ability to take the constant abuse of this special group of trans activists and their enablers in the progressive elite. He claims to have continued to do so with the help of anti-anxiety medication, and selective internet browsing, saying he would no more google his name than stick his ‘tongue into a plug socket’.

Tough Crowd might be the story of how the internet turned a ratbag left-wing shit stirrer into a deranged outcast, or it might be the story of an ‘old left’ true believer facing off against the middle-class elites. As you read, the story that unveils may tell more about your place in the world we live in than it does about its subject.

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Edie Wyatt writes on culture, politics, and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt, blogs on Substack and you can catch her on Welcome to the Dollhouse

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