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Un-cancelling Graham Linehan
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Graham Linehan created some of the most beloved British sitcoms of all-time, including Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. That counted for little when his life was upended for the ‘crime’ of advocating for sex-based rights.
In this conversation with host Will Kingston, Graham talks about his career in television, the craft of sitcom writing and why he continues to rally against the dangers of trans ideology.
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Buy 'Tough Crowd' here.
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Transcript
Modern Authoritarians vs. Fascists of the Past
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. One of my favourite lines from the iconic British sitcom, Father Ted, is when Ted denies being a fascist by saying, I'm not a fascist, I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do. Whereas priests, uh, wore a drink.
00:00:37
Speaker
The church doesn't really tell us what to do anymore, and fortunately the original fascists certainly don't. Authoritarians no longer dress in black, instead they cloak themselves in faux kindness and compassion. They aren't members of one party or religion.
00:00:52
Speaker
Rather, they are dispersed across a nebulous coalition that spans politics, culture, the media, and corporations. And whilst the threat they pose may not be as immediately obvious as the fascists of the 20th century, it is more insidious and perhaps just as dangerous.
Graham Linehan on Cancel Culture and Advocacy
00:01:08
Speaker
No one knows this better than my guest today, Graham Linehan. Graham was the co-creator of Father Ted, along with several other beloved British sitcoms, including the IT crowd and Black Books. In recent years, he has been arguably the most famous victim of cancel culture in the UK for the heinous crime of advocating for sex-based rights.
00:01:28
Speaker
His memoir, Tough Crowd, has just been released. Graham, welcome to Australiana. Thank you. What a fantastic introduction. I couldn't have put it better myself. And I've been thinking very hard about this for a number of years.
00:01:40
Speaker
Well, that's high praise indeed coming from you. I watched your recent interview with Andrew Doyle last night. You said in that interview you actually feel a tinge of guilt poking fun at the Catholic Church now. Why is that? Well, because of an element of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I do think it's possibly a good idea that human beings meet up weekly in a big space and tell each other how important it is to be kind.
00:02:09
Speaker
and how important it is to do the right thing. I think that's actually, you know, that was a
00:02:16
Speaker
Although religion wasn't a net good, I think that was a thing we've lost, a sense of community, all these things that religion provided, almost like an added extra to what even Ted might call the mumbo-jumbo.
The Decline of Religion and Community
00:02:35
Speaker
It's an interesting thing, but I believe the Jefferson Bible that Thomas Jefferson wrote, have you ever heard of this?
00:02:42
Speaker
No, I don't think so. I'm delighted to be able to introduce it to you. Thomas Jefferson wrote a version of the New Testament where he took, he simply took out all the magical elements. He took out every single miracle, rising from the dead, all that stuff. And what he said, or what others I think said about it, is that what it left behind is the greatest piece of moral instruction that if it was applied on Earth, it would create a heaven on Earth.
00:03:11
Speaker
because we would all be doing unto others as they do unto us. We'd all be turning the other cheek. We'd all be quick to forgive, slow to condemn. And none of these things are where we are at the moment. You know, we are in a world of instant condemnation, instant decisions, an incredible polarization.
00:03:31
Speaker
based on the strangest principles. And yeah, I think we've become a bit lost.
Internet-Fueled Mass Delusions
00:03:37
Speaker
And as I said in the biography, I was lucky in that the priests who I studied under at school, there was no sign of any of the stuff, at least as far as I was aware of any of the scandals that engulfed the church.
00:03:51
Speaker
And I've kind of found its way into Father Ted because, you know, in the end, the priests in Ted are very harmless. They're genuinely good people. They have flaws like all human beings, but they're not the thing that so destroyed the Catholic Church's reputation, the scandals in Boston and in Ireland and all over the world.
00:04:10
Speaker
So yeah, so I just feel like there was something we lost with this great disillusionment that everyone went through. And we probably helped along with Father Ted with religion. And yeah, I feel a little bit of guilt about that.
00:04:25
Speaker
This is really interesting because you're right with the decline of religion in most Western countries over the last 50 or 60 years, you have probably seen, or you have seen less of the bad side of religion, the scandals that you referred to in Boston in Ireland.
00:04:43
Speaker
But you have also lost that Jeffersonian moral framework in some instances, and that has left a vacuum in my view, and that vacuum has been filled potentially with some really troubling things. I've spoken to this about this phenomenon with Constant Kisson recently, with Peter Bogosian. It seems to keep coming up.
00:05:03
Speaker
Do you think that there is a direct connection between the decline in religion and some of these more troubling phenomena that you're grappling with today? No, I think we may possibly have had a chance. It might have been possible for a decline in religion without a kind of corresponding rise in insanity and evil if it hadn't been for the internet.
00:05:28
Speaker
the internet. I've been reading a little bit about mass delusions recently and the last time there was these kinds of religious cults as I believe a lot of the current quote-unquote woke systems of thought have it. I think that
00:05:47
Speaker
apparently they, after the printing press, there was a similar kind of rise in this type of craziness, you know, with offshoots of religion and, you know, Luther Luther being the only being the only successful one.
00:06:03
Speaker
There were a lot of others that ended in massacres and all sorts of insanity. And I think that what we're seeing here is a similar moment in human history to what happened with the invention of the printing press, except it's accelerated to such a degree
00:06:19
Speaker
that I genuinely think it's a problem in the same way that climate change is a problem. You know, any other issue, I feel
Regulating the Internet and Free Speech
00:06:26
Speaker
like the Internet has created a world. We've all got whiplash from being in this new world. Yet there was no discussion of the rules of this new world. And in many ways, you see, it's not a new world at all. It's just the same old world we've seen in recent days, the most extraordinary antisemitism.
00:06:45
Speaker
just rearing its head, absolutely extraordinary levels of antisemitism after a massacre of 1,200 innocent people. And in the same way, misogyny has just been over the last five years, and this was just the side of it that I've been fighting, misogyny just rose up like this most extraordinary monster that we'd all thought we'd defeat.
00:07:12
Speaker
and took the most grotesque forms. And because of the very effective cone of silence that's been placed down over this by a newspaper like The Guardian, which is basically a religious text for liberals and left-wingers.
00:07:27
Speaker
they simply either do not cover this subject or they misrepresent it. And they do that deliberately because the Guardian is another institution that's been captured by gender ideology. Anyway, I'm probably running off the original question and the original point. But yeah, I just, my point is basically that it's a new technology, but we're returning to the same old bigotries, anti-Semitism and misogyny, the two oldest
00:07:54
Speaker
you know, like racism and misogyny, the two oldest bigotries there are. And here they are again, you know, more stronger than ever, less afraid than ever, less, you know, proud of themselves, you know, putting their name, Billy Bragg puts his name to his tweets. Sorry, Billy Bragg is an English folk singer who's come down very hard on the gender ideology side of this.
00:08:18
Speaker
Yes, unfortunately, as a result of the internet, we are just as exposed to Billy Bragg.
TERFs, Trans Rights, and Feminism
00:08:24
Speaker
But you mentioned though, that we never really worked out the rules for this new technology and that's part of the problem. It feels like and belatedly governments in the UK and in Australia now actually are trying to grapple with this. And this is, you know, in the form of misinformation bills and how do you deal with harmful content online?
00:08:44
Speaker
And it raises the agile questions around free speech and whether it's better to have bigoted hateful views out in the open or whether to suppress them. How do we think about this challenge in the context of the internet?
00:08:56
Speaker
Well, here's the original, like the immediate problem is the clearest one I can think of, which is basically that for the last five years, a group of feminists have been demonized as hateful. They come under the name TERFs and they're called trans exclusionary radical feminists. They're the women with whom I ally. And the very name is a slur because the idea that these feminists are trans exclusionary is a lie.
00:09:25
Speaker
because they do not exclude women, any women, from their feminism even if those women identify as men.
00:09:32
Speaker
So it's a smear and it's a slur. And what it actually means is you're not letting men into the girl's tree house. Men want into the girl's tree house. And you'll even see this 40-year-old man in their bios who suddenly decided to start cross-dressing and become part of this new sacred class. And they call themselves girl. What is going on there?
00:09:56
Speaker
And so there's an already existing prejudice against these women that everyone just accepts. It's just been kind of accepted that they're evil. And then when the BBC talks about misinformation or when someone applying hate crime laws talks about misinformation, you can bet they're not talking about undoing the appalling reputation destruction on this group of women, which means that they get bullied out of their jobs, they lose their livelihoods.
00:10:25
Speaker
I know a girl in her mid-20s who had a promising publishing career ahead of her.
00:10:31
Speaker
And now she's unsure of what her future is because she was destroyed by this movement. And I know so many people like this. It's not just like JK Rowling or me who gets hurt by this stuff. It's mainly women and men who, you know, they can't afford to take out legal action. They can't afford to lose their income, but still they take the fight on and they suffer terribly because of it.
00:10:58
Speaker
specifically when it comes to more high profile people caught up in this. One of the themes that I'm fascinated by is how is the narratives that form around people and form around them so quickly and labels that get attached to them. Gramm-Linnahan anti-trans activist or Gramm-Linnahan women's rights campaigner, depending on the audience. Or whether it's in Wikipedia.
00:11:18
Speaker
Exactly, which I've heard you say gets changed 15 minutes after any attempt to change it to women's rights activists to get changed back to anti-trans. This is a not so subtle segue to pull us back to where you were before this narrative formed around you with respect to, I guess, the current culture wars that we're talking about, and that is as one of the most successful screenwriters in British television.
00:11:43
Speaker
I mentioned the book, the first half of the book goes to that. And in a more sane world, the whole book should be a
Writing Sitcoms: Structure and Humor
00:11:49
Speaker
story about Father Ted and black books and all that good stuff. I do want to explore that before we then dive back into the muddy murkiness of trans and the culture wars. I keep forgetting, like everybody else, I keep forgetting that most of the book is about comedy writing. You did have a very successful career before 2018. Yeah, it was going okay. It was going okay.
00:12:13
Speaker
I was getting standing ovations from people who all simultaneously lost my phone number. And we'll go to that. Yeah, sorry, I did it again. It's a funny thing, but you do tend to dwell on things when something like that has happened to you. So yeah, let's please talk about comedy before I get even more maudlin.
00:12:34
Speaker
We'll start with the process of a sitcom episode, which I'm interested in. Give me a feel for how do you go about writing an episode of a sitcom show? Well, we went through different stages. The first stage was Arthur and I, when we were writing Ted, we would simply write 10 funny things that we thought should happen in the show in the order that they could happen.
00:12:54
Speaker
And once we had these 10 funny things, they acted as a series of handholds that get you to the next bit. So everything becomes just a little bit more manageable, a little bit easier. Sometimes then, as you write this, the things that are further on, they suddenly don't make sense anymore. They don't work in the story that seems to be being written. So you might take out that bit and use it in a different episode or something like that. But you basically, you go through the list and then at the end, you have a first draft.
00:13:22
Speaker
That's interesting. So it's not necessarily a story as much as a series of funny bits that you then piece together into a story. Is that right? Yes, but they have to have a kind of some sort of unifying element. They have to be connected through theme or genre. Like, for instance, the flight into terror is basically, you know, we just stole, we just took the basic airplane storyline and used it ourselves, you know, because it's so generic that everyone recognizes it.
00:13:51
Speaker
You know, but but yeah, so that was how we originally we originally. Yeah. And so what the unifying theme does is it just makes it feel like a story, you know, ties everything up, you know, in a nice in a nice package with Father Ted, with the with the goat or the sheep episode where they kind of become homes and Watson. Again, that kind of suggests the way the story should go. But then when I stopped writing with Arthur, I had to figure out my own way of doing it.
00:14:20
Speaker
And I found that a little bit more difficult. I used a brilliant book called A Technique for Producing Ideas.
00:14:26
Speaker
which is by an advertising executive whose name I won't be able to remember. And he basically says there's four stages to coming up with a strong idea. And if I remember correctly, the first stage is gathering the materials, which is basically research. The second stage is playing with the materials. And for me, what that means is I would have a stack of 100 cards with funny ideas written on them. The research part was assembling that stack.
00:14:55
Speaker
And then I would mix up the cards and put them down on tables and look at them and try and think of different relationships between them, which line seemed to be a Roy line, which seemed to be a, you know, Moss line or Jen line. And, you know, stories would begin to form and it was a slow, it was a slow process, but it got it done in the end. It was fine in the end.
00:15:17
Speaker
But my favorite process so far was discovered after that, and possibly directly as a result of the IT crowd, because I think Dan Harmon used to like the IT crowd, who created this show Community and a few other, Rick and Morty.
00:15:34
Speaker
He was very flattered to hear that he actually wrote his Dungeons and Dragons episode of Community after watching my one. But the thing is, I had begun to use his approach, which is he uses a thing called a story circle, which is so brilliant. And
00:15:53
Speaker
Unfortunately, it's one of those things that you can explain it and a hundred people will have a hundred different ideas of what I'm talking about. But it's essentially just you draw a circle, draw a cross in the circle, and there's a progression around the circle. Everything above the circle
00:16:09
Speaker
is in the normal world. Everything below the circle is the trailer for that week's episode, right? So you're progressing through this and there's a number of stages to it, like I think eight stages. And it's just a fantastically simple way. What I would do is I would draw the circle and I would say, okay, what's in the bottom half? What is the trailer for this week's episode? They're the hooks, they're the things that are going to get people watching.
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And it's what it's about, you know, so it's like this week is about Ted is mistaken for a racist. This week is about Google becomes a milk float. The the ordinary world is the bit at the start and the end where they're just being priests again. But the special world is everything that people remember about the episode speed.
00:16:53
Speaker
and everything they remember about the episode of. I've got it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a fantastic system. It has a number of other ways you can use it. You can have a story circle for every, in fact, you do have a story circle for every single character in the show. And so you can kind of use a very, very basic idea of what a story is simply to take it again to the end of a first draft. And that's the important thing. If you get to the end of the first draft, the job is done.
00:17:22
Speaker
You know, what's that thing? I think there's a phrase, a job going as a job, as a job half done. That's what a first draft is. That's when you start to, there's a brilliant quote someone said, you have to write the ending to know what the start should be, but you have to write the wrong start to get to the ending. Well, you said in the book yourself that writing is rewriting and writers who don't write a reliability
00:17:48
Speaker
Rewrite her, my buddy, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Expand on that for me. Expand on the rewriting process. Well, the first draft is, I think, another quote I heard about writing. I'm a big fan of tips on any subject. I love computer games. I mean, I have to watch lots of videos on how to beat it and stuff like that. I love all that stuff. And writing is a bit like that for me. There's tons of things that I pick up from different people along the way and I kind of add them to my own theory. And one of them is
00:18:17
Speaker
Someone said that a writer is a sculptor who has to make his own clay and the clay is your first draft. Maybe you get lucky and the clay like kind of immediately looks like a statue of something like an elephant or a giraffe or a horse.
00:18:32
Speaker
And maybe it just looks like a big lumpy mess. And you have to start digging into it to see what's hidden in there. What is the final sculpture that's hidden in the clay that you provided?
Creative Processes in Writing
00:18:44
Speaker
And sometimes it's really close to the original. To continue the analogy, when we wrote Flight Into Terror, it just came out fully fledged to horse. It just looked like a horse. We were like, hey, it's there.
00:18:58
Speaker
took us two days and we barely rewrote it, you know. And how do you know that? Is that just, that's instinct? There's a couple of things. Well, there's a few different things. Yeah. Instinct, but also sometimes the story won't let itself be told. Like we had one episode, again, I did speak about this with Andrew, but we had in the book, but we, we had one episode where Ted
00:19:18
Speaker
It was called, it ended up, the show, we had a title, The Beast of Craggy Island, and we had a predicament, which was Ted and Dougal trapped at the top floor of a bus by a small yapping dog who's down on the bottom floor. That was all we had. And we couldn't get them down. We didn't know what the end of that story was. So we kind of went back and we thought, you know, by then you've written about 15 pages, right? And you've started off a few storylines and you're somewhat invested.
00:19:48
Speaker
to this idea that you've come up with. And also, it's been hard to write. It's been hard to get to this point. So you're emotionally attached to it because you don't want to go back to the start and do the same kind of work, right? But that's not what happens. If you throw away bad idea, and it wasn't a bad idea, we just couldn't make it work, we kind of discovered that, oh, we have a title, The Beast of Craggy Island, and we have a relationship with Ted and Dougal of Holmes and Watson.
00:20:14
Speaker
Holmes being this genius and Watson being the kind of why you're extraordinary. But that acquires an even funnier kind of shadow when it's Ted and Dougal. You know, Dougal is almost the stupidest person to ever live. So he just thinks Ted is a genius most of the time anyway. So then suddenly, as I said in the book, the small yapping dog disappeared and in its place was one of the funniest speeches we ever gave Dougal about the beast of Craggy Island.
00:20:42
Speaker
and we had a ridiculous mystery that one of the big clues involved that this farmer was riding his bike around while wearing a big fur coat and another one was wearing a crown. So things like that just suddenly started making themselves known.
00:21:03
Speaker
because we had given up our investment on the previous script and just kind of went full gung-ho into this one. And it was a breeze to write. You wrote, we wrote it in moments. It sounds like that's coming off the sparks from each other. I imagine that process relies on having a collaborator and I'm struggling to see how that would happen when you're writing on your own.
00:21:24
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's no, it's definitely, I mean, Jesus, it's so much easier to have a collaborator. It's a great, it's a great working experience to, to, to, to write with someone, but I'm just having a bit of trouble finding someone at the moment. Yes. Well, that's unfortunately, uh, not surprising. I didn't mean to dial it back into that. No, no, that's the thing. It looms over this conversation and it looms over your life at the moment, like a shadow. And that's just the unfortunate reality. Um, but.
00:21:53
Speaker
The other part of that answer that I thought was interesting was the recognition that writing is bloody hard. I've started to try and do some writing recently. There's this romantic notion of writing that you sit in front of a lake and you get out a pen and notepad and the words just come and it's all very delightful. I recall reading something from Hemingway and he was talking about writing in France.
00:22:18
Speaker
And he was talking about the experience of sitting down in the morning and fighting with the page, fighting for every word. And you think this is one of the great authors of the 20th century, and yet him, it was a constant battle. How do you reflect on that? Well, that's, you know, he's such a great example because it wasn't at Hemingway who said he had the idea that if it's going really great, you should stop in the middle of a sentence.
00:22:43
Speaker
So that the next morning when you wake up again, it reminds you of the excitement you felt and you continue writing. That even Hemingway needed that, you know, is, is, but yeah, that's, I mean, that's why I, I think that people who, like, you know, there's this debate around can you teach writing, you know, and I, I really think you can. What you can't teach is SPAC.
00:23:06
Speaker
you might call it, something that really differentiates your work from someone else's. I'm not sure you can teach that, but you can give people the tools with which if they do have that spark, they can turn it into something significant. We spent a long time experimenting with writing styles and it probably stressed us out a little bit more than it should have. I'm now at the stage where I clock in and clock out.
00:23:31
Speaker
Well, sorry, when I was still writing scripts and stuff. I clock in and I clock out. I don't torture myself at night. Oh, this bit doesn't work and stuff. It's like you just trusted a process. You allow your subconscious to get to work on things. You do other things to take your mind off it. And eventually things seem to, your subconscious just seems to knit it together almost without you always being entirely involved. You might see a TV show.
00:24:01
Speaker
and it has a single line that makes you realize how you can end something. It can come from anywhere. And it's one of the great things about making a TV show, when you're in the latter stages and the script has gone through a number of drafts, but there's still things that aren't quite working around quite there. This was funnier in my mind. I don't know why it's not working there. And there's a lovely process at the end of it where you just
00:24:24
Speaker
in the shower thinking about it you're thinking about it when you go to bed at night you're kind of giggling to yourself most of the time because you've just realized a joke that will. Just kill things like that it's a lovely lovely way to live your life yeah i imagine it also requires a bit of trust in that phenomenon that it will eventually come which i imagine probably comes with with with a degree of experience.
00:24:52
Speaker
Yeah, but also I think it's, one thing I try and do is you have to set out on whatever journey you're taking with something you can rely on, you know, a premise or a central character or a, it doesn't matter what it is as long as there's something there. If there's not something very, almost precious or holy, even at the center of it, then I tend to move away. I've done pilots, like I did a pilot with someone,
00:25:22
Speaker
a wannabe comedy. Well, no, I better not say that. But I did a pilot with someone and it didn't get picked up. And he went insane. You know, he just thought that everything you do goes all the way. And it's like, it's like, well, yeah, but, you know, I can't figure out what's wrong with this. Neither can you. So what are we what are we supposed to do? Take it to series, work on it every week when it's got a kind of wobbly premise so we don't know what the show is. We'll be living in hell.
00:25:52
Speaker
So it happens sometimes, but it's worth getting it right because when it does go right, then it's a joy to work on. People love watching it.
Casting Challenges and Rewards
00:26:02
Speaker
you know, most of the time. And yeah, it's, but you have to have that, that special thing, you know, I did a show called Count Arthur Strong over here. And it was Steve Delaney as Count Arthur that I thought was just so precious and extraordinary, that it was worth trying to create a show around him. And it was worth trying to force a premise into existence. And we had this premise, it was interesting, we wrote the pilot, and the premise took up 10 pages.
00:26:32
Speaker
10 pages of how Count Arthur met this other man in his life, the son of his old comedy partner. It was already a bit too complicated, you know what I mean? So we wrote 10 pages of this then meeting up. And we just, you know, thought we have to wait 10 pages before we see them together. And so that we boiled it down and boiled it down and boiled it down until it finally became, I think, a pre-credit sequence.
00:26:57
Speaker
So, yeah, so the premise wasn't as strong as the worst priests in the world live on an island together. But the preciousness of Steve's performance and Rory Kinnear and all the other cast we had, but also just, yeah, the preciousness of that relationship just gave rise to loads of jokes and situations, even if the premise was a little bit, wasn't quite as clear as I'd like it to have been.
00:27:21
Speaker
Well, I'm interested about casting. One of the really big parts of the Success of Father Ted was the casting of Ardal O'Hanlon and Dermot Morgan. What are the secrets to getting casting right?
00:27:34
Speaker
Oh, that's a very good question. Gosh. Well, if I knew, I'd answer faster. It's a tough one. It's a horrible process. Casting is an unpleasant process. Only one person can get the role and you're seeing 20 people. So despite my reputation, I'm quite an amenable person.
00:27:54
Speaker
And I don't like when people come in and they're not right for a role and you have to nod and smile and send them on their way and try not ruin their day with how you react to them. But some just know. Some just know they haven't got it, they didn't nail it, they didn't quite grasp it or we weren't.
00:28:11
Speaker
Impressed in the way they thought they thought we would be and that's really tough. You know, it's it's I don't like disappointing people But at the same time it's it's also a great process in the sense that you know You might see someone who's not right for X, but they're brilliant for Y, you know, it may this might something I should have put in the book actually, but Father Ted's arch enemy father dick burn like that
00:28:38
Speaker
The people Dick Byrne and his father Dougal and his father Jack were our second choices for all the characters. Interesting. We saw a lot of people and they were so good and we were so tortured at the decision that we created another bunch of rival priests so that we could still have them in in some way.
00:29:02
Speaker
So casting is just one of those things. It's a tough process, but it does throw up lots of lovely surprises. It can spin things in a different way. And again, it's just a good thing to be very alert to when you're making a show, very alive to, okay, this person could not do this character for love or money, but maybe they'd be good as this one. And yeah, suddenly they've kind of blossomed in the other role.
00:29:28
Speaker
I was reflecting last night on a question that could try and act as a segue into the two acts in
Preference for Sitcoms Over Films
00:29:38
Speaker
your story, and it's not easy. Where I've landed, what do you see as the role of an artist? Well, how would you describe the role of an artist?
00:29:49
Speaker
Well, I think you find the gift you've been given and you exploit it as much as you can in order to share it with people. I did come to a conscious decision about halfway through my career where I kind of thought,
00:30:07
Speaker
I've got to stop worrying about being an artist. You know, I'm a sitcom writer. I write silly, silly shows that people really, really seem to like. And I should just do that because I was obsessed with global warming for most of my life ever since I heard the Pixies monkeys going to heaven, actually.
00:30:27
Speaker
That would have been a much safer campaign to wage. Yes, exactly. And I did wage it. I was a good little lefty all these years. They don't come after the right, you see. They only come after us lefties. Sorry, but where was I? You had to make a decision to go and make an artist or a sitcom writer. Yeah. And I just thought, well, there's a lot of people who are probably in the same state as me that they're worried. They don't know what's going on.
00:30:53
Speaker
the world seems kind of confusing and disturbing and awful and there's not a lot of hope being proffered. So I thought, well, I'll write silly sitcoms then and I'll do them as best I can and I'll try and make them
00:31:06
Speaker
I'll try and keep them up to the standard that I've always tried to hit. And that'll be a good use of the rest of my time on Earth. You know, rather than fretting about some imaginary, because I used to be a film critic. So of course, for a long time, the kind of aim of making a film is to be all and end all. But it's not my, I don't know, films are, films are, I like watching them, but I can't write them, you know, they're just too, they're too unwieldy for me, like an hour and a half.
00:31:36
Speaker
that's why i love faulty towers that's why i think faulty towers is one of the greatest works of art because they were half hour long farces ten and farces they get a bit boring after half an hour so he just got the perfect form for the perfect farces and and made at least ten of them two of them i'm not a huge one but ten of them are i think all time perfect sitcom episodes
00:31:59
Speaker
It's interesting. We spoke to Jeffrey Archer on the show last week and we were talking about the difference between short stories and novels, which is, I guess, the analogous conversation. And he was saying the difference between a vignette, a moment in someone's life, a sick comment since it's a farce or a scandalous situation and then a drawn out story with a beginning, middle and end. I imagine it does require quite a different skill set.
00:32:22
Speaker
Yeah and you know some people are very good at working within that and still creating a kind of a novelistic style like Jesse Armstrong who does Succession. It's actually kind of a looping sitcom in a way but it still has enormous progression in the main story and the subplots and it's just so brilliantly done. But my I'm not sure I think that is something you also kind of need a team for you know like
00:32:51
Speaker
The thing I know I can do on my own, just about, is sitcoms that start at point A, move to point B, and then go back to point
Controversy and Feminist Stance
00:33:02
Speaker
A. That's what I know I can do. And I've been working a little bit on trying to create
00:33:07
Speaker
as they say in Hollywood arcs, you know, to a series. And it's not been going bad. It's very easy, though. I can tell you how to do that in one. You just write a normal sitcom, right? In the episode one, you set up some story, and then in episode six, you talk about it again. That's all you have to do to make it look like it has an arc. The rest of the time, you can have this dumbest shit happening over and over again every week. It would still look like a proper story.
00:33:34
Speaker
Well, the Gremlin Hand story went from point A to point B. I get the sense that we are coming back to point A as the world starts to understand the collective madness that's been through over the last five to 10 years. Some people in Australia are aware of this story, some maybe less so. Perhaps just give us the overview of how you went from beloved sitcom writer to the, you know, most cancelled man in the UK. Yeah.
00:34:01
Speaker
Well, it was basically just beginning to notice that there was a group of feminists being targeted online who were called TERFs and they were receiving the most extraordinary abuse, rape and death threats, which I thought was very odd because I didn't think anyone was supposed to speak to women in this way. And I started noticing it and complaining about it.
00:34:27
Speaker
And while I did that, I discovered more about what these women actually believed. And I think one of the very first things I shared was a list of things that basically said we always used to do this because we felt it might make a difference that you start off your positions by
00:34:46
Speaker
reaffirming the fact that you have nothing against trans people, that you want them to have the same rights as everyone else, that you want them to live in peace and without any harm coming to them. But, and I know how bad it is to put a but in there, but there is a but in there, none of this is at the expense of women. Full stop. Rape crisis centres, women's sports,
00:35:10
Speaker
women's spaces, these are all sacred. And anything that is to be done to these spaces has to be done after a full consultation with the people it affects.
00:35:23
Speaker
This is the big problem with the whole debate for me is this is not about rights for one group or another. It's a balance of rights debates. What happens when one group's rights come into conflict with another group's rights? And then how do we think about that conflict? And then there isn't any sort of nuance in the public debate goes to that from what I can see. But that's because it's not really a fight between two groups. It's not really a fight between feminists and trans people. That's not the fight.
00:35:51
Speaker
The fight is between feminists and trans rights activists. Trans rights activists are very distinct from trans people. Most of the ones I know are straight. You know, I know, there's two married men, they just hate women. And they found in this issue a way of safely and openly expressing their misogyny, you
Self-ID Laws and Gender Misuse
00:36:14
Speaker
know? There's a guy, I don't, can I name names or should I? Yeah, why not? There's a guy in Dublin called named Aidan Comerford.
00:36:21
Speaker
And he has been obsessively smearing a dead lesbian, a lesbian who died at the age of 34, heard that she was a YouTuber named Magdalene Burns. And the interesting thing about him is that whenever he's smearing this young woman's name, he shows the same screen grab of a conversation where Magdalene was standing up for herself, for her reality as a lesbian, and was disgusted at what was being said to her. He very carefully, and I don't want to go too far into the internet weeds here,
00:36:50
Speaker
But he carefully cuts out the guy's name because the person that she was talking to was someone called communist failed off, right? So this is just a bloke who's trolling a lesbian, you know, and he, this guy come over to Dublin, he shares this tweet.
00:37:07
Speaker
over and over and over and over again. And she made, I don't know, 100 videos that are all funny and charming and make her points exceptionally well. He never shares any of them. He would never dare share any of them.
00:37:22
Speaker
because his only aim is to destroy the reputation of this dead lesbian. And so that's who I'm fighting against, men like these. And there's other men who, you know, there's various stages, levels of, you know, there's some good people doing this. There's some people who think they're doing the right thing, who think they're being good allies. But unfortunately,
00:37:46
Speaker
Their very good nature is being used by men who are anything but. I put in the book the story of my harassment by Stephanie Hayden, who is a con man who harassed me for years and was a major part of my reputation being destroyed and my marriage breaking up. He released my family's home address. These men have nothing to do with transsexuals.
00:38:10
Speaker
They have nothing to do with transsexuals. And you'll find as well, and this is something that, you know, when someone like Peter Catchell accuses me of saying that all trans people are this or all trans people are that, why would I say that when I'm
00:38:26
Speaker
friends with so many trans people who agree with the GC position. GC, just to explain to people, means gender critical. Another word for the TERFs. It doesn't hold up to anything, and the only way it works is the way all their tactics work, through repetition, like trans women are women, Amnesty International writing out trans women are women five times.
00:38:47
Speaker
you know, which they have to keep doing because it's not true. And it's the only way that they can get people to repeat it is by repeating it themselves, you know. Something that's so jarring about what you just said, which I really struggle with. And I think it's a big reason why these sorts of ideologies continue is the disconnect between the brand of the ideology and then the methods they use to try and propagate them. So what was the name of the, the, the guy, Stephanie Hayden? Yes.
00:39:15
Speaker
I've got no doubt that Stephanie Haydn would say that what he's doing is done out of love and kindness and compassion and empathy. And yet the methods of, of doxing your house and, and all those sorts of things are so cruel. And how do you think about that disconnect between words and deed when it comes to, to not just this ideology, I would actually say a lot of different, for want of a better word, woke ideologies in 2023.
00:39:45
Speaker
Well, yeah, but I just want to be clear, there's a slight difference between Hayden and other people, because Hayden is an ex, Hayden's a criminal, you know, he sexually assaulted a redux recently found out that he sexually assaulted a 14 year old boy. And he's changed his pronoun, he's changed his name multiple times, you know, so he's not quite he's, he's a bit of an outlier in certain ways. However, very representative
00:40:11
Speaker
of the kind of danger that things like self ID presents to us. You have someone who basically changes their name to avoid detection, who's running from all sorts of people he owes money to.
00:40:22
Speaker
And he's just kind of weaving this smoke around himself. And that's what I would do if I was a criminal. But unfortunately, at the moment, men like him have been given this huge advantage in that they are considered a kind of, as I said earlier, a sacred class, a class that can't be questioned, a class of people that, you know, are just kind of
00:40:47
Speaker
changing the discourse in all over the English-speaking world as if a coup has already taken place, you know? It's like, how on earth? Like, there's a man who sent me a credible death threat. His name is Frida Wallace. I've reported him to the police. And then you turn on talk TV and other channels, and he's there as a pundit. So you're getting a kind of class of dangerous man who's attaching themselves to this movement.
00:41:17
Speaker
Many of them fully intact, and they attach themselves to this movement. They're narcissists, they're criminal, and they are using people's goodwill as a weapon against them. And unfortunately, they've done this so successfully that you cannot talk about them without people saying, well, you're talking about everyone else. You're talking about nice trans people.
00:41:43
Speaker
You know what I mean? I noticed that you don't use their preferred pronouns when you are having this conversation. Why not? Uh, because if I have to use preferred pronouns for, um, anyone, then I have to use them for people like Adam Graham, who, who was the double rapist who was nearly placed in the Scottish women's prison. The guy today who, who was just put away in Scotland for 20 years for torturing a young woman, an 11 year old girl, excuse me, uh, in his home. These are not women and these are not women's crimes.
00:42:13
Speaker
and starting to muddy the issue, muddy the waters around there, creates an extremely dangerous world for women. So I won't do it. I won't play along with it. And look at me, I'm friends with, you know, my trans friends, some of them are hilarious. There's one Miranda Yarvey.
00:42:32
Speaker
and even though Miranda has a woman's name, he will correct people if they say she about him. He will say I'm not he, you know, and he's trans identified and he's deeply embarrassed about trans activism and what's being done with his name.
00:42:48
Speaker
Which is a powerful reminder that not all trans people, trans people think the same and we've got to be careful, careful not to assume they do. And we're listening to the wrong ones at the moment. You know, the ones we need to listen to are the trans men who are extremely honest. Like Scott Nugent is a good example in the US. They know that what's happening is extremely dangerous and they're doing everything, they can't stop it.
00:43:17
Speaker
even while having a trans identity themselves. Some of them will have different reasons. Some of them is because it's too far gone. There's no way back. You kind of have to take on the role of the opposite sex for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not, because testosterone is such a powerful drug.
Health Risks of Transitioning
00:43:33
Speaker
And others are just happily trans, and they just get on with their lives. But they know
00:43:38
Speaker
The reality behind transitioning that there's not really such a thing as a successful transition. It is a lot of whatever you do to yourself. You're going to be going to the hospital a lot. Tell me about saying boys with walking sticks or walkers.
00:43:53
Speaker
Yeah, well there's something we've been noticing. I remember I was driving once and a guy who looked very much like he identified as trans crossed in front of me and he was in his twenties and he had a walker. And there was another famous video of a trans activist in Scotland
00:44:08
Speaker
Charging at women with a walker, you know, it's almost a father Ted skit, isn't it? I know Sad under the surface at first I saw I thought maybe maybe it's like something to do with a disability scam or something like that I didn't know what was going on. So why did they all have walking sticks and walkers? And then I found out it's because cross sex hormones give you osteoporosis
00:44:31
Speaker
And if you are a young person and you're coming down the stairs and you take a little bit of a trip, you write yourself and you get on with the rest of your day. If you have osteoporosis, your life has changed forever. So no one is telling these kids this. No one is telling these kids this. And instead what you have are trans activists, again, fully intact trans activists.
00:44:57
Speaker
who are telling kids that they won't be happy until they begin these procedures. It's disgusting. I think it should be against the law. And I really do think that the word grooming is the word for this. It is ideological grooming and it's run wild over the last five years.
Ideologies and Academic Influence
00:45:16
Speaker
In a conversation you had with Lawrence Fox earlier in the year, coincidentally, we're speaking to Lawrence next week, another more recent cancel culture victim. He asked you, how did we get to this insane position? 90, 95%, I'm plucking numbers out, but surely the vast majority of people agree with your basic position that men cannot be women. They agree that this is insanity.
00:45:43
Speaker
Despite that, people's lives can be ruined. Your life can be upended. Someone like a JK Rowling previously, one of the most beloved Brits alive can be vilified. As to answering the question, you talked about the idea of a perfect storm. You mentioned the internet, for example, is one of those forces which is driving this. What are some of the other forces that are driving this insanity?
00:46:05
Speaker
Well, I think that you mentioned it earlier. I think that the kind of big bang of how it took over the world is related to the corruption of academia in the US, possibly all over the world. I'm not sure of the state of academia all over the world, but I think that the US is particularly bad. I think that the UK and Australia are downstream of the US in these issues, unfortunately.
00:46:29
Speaker
That's exactly what I mean. And I think I say in the book, but these academic insane ideas, they trickle down and they've been trickling down through the internet, through teachers and academics and professors and all sorts of people who
00:46:44
Speaker
one would normally expect to know better, and you would hope would be the storehouse of the wisdom of the world, you know, these institutions. And instead, there's been a kind of a weird corruption of them, where to give a very quick rundown of why Peter Boghossian keeps coming up, but he was part of a group of academics who ran a prank where they submitted all these fake papers into various... The conceptual penis was one of those papers.
00:47:14
Speaker
Yes, into various academic journals. And they sprinkled around meaningless jargon from gender studies and other critical race studies and things like that. And they got them accepted. One of them was literally a translated chapter of Mein Kampf. And it was accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. So they proved that there was being built in US academia a fake body of knowledge.
00:47:41
Speaker
A body of knowledge is not really based on anything that originates from some very dodgy people a lot of the time. I don't know if you've ever seen the Derek Jensen video, Queer Theory Jeopardy, where he basically, oh, you've got to link to it. He goes through the founding documents of queer theory and points out that each of them is a very, very relaxed attitude towards sexual relations between adults and children. So it's an extremely disturbing field.
00:48:10
Speaker
that has somehow still managed to make it into the mainstream. You can see it in books that schools are not letting their kids or letting the parents of the kids they're teaching see. There's someone in the UK currently taking the Department of Education to court because they won't let them see the materials for the kids. There's all these like little and words like sis
00:48:35
Speaker
which have no traction because they're not based on anything that exists in real life. These words have just kind of trickled down into the discourse, not really of ordinary people, but certainly of what you might call the educated classes or the privileged classes or the laptop classes. Let's say the non-working.
00:48:55
Speaker
you know, the non working well off classes, you know, they're the ones who have really been, I've really fallen in love with this. And yeah, I think you can kind of trace it back to this corruption of academia.
Hope for Future Conversations
00:49:10
Speaker
And unfortunately, I genuinely, I wonder whether you can fix it until you go into, into that area and see what happened there. Because it's, it's extraordinary got as far as it did. Like Rachel McKinnon, here's a good story.
00:49:24
Speaker
Rachel McKinnon, who is the famous cyclist now named Veronica Ivy. They do like changing their names because they get a lot of bad publicity. But Veronica Ivy wrote a paper. He's a professor. He's a professor as well. And his paper was called Yes, the Emperor Has No Clothes, But You Shouldn't Mention It.
00:49:43
Speaker
You know, I mean, it's like not enough to tell an audacious lie. You have to actually tell people you're doing it. I've always thought about this as a subconscious denial of reality, but that is just a completely conscious denial of reality. It's extraordinary. Yes. All his papers, all Veronica's, Ivy's papers are about the concept of creating reality by lying about it. You know, you basically create your own reality if you lie hard enough.
00:50:11
Speaker
Pure Foucault, right? It's kind of this weird strand of postmodernist thought. Yeah, that's what it is. I mean, really, it's like postmodernism has just poisoned everything until, you know, we're getting to a stage now where we don't even know how to respond to human rights atrocities, you know?
00:50:30
Speaker
So it's yeah, I would say academia and then the internet. What the internet did was just disseminated it far more quickly than it would have been disseminated otherwise.
00:50:43
Speaker
But my final question, I want to probe on a little moment of hesitation you had earlier in that answer. He said, I'm not really sure how we solve this. And my question is, where does this end? Where do you see the state of the debate when it comes to trans today? And looking forward, how do you see this playing out?
00:51:04
Speaker
Well it's unfortunately there's the range of people who have investment in it makes it a very difficult thing to deal with because you have young kids who were genuinely fooled because adults didn't tell them the truth and told them a terrible lie. They're the ones who my heart breaks for most of all you know and I just don't know how anyone would be able to pick up the pieces after being lied to by the whole of society.
00:51:29
Speaker
It blows my mind when I think about it. Also, we spoke to Helen Joyce about a month ago and she talked about the parents who have been messaging that and it will be just as hard for them to give it up as well. That's exactly what I mean. That's another group who have to be spoken to or treated in a different way. Then there's the group who are basically just criminals who are putting on lipstick and getting accepted into every women's space they want to be.
00:51:53
Speaker
accepted into. Then there's the group of what you might call, well you know, transsexuals, people who are driven to remove their genitalia because they can't
00:52:04
Speaker
stop thinking about it, you know? And then there's all these groups and they're all involved, but they're all kind of different conversations need to happen. But the most immediate and urgent thing is to take down the people who are lying, you know, the pink news type publications, the Guardian, the people who are covering it up
00:52:27
Speaker
the people who are lying about it, the people who are telling these young kids that feminists hate them, that JK Rowling hates them. That's what needs to be addressed first. An incredible misinformation campaign that's been running now for about at least seven years. So yeah, once that's done, then hopefully those kind of painful but necessary conversations will be able to take place.
00:52:53
Speaker
is hoping. Graham, I hope it wasn't obvious. I was up quite late last night, binging on Father Ted. First time I've watched the show in years. It was such a lovely little reminder of maybe a time when we were a bit more forgiving, a bit more irreverent, and I think, kind of. And I think there is so much in that show that is a salient lesson for us today. So congratulations on that, on your career, and on the book.
00:53:19
Speaker
beautifully written, which as a writer, I would expect. But it's also very honest. It's very funny. And I think it's a very important contribution to this debate that we've been talking about. Thank you for coming on, Australiana. Very happy to. Thank you so much.
00:53:33
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.