Linehan Tough Crowd

How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78563-338-6
Verlag: Eye Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'A must-read. Funny and utterly compelling' Jonathan Ross Having cut his teeth in music journalism, Graham Linehan became the finest sitcom writer of his generation. He captured the comedy zeitgeist not just as the co-creator of Father Ted but also with The IT Crowd and Black Books, winning five Baftas and a lifetime achievement award. Then his life took an unexpected turn. When he championed an unfashionable cause, TV commissioners no longer returned his emails, showbiz pals lost his number and his marriage collapsed. In an emotionally charged memoir that is by turns hilarious and harrowing, he lets us into the secrets of the writing room and colourfully describes the high-octane atmosphere of a sitcom set. But he also berates an industry where there was no one to stand by his side when he needed help. Bruised but not beaten, he explains why he chose the hill of women and girls' rights to die on - and why, despite the hardship of cancellation, he's not coming down from it any time soon.

GRAHAM LINEHAN was born in Dublin. He is the mastermind behind beloved sitcoms Father Ted, The IT Crowd, Black Books and Motherland. His Substack is dedicated to monitoring the extremes of gender identity ideology and he also co-hosts the highly successful weekly YouTube show The Mess We're In, which has garnered a remarkable 1.5 million views in just three years.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Linehan, Graham

Leseproben

prologue:
The end

Some time before I lost everything, I heard laughter drifting up to my office at the top of the house, a sound I could never resist. My family were my favourite audience, and if they were already laughing, well then, even better. Normally, I’d gallop down, asking what was so funny, to join in or see if I could steal something to turn into a joke or a sketch or a scene or a show. But this time I just stood at the top of the stairs and listened. This was after the first year of relentless harassment, while I was still dissecting the workings of the trap I had walked into, and the limits of friendship had allowed it to snap shut on my remaining testicle, the one that the cancer had somehow not stumbled upon during a recent tussle with its immediate neighbour. I didn’t yet know how firmly the trap held me, but it certainly held me at the top of those stairs.

It was still early days in my exile from the dinner party circuit; work, opportunities and social engagements had only just ceased to darken my door. Sure, no one was saying anything, no one was helping – my friends were, in fact, giving me odd looks, ghosting and blanking me, not returning calls, giving my wife shit on the phone, writing nasty letters about the importance of kindness, and perhaps worst of all, sympathetically nodding while telling me why they couldn’t get involved – but I still believed it was only a matter of time before these friends and colleagues from the entertainment industry would fly to my aid. The satirists, the stars, the progressives, the feminists... Those I’d made famous, and who had made me semi-famous in return. I thought they’d be along any minute.

But no one around me expressed an opinion about the issues I was desperately asking them to address: women losing their words, spaces and sports, and the systematic dismantling of basic principles of safeguarding that protect the most vulnerable. My nerves were shredded, waiting for my friends to turn up and them not turning up. So when I heard my family laughing from downstairs I knew I couldn’t go down because it would all be written on my face and I’d do to the atmosphere what the internet did to privacy: kill it stone dead.

It was out of the question. It’d be like Lurch from The Addams Family walking into the room. So I sat down at the top of the stairs and listened to them, smiling, glad that there was still at least some happiness in the house. Maybe the dog joined me, or one of the cats. It wasn’t so bad.

‘A nursing home on one side and a graveyard on the other,’ the lettings agent had said, forcing a laugh. ‘Not ideal, I know.’

‘No, no. What could be more convenient?’ I said.

It’s early in 2020. My modest flat, which is a few hundred yards down the road from my family, is on a corner of the building and does indeed have a nursing home to one side and a graveyard behind it. When I’m preparing food, I look out of a window at the nursing home; when I’m eating, I look at the graveyard. It’s quite the rollercoaster! Every day, I lock eyes with one elderly patient propped up on pillows, staring straight back at me through his window. I waved once and got no response. He’s either suffering from dementia or he knows who I am and doesn’t have the strength to raise his middle finger.

In the earliest hours of the morning, the nurses at the nursing home (it would be odd to have nurses at a graveyard) gather outside to gossip and smoke. Because I’ve stopped watching the news, the soft trill of their conversation acts as a sort of virus-progression barometer. If I wake up to the sound of laughter, then all is well and Covid has not yet suffered the journey to Norwich, a journey which, to be fair, is a bit of a bugger, even for so-called worldwide pandemics. Norwich isn’t on the way to anywhere, so not many can be bothered to make the trip.

My building is at the ancient, overgrown, neglected end of the graveyard, which is a little too symbolically on the nose for this writer’s comfort. At the other end of it, the newbie dead are still rocking their Sunday best, but in my corner, squirrels cavort over the disintegrating remains of the long-gone. In the early evening, junkies dart through the staggered gravestones, like dark fish at the bottom of a rock pool, shouting over distances because one is always faster than the other. I don’t know it yet but this flat is where I’ll spend the next two years, my TV writing career in tatters, stunned at my inability to make people care about the daylight theft of women’s rights, or the greatest safeguarding scandal since Rotherham, or the greatest medical scandal since thalidomide.

When I began talking about the issue, there were still five years to go before the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon and the closure of the Tavistock gender clinic, J.K. Rowling had not yet broken cover to take over as the number one target of trans rights activists, and terms like ‘assigned at birth’ and ‘cervix-haver’ had only just begun to turn up in NHS documents. On the rare occasions it was noticed at all, the trans issue was seen as a sideshow.

‘Why are you focusing on this tiny minority?’ people would say.

‘Women are not a tiny minority,’ I’d reply.

Kinder people than the friends I lost often say, ‘I don’t know how you can withstand the abuse,’ but the truth is that I don’t see it. I got the gist a while back and now I would no more google my name than stick my tongue into a plug socket. Besides, I’d had online abuse before, in various forms and for various reasons. I’d even had it before it went virtual, in the form of physical bullying, a phenomenon that must seem both quaint and terrifying to the emotionally tender youth of the modern middle class.

There’s a story that I first heard attached to the actress and model Pia Zadora, a briefly famous starlet who won Worst Actress and Worst New Star at the Golden Raspberry awards in 1982. The legend goes that her performance in a stage production of The Diary of Anne Frank was so underwhelming that when the Nazis barge in at the end of play and demand ‘Where is she? Where is Anne Frank?’ an audience member shouted, ‘She’s in the attic!’ But Zadora was never in a stage version of Anne Frank – the story was applied to each fresh female actor who had somehow brought the public’s withering gaze upon her head. It’s a joke, really, a combination of gossip and joke, with a scorned and discounted woman providing the punchline. And yet, for all that, it’s funny. An audience member turning you in; it’s the worst possible review, and the best example of the term, often said with a shrug by comedians consoling or warning one another about a difficult gig: ‘Tough crowd.’

There was certainly no shortage of people shouting, ‘He’s in the attic!’ I was astonished at the pain of each fresh betrayal. I couldn’t seem to get used to the experience. When the internet turns on you, as it had the moment I entered into the debate around women’s rights, it isn’t pretty, but I thought I had a couple of advantages. I had an audience that I had already won over by co-writing some well-loved sitcoms, Father Ted being by far the most famous, but also The IT Crowd, Black Books and Count Arthur Strong, and more importantly I had smart, compassionate, progressive friends within the industry who would soon be swooping in to add their voices to mine.

Unfortunately, the fight against gender ideology wasn’t funny, and when I wasn’t being funny, the public took the opportunity to tune me out. Sitcom writers are not particularly noticed at the best of times, but I never thought I’d become so imperceptible that friends and even family members failed to notice what I was going through. I was targeted by a convicted criminal who had the police in his pocket, and a media eager to find some dirt on me, and it was at that precise moment that all my showbusiness friends simultaneously lost my phone number. One day, I looked at my sunken eyes in the mirror and realised I was becoming one of those depressing BBC docudramas about comedians catching cancer or falling off the wagon or whatever. The big difference with my story was that over the last five years, cancer of the testicles had been the most positive thing that had happened to me.

There is no definitive moment that I became perceived as toxic. But there’s no doubt about the sheer scale of the media machine that made it happen. If anyone edits my Wikipedia page to say ‘campaigner for women’s rights’ rather than ‘anti-transgender activist’, the edit reverts back within fifteen minutes. Gender-goofy newspapers like The Guardian and The Independent only interview colleagues of mine in the hope they can get them to condemn me, which many are delighted to do. The LGBTQ+ website Pink News has to date written more than seventy-five hit pieces on me, all of them designed to paint my perfectly commonplace beliefs as evidence of bigotry and madness.

But that’s Pink News. I expected a little more digging, a little more discernment from those who knew me well. Unfortunately, friends, colleagues and family members alike decided to treat malicious gossip as gospel. In those early days, I didn’t yet know what a ringing disappointment people would turn out to be. There was a spring in my step, and not just because I was lighter by a testicle that had, overnight, grown until it weighed as much as a Rolex. I thought I could offer something to the increasingly febrile debate, perhaps bring some...