#fuck Graham Linehan

[dougielombax]

No

You can’t go and see what’s behind the Red Door.

That’s where the Creature lives.

#dougie rambles #personal stuff #red door #creature #a creature #the creature #creatures #terrors #the horrors #the it crowd #richmond #my poor attempt at a joke #what #no context #vagueness #fuck Graham Linehan

[thenameofsantiagossextape]

Quick reminder of how much of a c*nt Graham Linehan is:

Why do people like Graham Linehan keep choosing this hill to die on? | The Independent

#fuck graham linehan #and sorry #but fuck richard ayoade for supporting him #i don't want to cancel anyone #but if you support people like graham linehan then fuck you #trans rights #trans rights are human rights #tw: transphobia

[thatheathen]

ratio

#thatheathen #twitter #fuck graham Linehan #fuck transphobes #lol #a vile transphobe just harassing trans people online for posting cat videos

[quinnfabrayapologist]

Graham Linehan claiming he sold out all 10,000 copies of his book when every new source says he sold less than 400 total is actually a great representation of the average gender critical's relationship to the truth

#terfs don't interact #radfems don't interact #graham linehan #glinner #LMAOOOOOO #like. buddy. take the fucking L.

[mossflower]

they need to make more mid 2000s sitcoms that are so homophobic they cycle back around to being gay

#parents put the it crowd on. why did they do a minute long sequence of the two guys kissing #obligatory graham linehan is a terrible person #but he managed to accidentally write a show about two trans guys with a weird gay thing going on and their failgirl bestie #like. you make an episode about Men Getting Periods and i will reinterpret that joke to mean they’re trans. get fucked <3

[peachy-lutin]

Richard why would you do this?

#richard ayoade #text post #graham linehan #fucking glinny #for real tho Richard jeez #this is so disappointing

[kimwxlers]

Happy The End of the Ice Age Day!

#my gifs #ted crilly #dougal mcguire #father ted #dermot morgan #ardal o'hanlon #tvedit #it's the end of the ice age... and my birthday! #also fuck graham linehan though

[nothing-an-iratze-cant-fix]

I think what celebrities don’t get about “cancel culture”, or possibly pretend not to get to try and avoid the consequences to their actions, is that we don’t care about them. We did, and then they behaved like an arsehole so we stopped caring. No huge part of our lives, no massive tragedy for us. If they were particularly dear maybe 10 minutes googling and a vague sense of distant mourning.

It’s not prison. They can still live. They can get shitty jobs and live in shitty houses like the rest of us. Because having better lives than us was a privilege that relied on them holding themselves to a decent standard and it doesn’t get actively taken away, it just … goes. When the crowd turns their backs and doesn’t think of you anymore, you aren’t executed, you just … disappear. You didn’t have a right to fame and fortune, it was given to you because we loved you. And now we don’t. Tough shit buddy, time for a semi-detached and the relentless drudgery of an office job. And honestly, these days, that’s still fucking lucky.

#cancel culture #although the term is bullshit #celebrity #David Tennant #not because he’s cancelled but because I was thinking about him and #graham linehan #and that’s what made me write this post #also #fuck Graham lineham #and while we’re here #fuck terfs #fuck jkr

[itspvg]

I didn't think I truly understood what terminally online was. Or had a good example of who would be terminally online till I saw Graham Linehan's fucking twitter a few moments ago.

Christ what an absolute fucking shit stain of a person.

#my post #Graham Linehan #He can go sit on a fucking pyre

[dougielombax]

Yeah.

I see.

Have you tried turning the gravitational constant of the universe off and on again?!

Okay.

Turn it off.

Yes.

Okay.

Now.

….

TURN IT BACK ON AGAIN!!!!!

For fuck’s sake…

#dougie rambles #personal stuff #have you tried turning it off and on again #reboot #the it crowd #fuck Graham Linehan #my poor attempt at a joke #what #this sounded funnier in my head #shitpost #unreality #universe #gravity #fundamental constants #celestial mechanics #statics #dynamics #constants #real numbers #empirical laws #empirical #metaphysics #highbrow shitposting #weapons grade shitpost #advanced shitpost #science #physics #space #fuck’s sake #the power of god

[janersm]

That time Graham Linehan and his cult of TERF devotees decided that women with polycystic ovary syndrome are men. The only aggressive man showing contempt for women’s boundaries here is him.

[image description: a screenshot of Graham Linehan quotetweeting Twitter user dizzyborden1972 “Yeah we know. You're just an aggressive man showing contempt for women's boundaries.” dizzyborden1972 had said, “I do gotta say it's going to be interesting if one of you dudes actually tries to physically stop me from using the restroom just because PCOD makes me hairy and I rarely do performative femininity. I may have to "stand my ground."”]

#the terfs are not alright #graham linehan #terfs dni #terfs fuck off #terfs are mras #fuck terfs #terfs suck #terfs #misogyny #sexism #ableism #pcos #fuck radfems #not radfem safe #anti radfem #twitter #fuck your bigotry #just say you’re a bigot and go

[tanadrin]

Imagine one day a new social trend starts spreading. It’s something unbelievably dumb. Not harmful per de, but truly silly to believe. Let’s say, I dunno, healing crystals start going mainstream. Everybody’s talking about their crystals. It becomes impolite to criticize people who believe in healing crystals. They become a big part of people’s personalities, and people on TV start talking about them, and one day years down the line politicians are debating funding for crystal-based medicine. And through it all you are sitting there going, what the fuck is happening. I thought we were all on the same page on this. You want to get along and be friendly and open minded but you cannot pretend to believe in healing crystals, this is nonsense, and when the topic comes up you refuse to lie about it. This eventually starts to have social consequences—they’re that popular!—but what can you do? You cannot pretend a lump of quartz can cure the flu or whatever. It’s just all so unbearably embarrassing.

I think what the centrist/liberal/center-left reactionary turn driven by culture war stuff feels like. And I think the key emotion is probably cringe. Not hate, not fear, though those emotions may reinforce the turn. I think in a lot of cases people who imagine themselves pretty open minded and flexible have as part of their worldview something they thought was bedrock social consensus—on the level of “healing crystals are silly woo”—so bedrock maybe that it didn’t even need to be a conceptual boundary they actually policed in their minds.

For instance, when she started her anti-trans turn, JK Rowling made a big show of not being really anti trans, just arguing that Some People Had Gone Too Far. She wasn’t a frothing religious reactionary, after all. And I believe that’s probably true! I think Rowling probably did have a mental model of sex and gender with a little bit of give in it—of the “we can humor the odd weirdo” type. But as the discussion of trans rights in the UK got more serious over her lifetime, trans people went from “the odd weirdo” to “a recognized minority,” and eventually this ran against a bedrock belief that on some level men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet. To act otherwise was just too embarrassing. And she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in the name of political correctness.

Other people whose brains have been eaten by the anti-woke mind virus (as @eightyonekilograms calls it) have something going of the contrarian in them, who enjoys yelling “up yours, woke moralists!” or w/e. Im thinking of ppl like Glenn Greenwald here, or Dave Chapelle, people who seem not to feel alive except when people are mad at them. That’s a separate but interesting dynamic. And there are people like Graham Linehan who become totally unhinged through this process of auto-radicalization, moths drawn ever closer to a particular source of validation within their chosen reactionary subcommunity, until they are truly parodies of themselves. That is also an important dynamic, but it’s one that only takes hold after the initial turn has begun.

I think the role of that feeling of cringe, that refusal to entertain an idea because it is too embarrassing (even if it does actually have a decent body of research behind it, unlike crystals) is important to think about, because I am interested in how to get people over it. I know that feeling has affected my own thinking over my lifetime. I wasn’t raised particularly conservative, but I had to learn not to cringe at a lot of feminist thought before I could appreciate it and learn from it. I explicitly didn’t have that cringe when it came to gay people for whatever reason, so it never entered my mind that it might be a problem. I remember being surprised to learn when I was very young that some boys wanted to marry other boys, but my response was “huh. Go figure.” Because for whatever reason I had not picked up that this was something I was supposed to be grossed out by. A general doctrine of empathy, of trying to understand people on their own terms, can help forestall some of this stuff, but it’s not foolproof in either direction—I don’t want to believe crystals have healing powers if it becomes socially popular to do so, just because it is socially popular to do so! And if they do, I don’t want to not believe they do just because it is socially unpopular!

(Obviously the crystals thing is not a one to one metaphor for the trans thing, so don’t read too much into that. Maybe astrology would have been a better analogy. Also I’m not talking just about people whose reactionary turn is predicated on trans issues—I think this dynamic applies to everything from gay rights to the Tridentine Mass. But trans issues are a handy example bc, as the adage goes, somebody posts once about trans people and they never post anything normal again. I think the classic rapid-onset trans derangement syndrome is closely tied to the fact that gender norms are a really deep element of many people’s social-consensus-based worldview, and so challenged to that worldview are felt as really cringe.)

I’m curious if other people who grew more liberal in their thinking over time had a similar experience of having to overcome what was basically a feeling of embarrassment at certain ideas.

[couldtransitionsaveher]

ROY TRENNEMAN from THE IT CROWD

JUSTIFICATION:

"idk if you’ve done her before but if you haven’t holy shit dude you gotta, she SUCKS she’s a 2000’s sitcom man with aallll the problems that comes with, weird around women, insecure about her masculinity, etc. etc. but me and my partner are VERY agreed she’s trans, just something about the pathetic wet cat way she tries so hard to be a ‘real man’ ends up reading more as repression to me than anything else and the way babygirl is SO obsessed with performing masculinity while having all the 2000’s Nerd Egg stereotypes is hilarious. Also fuck Graham Linehan lol" - @sulphur-and-honey

Reminder: Submissions are always open! Submit here!

#glinner if you see this fuck you #roy trenneman #the it crowd #could transition have saved her #transgender #trans hc #sulphur-and-honey

[beesmygod]

Since you’ve reminded me of British Television have you seen Absolutely Fabulous? I’ve only seen a couple eps so far but it defies description.

Also the IT Crowd, which makes me cry laughing even though it was written by Graham Linehan (presumably before he became the man he is today?)

AB FAB IS SOOOOO GOOD LOL. I WANT TO BE THEM....

the tragedy of darth linehan is that he was absolutely one of the top comedy tv writers of probably all human history. father ted, black books, IT crowd, etc are genuinely so fucking funny and were the foundation of a lot of people's humor. its just. he got social media and it completely fried his brain. he became this like. fucked up parody of an old man online before transphobia became his signature move. people criticized a rotten joke in IT crowd (one joke! one joke out of an entire career!!) and he just completely fucking lost it.

lol at ruining your life so much it retroactively destroys your previously glimmering legacy.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

All right, I didn’t want to do this, to dignify this bullshit with attention, but I’m going to be annoyed about it anyway and if I write the annoyance down and post it somewhere then I can move on from thinking about it. That’s pretty much why this whole blog exists – write the thoughts down, put them somewhere outside me, then I can move on from them.

Many days when I wake up, I check Chortle like it’s the morning paper. It’s not a perfect website. In many ways, it’s rather a shit website. The frequency of the typos is genuinely amazing, for a website that people get paid to make. But I’m not on Twitter (and I don’t think going there would be a good way to find fewer writing errors in my way of getting comedy news), and I want to know what’s going on in British comedy, and that’s a good way to scan the headlines.

I’m not doing a Chortle headlines roundup this morning, where I post the actual headlines. I almost linked to their top story today, and then decided I shouldn’t, and this is the first time I’ve ever thought I shouldn’t link to Chortle. Because Chortle’s imperfect, but it’s not evil, a link to there is not going to drive traffic that’ll be used for nefarious means, it’s not like linking to the Daily Mail or some shit.

But I still don’t want to link to this one. Throughout the Edinburgh Festival this year, I got annoyed when they posted an article about it pretty much every time Graham Linehan left his house. Why give this attention? Why treat this like it deserves any relevance? Why play directly into his hands, by constantly covering what is very, very clearly a contrived publicity stunt? Why write an article about how this is a transparent ploy for attention, when the writing of that article clearly rewards it with the exact attention he wants? (For anyone who didn’t follow it, basically, Graham Linehan got himself booked on a gig that got canceled so he could shout about being canceled, and then he did his set anyway in the street. It really isn’t that interesting.)

Well, we know what it was all for now. Everyone who said it was a publicity stunt was right, and everyone who publicly said it was a publicity stunt did, in fact, contribute to further publicity for what was definitely a publicity stunt. And not just some general publicity stunt to garner attention for the general concept of Graham Linehan – it was a specific guerrilla marketing campaign for this book. And everyone played into his hands.

That’s the Chortle top story I’m not linking to – today’s announcement that he’s written a book about how he got canceled. I realized today that, as annoyed as I am about everyone giving him the attention – I still clicked all those Chortle headlines this summer. And I don’t click every Chortle headline. I click the ones that interest me. But I clicked every one that mentioned Linehan, because I was curious. Thereby letting Chortle know that they can get the click-based attention their business model requires by continuing to give Linehan the attention he needs to market his book. What a fucked up state of the world. I’m not trying to, like, cancel Chortle or anything. I’m still going to read that site and link to it when I think there’s something interesting. But I can at least avoid linking to their Linehan articles.

That’s what’s in it, though. Graham Linehan has written a book and it’ll be published next month. The book is the type of thing that should really be a relic by now, shouldn’t it? It’s been a cliché, at this point, for comedians to make jokes about the provocateur who gets a book deal and TV spots and uses them to talk loudly and publicly about how they’ve been silenced. That joke’s been done to death, we’re all now aware of how absurd that is. So how on Earth are people still doing it unironically? It would be like someone doing an unironic, unsuberverted “What’s the deal with airplane food?” joke in 2023.

If that were all this was, I’d have read the article, rolled my eyes, and moved along. Because like I said, I don’t want to give it attention (though I’d argue that my tiny tiny Tumblr blog giving attention to something does not make me hypocrite for complaining about one of the biggest websites in comedy giving it attention – it’s not the same thing). But this article listed the quotes that have been lent in support of the book. Andrew Doyle – obviously. Simon Evans – no surprise, don’t care, though I’d say this might push him from “really shitty right-wing comic but I guess he’s sort of just barely on the slightly more acceptable side of right-wing, and therefore it’s not totally unconscionable that that they have him on The News Quiz sometimes, a bit like Geoff Norcott as much as Geoff Norcott fucking sucks”, to “seriously, if the BBC keeps booking this guy, I might go beyond just skipping his episodes and be done with The News Quiz altogether”.

Then there’s Jonathan Ross, which is slightly more notable because he’s still out there in the mainstream respectable side of comedy (well, light entertainment, at least), but not a surprise. I think he’s already publicly expressed support for Linehan, anyway. Also, he married his wife when he was 28 and she was 18, after meeting her when he was 26 and she was 16. Who cares about anything else about him?

That’s a bit how I feel about Frank Skinner too – why is there any debate about whether he’s a good guy, when he married a teenager who was ten years his junior (though in Skinner’s case, there’s the added fun element that he was her teacher)? This isn’t some vague rumour that he might have fucked a teenager, where we can pretend it might not be true, like with Noel Fielding. He definitely did it, they got married. They had a ceremony with witnesses and legal documents to formally acknowledge that he definitely fucked that teenager. I don’t care what else he’s done, that should be enough to end the conversation about whether we like this guy.

I’ve thought before that it says something about standards and values in the 00s that Jonathan Ross had a very successful career in the public eye for many years after marrying a teenager, no one minded that, he only got in trouble with the BBC after he made some lewd phone calls (I think those phone calls are the thing that have landed Russell Brand in the most actual hot water as well, despite those being much less bad than the crimes he’s confessed to in public, not to mention the ones that he hasn’t). Around the same time, Frankie Boyle said a bunch of horribly misogynistic and racist shit on Mock the Week, and that was all fine, he only got fired for a joke that was insufficiently reverent about the queen. Interesting where the BBC draws its lines.

Anyway, this has gone very off topic, but the point is that I don’t care what Jonathan Ross has said, because I never liked him anyway (I mean, he is also really annoying, but that shouldn’t be the main reason to dislike him in light of the fact that he married a teenager). That leaves just one person who gave a supportive quote to Linehan that counts as a surprise or disappointment, which is Richard Ayoade.

“Graham Linehan has long been one of my favourite writers - and this book shows that his brilliance in prose is the equal to his brilliance as a screenwriter. It unfolds with the urgency of a Sam Fuller film: that of a man who has been through something that few have experienced but has managed to return, undaunted, to tell us the tale.”

Normally, I would not hold a pull quote on a book against anyone. I know those things don’t mean anything. I know that much of the time, the person who wrote the quote didn’t even read the book. I know they were just asked to say something so they did, or maybe they even just let their publicist write something and then signed off on it. But in this case, even if that’s what happened, that doesn’t make it better. The unconscionable thing here is lending any support to Linehan in 2023. You can’t even make some argument about separating the art from the artist, because this is the artist. It’s not an unrelated stand-up comedy set, it’s a book about how his views are fine and he shouldn’t have been canceled for them. Even if Richard Ayoade never read that book, he signed off on having his name attached to a statement that a book on that subject is okay.

The only thing that would justify this is if it turns out they took a quote he said years ago out of context, or if they made it up entirely. The former seems unlikely as he seems to be talking directly about this book, referring to Linehan's ability to write prose. The latter seems unlikely as inventing this seems like an absurd thing to do even by Graham Linehan’s standards, and if he had, you’d think Richard Ayoade would make some statement denying it.

God damn it. I mean, it’s not the end of the world. I’m not quite emotionally invested enough in being a fan of Richard Ayoade to have that much difficulty in saying, “Okay, I’m definitely done being a fan of that guy now.” But I did like him. I’d love to revise history and say I never liked him, but that wouldn't be true. I can claim to have been on the right side of history a little bit, in that I always thought The IT Crowd was overrated. I first watched it when I was in high school because all my friends loved it and I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and I didn’t think it was that great. I re-watched it in 2020, and thought some of it was funny, but it didn’t deserve to be as revered as it was. Once I learned more about Linehan, I became pleased that I took that viewpoint (I also never got into Black Books, tried one episode years ago and didn’t much like it). I guess I have another reason to consider that the right side of history now. But I can’t pretend I never liked Richard Ayoade.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is a fucking masterpiece. I thought Question Team was great. The IT Crowd was sometimes funny. He was funny on Mighty Boosh things. And I always find him funny on panel shows. Any episode of Catsdown or Big Fat Quiz or Buzzcocks or anything like that will be funnier if Richard Ayoade’s in the lineup. He’s quick and he’s sharp and he plays his persona brilliantly. He's funny. I liked him enough to feel disappointed about being done with him now, but not enough to feel conflicted about it.

Though on the subject of the persona… look, if Richard Ayoade really thinks it’s fine to dedicate your life to insisting that everyone should have to remain exactly what they were when they were born and cannot ask people to see them as anything different from that, then I’d like to point out, it’s not his real voice.

Which is fine, it really is. I’ve shared those things before to laugh at the contrast between that version of Richard Ayoade and the guy we know now, but I don’t think it means he actually did anything wrong. Comedians using personas is totally normal, though Richard Ayoade took it farther than many do. He played one really nerdy character in about 2006, and then got stuck having to continue playing that character on every TV appearance for the rest of his life. Which you’d think he might consider limiting, but I guess it did also make him large amounts of money, which might be why the limiting nature of the persona he took on did not stop him from feeling destructive levels of loyalty to its creator.

He just... you didn't need this, Richard! You absolutely did not need to do this! Why couldn't you have just kept doing what all the other apolitical comedians like you do: shut up about it, and let us all assume your political views are probably basically fine, even while we vaguely know in the back of our minds that probably if we ever heard you tell us what you think about everything we wouldn't be able to like you anymore? You know, like we do with possibly some of your Cambridge contemporaries? (David Mitchell, I'm going to need you to shut your mouth very tightly about this, as tightly as you shut your mouth when you were next to Robert Webb in that interview where he was refusing to walk back his transphobic comments, because as long as you continue to not actually say anything, I can continue to like you.)

I understand why some comedians go right-wing. Small ones, struggling to build a career in the mainstream, do a Comedy Unleashed show so they can compete in the smaller and less competitive market of right-wing comedy. And/or they say something horrible because it might get them on the front page of Chortle and even negative publicity still helps them build a brand.

But Richard Ayoade did not need to do that. He fucking won in the mainstream comedy arena. He can get on the front page of Chortle any time he wants. He did not fucking need this. I was trying to think of the best way to describe this situation, and I have to give @lastweeksshirttonight credit for being, as usual, more concise and clear about things than I am as they used the term "unforced error". There's no a better way to put it than that. There was no reason for this.

Okay, those are my thoughts, I have written them down and put them somewhere, and I shall now move the fuck on and stop paying attention to it. But fucking hell, this is annoying. I did like the guy. Why taint the legacy of Garth Marenghi this way?

#Youtube

[paterklatter]

ok genuinely, why is hogwarts legacy where everyone decided to draw the line in the sand. obviously the game looks like ass but i don't think the people who are so deadset on a boycott care about actually care about material harm to trans people as much as they just want another way to purity test who's a "real leftist"

a performative boycott of some random bullshit that was gonna do well anyway every few months only serves as free advertising. fuck i'm pretty sure they intentionally stoked the flame, gods sake i can't count how many ads for the game I'VE gotten. a boycott of a major release is never gonna work because all it does is have people who were never gonna buy it or talk about it to fill their entire twitter feed with posts about the game for MONTHS, people who were already gonna play it get to #ownthelibs by streaming it on twitch, and people who weren't interested now want to because it's a forbidden fruit.

even if boycotting everything related to jk rowling did actually do anything other than do more free advertising, why not extend that to hbomax or universal studios flordia or anything time warner for that matter. i highly doubt the people casting out their friends for playing this game would hardly say the same if the same friend went on a trip to universal and spent a fuckton of money on merch at harry potter world.

and why *only* jk rowling, i get that she's a particularly vocal transphobe, but why not apply the same to every other vocal transphobe. why shouldn't i be #canceled because i've watched it crowd on netflix multiple times when graham linehan is vocally transphobic, the show even having an episode that was extremely transphobic?

why does every internet leftist pick a new purity test every few months to prove who is the most real leftist when the hours they spend on twitter arguing about it could easily have been spent doing an innumerable amount of possible good things.

#hogwarts legacy #peter.txt