The latest internet furore to hit headlines this week is that of Graham Linehan.
The Irish comedy writer was arrested at Heathrow this week on suspicion of inciting violence with anti-trans posts he’d been making on social media.
He was arrested by after arriving on a flight from the US, and later said on Substack newsletter that after his blood pressure got too high, they took him to hospital instead. Now he’s been released on bail on the condition that he is “not to go on Twitter”.
For Linehan, that may be easier said than done. This isn’t the first time he has courted controversy. From his beef with JK Rowling to his failed Father Ted musical, here’s what to know.
Early life
Linehan was born in Dublin in 1968 and attended a Roman Catholic secondary school. In the 1980s, he ventured into journalism, joining the Dublin-based political and music magazine Hot Press, where he also met his future writing partner Arthur Mathews.
The pair’s collaboration proved a fruitful one: they wrote for sketch shows like Harry Enfield & Chums, The All New Alexei Sayle Show and The Day Today. In 1995, they came up with their best-known show, Father Ted, which follows the exploits of three Irish priests who live on the fictional parish of Craggy Island.
By late 2003, the pair’s reputation was sky-high. They were named one of the 50 funniest acts in TV by the Observer, and Father Ted had netted BAFTA Awards for Best Comedy in 1996 and 1999.
By himself, Linehan also racked up a considerable line of writing credits: he contributed to Brass Eye, Blue Jam and co-created the sitcom Black Books with actor Dylan Moran. He also wrote and directed the Channel 4 show The IT Crowd – which, coincidentally, is the show that sparked his interest in anti-trans activism.
Anti-trans views
Linehan has long being active on social media. In 2015, he admitted that he was a regular user of Twitter, calling it "part of [his] nervous system" in a Telegraph interview.
His fascination with anti-trans activism goes back to a 2008 episode of The IT Crowd, which he wrote. Called The Speech, it depicts Matt Berry’s character Douglas getting together with a woman, whom he later learns is transgender. The episode ends with a massive fistfight between the pair – and it provoked huge backlash when it re-aired on the Channel in 2013.
Channel 4 removed the episode from streaming in 2020, and Berry has weighed in, saying that the episode was “ridiculous and dated.”
Linehan said he though the joke was “harmless” – though he later told The Times that the pushback was what sparked his interest in the subject. "When it went out, the pushback was so weirdly aggressive that I just thought there was something a bit strange about it. I thought, this is different from usual. So I started paying attention,” he said.
After an operation for testicular cancer in 2018, he decided to write about his views on Twitter (now called X, after the company was bought by Elon Musk). “I think I was actually a bit high from morphine after the operation and I thought, ‘Why am I so nervous about getting involved in this?’ And it was almost instantaneous. The first response I got was from someone saying — and bear in mind I’d just had the operation — ‘I wish the cancer had won.’”
After that, he said, he “jumped in with both feet.”
By 2020, he was telling The Spectator that “we are being forced to accept a religious belief that men can become women. It causes harm and leads young people to think that people like JK Rowling hate them.”
He was also using his Twitter account to rail against “trans ideology.” In 2018, he was sued by Stephanie Hayden, a trans woman, who alleged that he had shared photos of her life and family before her transition, misgendered her and suggested she was a criminal.
In return, Linehan alleged that Hayden had published the addresses of several houses linked to his family to ‘silence him’ – Hayden ultimately dropped the case, but police also issued Linehan with a verbal warning not to contact her.
Linehan went on to rail against the Tavistock Centre, trans charity Mermaids (he attempted to stop them receiving a £500,000 lottery grant; this ultimately went ahead) and other ‘causes’; in 2020, his Twitter account was permanently suspended, with the platform citing "repeated violations of our rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation” as the reason behind it.
Twitter bans and lawsuits
Linehan didn’t let this stop him. In December – six months after the suspension – he logged back onto the platform, posing as a transgender man, to call Irish politician Colm O'Gorman "a traitor to women, gay people and yourself” for supporting a letter published by the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland.
In February 2021, he also created a fake account on Her – a lesbian dating app – with the aim of finding and ‘outing’ non-binary people and trans women who were on it.
He also claimed he no longer wanted to work with Channel 4 after they pulled the controversial episode of The IT Crowd from circulation. Or with the BBC, as they had committed the sin of showing a transgender lesbian couple in a CBeebies video.
In September 2022, Linehan added that his activism had led him to question whether the Covid-19 vaccination and climate change was real, “because I've been lied to so conclusively by all the people I used to trust.”
He also found time to criticise Mridul Wadhwa, a transgender woman, when she was announced as director of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, and doxxed her – something Wadhwa said “was the first time she truly feared for her life.”
Personal life
Linehan’s personal life has suffered as a result of his extreme views. In 2022, he said that his opinions had “consumed his life”. He had married Helen Serafinowicz – the sister of actor Peter – in 2004, but the pair divorced in 2020.
“She was scared. She was justifiably scared. They started to target her. They started to target her family. It just got too much for her,” he told the Times in 2023. “When you’re under constant stress because of legal things, because of money, because of the police coming to the door, then all those tiny little problems that you have in a relationship are amplified.”
He also revealed that he had been on anti-anxiety medication for the five or six years preceding that; according to the interview, he also has “virtually no income, no television career and has lost his old media friends.”
At one point, there were plans for a Father Ted musical, something Linehan hoped would provide money and act as his “pension”, but this was ultimately cancelled when the production company decided that his involvement made the project too difficult – in one YouTube video, he called for everybody working on the musical to “sign a declaration of women's sex-based rights.”
“I think they’re waiting for me to die,” he later told The Times.
