What goes around ...

I have never really wanted to meet any of my creative heroes, mainly because of the worry that, if they turned out to be twerps, it might put me off the very work which drew my admiration in the first place. Accordingly, I usually find it easy to separate the person from the work. If I first had to approve of the personalities or political views of folk whose music or literature I could enjoy, I’d probably need to ditch about 90% of my books and CDs. 

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a more pronounced example of the gulf between ‘how highly I rate someone’s work’ and ‘how unimpressed I am with them as a person’ than the case of Graham Linehan. I loved his writing for the sitcoms ‘Father Ted’ (co-written with Arthur Mathews) and ‘The IT Crowd’. These shows created surreal worlds wherein events invariably conspired to cock a gentle snook at prevailing orthodoxies, institutions and personality-types. The scripts were often rich in sceptical observations of the kind that could only be made by a thoroughly grounded person. At least … that’s what I thought until I started following him on twitter.   

I soon discovered that, on cultural debates, he came across as … well, let’s be polite and say ‘not a very nice person’. His strident right-on persona dispirited me to the extent that I had to ‘unfollow’ him, worried that continued exposure to his shrill pieties might somehow impact on my enjoyment of his creative work. Earlier this year, he disgraced himself by condemning a fellow comedian (Count Dankula) over his now infamous ‘Nazi-pug’ video. 

It seems, however, that Linehan has now fallen prey to the very thing that he practiced: the twitter pile-on. In case you haven’t caught the story, he has been cautioned by the police for dead-naming (no, I didn’t know that was a thing either) Stephanie Hayden, a trans activist. Presumably looking for something to do after solving all of the local crimes, the police sprang into action when Linehan chose, in an online spat, to mention a biological fact: namely, that the person he was arguing with had been born male. 

Let’s, for the moment, put to one side the chilling realisation that the Orwellian nightmare of thoughtcrime has been eagerly embraced by the British police. 

After cultivating a belligerent online persona, Linehan surely can’t have been surprised by the extent to which people were prepared, in tennis parlance, to return his serves with interest? Having, among other things, slandered Brexit supporters as RACISTS (yes, he did use capital letters) he is now being served with a civil court action for being a TRANSPHOBE (capitals appropriate).

His problem is that, even in comfortable middle age, he has yet to grasp a simple truth that, once understood, ought to inform adult political discourse: namely, that the opposite of a good idea is not necessarily a bad idea; it is often just another idea, imagined by someone with different life experiences and different thought processes. Good ideas not only can, but do (and almost inevitably will) come into conflict. An acknowledgment of this fact should be on the map guiding us through the territory between competing ideologies. Because, to put it simply: how we negotiate that space defines our humanity.

Had Graham Linehan been plotting these misadventures for one of his comedy characters, my hunch would be that the story arc would end with a moment of realisation, after which the chastened hero would be a wiser, more measured, more conciliatory person.  

He must be a smart guy to have written the things he has written.

I hope he has it in him to become as smart as one of his characters.