Wading into other people’s fights has proved a theme for the co-writer of Father Ted and writer-director of The IT Crowd. A vociferous critic of the transgender rights movement, Linehan’s views have, in recent years, cost him friends, his livelihood and, he claims, his marriage. But, despite having been given a verbal warning by police after a complaint from a trans campaigner, he remains uncowed. Tough Crowd is, then, his memoir-cum-defence statement in which he recounts his years making TV sitcoms before he was “perceived as toxic” and lays bare his grief at all he has lost.
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But all charm evaporates in Linehan’s exhaustive recounting of the past five years as an “activist”, during which memoir is largely replaced by polemic. He is oddly sage-like on the early dangers of social media, though this doesn’t prevent him from being hypnotised by the heated online exchanges between trans campaigners and gender critical feminists. In 2018, while lying on a hospital trolley, of all places, fresh from surgery for testicular cancer, he picks up his phone and posts a series of tweets “[nailing] my colours to the gender-critical mast”.
The more he is abused for his opinions, the more entrenched and maniacal those opinions seem to become. Here, as on his Twitter page, he makes a show of misgendering trans men and women, and says he is stunned at his “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”.
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Tough Crowd reads less like the story of a man heroically cleaving to his principles than a document of a peculiar and self-defeating obsession, a sad coda to a once towering talent.
Sad indeed. A few years ago I’d have been picking this up with great anticipation. Now I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.
It doesn’t sound like it goes into the “Why?” At all, which is what would actually be interesting.
Like…everything’s fine, and then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, you decide to become a hate-spewing anti-trans activist.
Over time, all your friends, loved ones, colleagues etc all reject you because you’ve become entirely consumed by rabid hatred, and seemingly do and speak of nothing else.
You say “well, they’re all wrong. I’m campaigning on behalf of women’s rights”, then you double-down on what you’re doing, without even stopping to question it.
I just feel like there’s an early chapter missing somewhere.
There’s no chapter missing. The early ones are that he always thought like this and considered himself right in the absolute because he was a successful personality. It didn’t matter what your opinion was, his was the correct one. And as long as it was making people laugh he continued. Only now he finds that his opinion doesn’t make people laugh and he can’t cope with it. But he hasn’t changed. He was no more capable of listening and understanding a view held different to his own than he is now.
I felt like a few chapters were missing. My impression is he was mostly radicalized online, and is just an obsessive person who feels righteous and enjoys it too much to stop himself. I think he truly expects to inevitability be vindicated. I don’t think there’s much “why” beyond that, he liked arguing online and it consumed him.
There’s an interesting story to be told about how he got to this point but if he was capable of the kind of introspection required, he might not have buried himself alive.
At this point I am unsure if anyone else could winkle out his path to radicalisation either as he’s now so fortified his mindset. I tried a similar thing with David Icke but he clearly spotted where I was going with my questions and he has ghosted me since.
Have you read any of Jon Ronsons essays or books? He had a particularly interesting chapter on Icke as I recall
That’ll be Them and the accompanying documentary, The Secret Rulers of the World, had an episode revolving around Icke.