Il co-creatore di padre Ted Graham Linehan accusato di molestie e danni criminali | Notizie ITV

I hear your midlife crisis into transphobia and hate ruined your life there father

I assumed he already was.

He doesn’t even have to let go of his hate. If he could keep it to himself, hate in the privacy of his head, his career would be fine, his marriage might be ongoing, and he wouldn’t be up in court.

But the venom is too strong.

The racists and rapist supporters who were marching in dublin today will be along soon to show their support

Imagine creating something as iconic as Father Ted but ‘jocks checker’ will be your epitaph. Mental.

Is there anything to be said for another mass?


I’ve made this comment before but I have to admit, I actually think about him more than I should. His whole life is some bizarro classic tragicomedy.

There was a very telling article he wrote a few years ago regarding his childhood and being bullied by a French exchange student. You could see his self esteem still hadn’t recovered years and years after the fact. My pet peeve is armchair psychology but it was obvious from reading it that he was still holding on to so much resentment and craved being accepted by an in-crowd. (EDIT: Can’t find the article but I found a similar article here. It’s a bit down on this page and it’s a conversation between Graham and Jon Ronson on the topic https://www.thisamericanlife.org/314/transcript)

Nevertheless he goes on to be incredibly successful (and at such a young age too – he was in his mid 20s when writing Fr. Ted). Then Social Media came. He was an early adopter. Father Ted had finished less than a decade before Graham first started using Twitter. He built up a bit of a following and was one of the more popular UK based users pre-2010. He then got that criticism for the IT crowd episode (which was aired in 2008 but was not really criticised until about 5 years after). The algorithms did their thing, and he became a lightning rod for that dark abyss of the Internet. Graham had now found his in crowd that he’d always been looking for and he was fêted as one of their main spokespeople.

I first started paying attention to him around 2018. I had known that he was the cranky auld lad who had a Twitter but a cursory look across his profile amazed me. I genuinely and naïvely though that it was a piece of performance art or satire at first, as I honestly didn’t think that anyone could be so obsessed by a topic that didn’t seem to concern them in any obvious way.

His entire life is a cautionary tale on being terminally online and frankly, I’m fascinated by him. There was that analysis that he tweeted about trans stuff on average every 20 minutes on Christmas Day a few years ago. Incidentally it was the last Xmas day he had before the family left him. Imagine trying to have a peaceful Christmas dinner while your husband/dad is clawing at his phone every few minutes to argue with a stranger about someone’s genitals.

Whilst I appreciate this site here is a form of social media, my social media consumption has really collapsed in recent years and it is in no small part to seeing the brainrot it spreads to people like Graham, amongst many others. His career, family, and reputation have been obliterated. He now has nothing because he literally couldn’t stay offline.

As I said, this might seem like low stakes drama regarding a washed up bigot, but I’m really interested in social media engagement and the psychological effects of staying online for too long, and Graham is an excellent case study. For every Graham there are thousands of people who have gone equally insane online, but weren’t in the public eye so we might think they were always like that. Graham might have been a bit odd but he wasn’t always a raving lunatic. He had been very successful. Think of all the other people who had privately and modestly successful lives who then went down the rabbit hole and are now destroying their lives while shouting into the social media void about trans people, vaccinations, immigrants, refugees, Qanon, or whatever else fuels their obsession.

He’s clearly an idiot that ruined his career for no good reason. Whatever your views are, there’s no excuse for arguing for them in the manner he did.

That having been said, I’ll reserve my judgement on this particular issue until I hear more details. It’s definitely not surprising that he could get a charge for harassment. I definitely see him crossing the fine line between freedom of speech and harassment. But I do wonder about criminal damage. That’s a very serious offence and this will sound odd, but I hope that he’s done something bad enough to warrant it.

I hear you’re a transphobe now father

Another case of whether you can separate the art from the artist

Part of me feels sorry for this guy. He is a prime example of how social media can drive you to extreme views and ruin your life.

But also. Fuck him.

He seems to have got fixated on the Trans issue. A great comedy writer.