A tearful Graham Linehan said he was kicked out of a Father Ted musical. (Screenshot via YouTube)
The Father Ted The musical is said to have been put on ice while Graham Linehan is still attached – and of course he blames the trans rights activist for that.
Linehan, the disgraced Irish TV writer who co-created Father Tedhas seen his personal life turned upside down and his career falter over the past six years as he has increasingly spent his time opposing trans rights.
He worked on Father Ted: the last episode, a theatrical version of his 1990s sitcom, for seven years. But the show’s production company decided to drop Linehan from the musical altogether, he claims.
Jimmy Mulville, who produced two Father Ted documentaries, reportedly told Linehan on Monday May 23 that Hat trick Productionsthe studio behind Father Tedwill not pursue the musical while he is still involved in its production.
“At first I was going to keep quiet about this because I was protecting the show, but unfortunately my position here is too important to back down,” Linehan said in a YouTube video posted Tuesday titled “Father Tedthe musical: update“.
Linehan blamed trans rights activists for the decision. He accused Mulville of “taking sides” in the debate: “Jimmy said to me at one point, ‘We don’t want to take sides. We don’t want to be dragged into this.
“They’re taking the side of the people Alison Bailey is fighting in court,” he said of the LGB Alliance co-founder suing Stonewall, the UK’s biggest LGBTQ+ charity.
The 54-year-old then turned to young trans people. “Another idea is that there is such a thing as trans kids,” he said, adding, “There’s no justification for sitting around while young kids are being mutilated and sterilized.”
“And yet,” he added, “they will tell me to walk away from my own show because I stand for these things.”
He fumed about the “cotton cap,” which “refers to the so-called problem of lesbians not wanting to sleep with, as Ricky Gervais puts it, women with penises,” he said.
“It is for having defended these women, these lesbians, that I am being punished.”
“The Ted music is sacrificed in the name of these ideas,” he said. Adding: “It’s a musical. It has nothing to do with this issue, but he is currently being held hostage by trans rights activists.
Graham Linehan told the studio about his anti-trans views
Graham Linehan claimed to have said Hat Trick Productionsabout these issues: “They literally said, ‘I don’t care. “”
He also wrote a letter to Sonia Friedman Productions, a theater production company, about trans rights, which he read aloud on the YouTube video.
“I don’t think you all support me as collaborators, business partners or friends. Far from being on the wrong side of history, JK Rowling and I have been right time and time again that this is a toxic ideology that destroys lives,” the letter reads, according to Linehan.
He continued, “The next thing I heard from Hat Trick, they took me to a meeting and they said they wanted to give me money to leave and get away from the store. £200,000 they offered me.
Linehan said he would try to buy the rights to the musical from Hat Trick Productions. “I’m looking…to see if we can buy it from Hat Trick. You know, if they sit on it and refuse to do it, that’s just vandalism,” he said.
He added: ‘They’re just kind of, what, are they hoping I’m going to die? Because it’s the only way for me to get away from this project.
Linehan has already claimed the Father Ted the musical was axed altogether. He said BBC’s Stephen Nolan in March that producers had “switched over” to trans rights “lobbyists”.
“Just because a group of people decided that anyone who stands up against that ideology is bad, they kind of turned around for those people,” he said. “No one defends me.”
The computer crowd co-creator has repeatedly complained about what many see as the consequences of his own actions. Twitter blocked him for “hateful conduct” and he has since devoted himself to asking what a “woman” is on Mumsnet and impersonating trans people on Twitter and the lesbian dating app Her.
He once compared gender-affirming health care to Nazi experiments on children in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The police issued him a verbal harassment warning in 2018 for allegedly mocking a trans woman online.
In 2021, he urged people to “come out” as gender critics at Christmas. He rightfully called the event “TERFmas.”
Even though he has been banned by social media platforms, Linehan continues to spread his anti-trans views to thousands of people. He frequently uses Substack, Medium and Telegram and has spoken to The telegraph and UK News to be “cancelled”.
“I’m going to keep talking about it,” Linehan said in the YouTube video, adding that he has an “upcoming project.”
“If you ignore it, you are complicit in it and that is what I will prove over the next few months,” he concluded.
PinkNews has reached out to representatives from Graham Linehan, Hat Trick Productions and Sonia Friedman Productions for comment.
