Graham Linehan Biography
Graham Linehan anIrish sitcom writer known as a co-created the sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd. Linehan has also written for Count Arthur Strong, Brass Eye, and The Fast Show. He is a vocal critic of transgender rights activism.
Graham Linehan Age
Linehan was born on May 22, 1968, in Dublin, Ireland.
Graham Linehan Career
Linehan and Arthur Mathews first met while working at Hot Press. In their early collaborations, they were responsible for segments in many sketches shows, including Alas Smith and Jones, Harry Enfield and Chums, The All New Alexei Sayle Show, The Day Today, and the Ted and Ralph characters in The Fast Show (the characters were created by Linehan and Mathews and played by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson).
The two continued their collaboration with Paris (one series, 1994) and Father Ted (three series, 1995–1998). They then wrote the first series of the sketch show Big Train, but Linehan was not involved in the second series.
They also wrote the “Dearth of A Salesman” episode for the series Coogan’s Run, which featured the character, Gareth Cheeseman. In late 2003, they were named one of the 50 funniest acts to work on television by The Observer.
Linehan has since written for other shows, including Brass Eye. With Dylan Moran, he co-wrote the first series of Black Books, a series to which Mathews also contributed. He has also contributed material to Blue Jam, and its television adaptation Jam.
Linehan wrote and directed the 2006 Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd, in which he sought to move away from the recent British trend towards mock-documentary comedies. Unlike many series of the time, it was recorded before a studio audience.
In November 2008, he was awarded an International Emmy for The IT Crowd. In 2013, he wrote and directed The Walshes. He co-wrote the first series of the BBC sitcom Motherland and directed its pilot episode. In 2018, he and Mathews announced plans for a Father Ted musical.
Graham Linehan Net Worth
Linehan has an estimated net worth of between $1 million and $5 million .
Graham Linehan Books
Linehan along with Mathews have had one book published, Father Ted: The Complete Scripts (Paperback – Boxtree – 20 October 2000) ISBN 0-7522-7235-7. They have contributed to various magazines and written surreal liner notes for the popular Volume series of alternative music compilations.
Graham Linehan Television
Linehan and Mathews have made cameo appearances in programs they have written. They also made an appearance in the sitcom I’m Alan Partridge as two Irish TV producers considering Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) for a contract.
Linehan has also appeared in The Day Today and in two episodes of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and has had cameos in Black Books (series one, episode two, as “I love books” Guy, and series one, episode five as Fast Food Customer), and the Father Ted episodes “Good Luck Father Ted”, “Entertaining Father Stone”, “Flight Into Terror”, “Cigarettes, Alcohol and Rollerblading” and “Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep”.
He had cameos in four episodes of The IT Crowd: as Messy Joe’s Restaurant Musician, in series one, episode three; the blind sorcerer, in series two, Episode six; as an audience member of Jen’s speech, in series three, episode four; and as Beth Gaga Shaggy, in series four, episode three.
He appeared in the Identity Parade round of Never Mind the Buzzcocks. He has also appeared in the pilot of Little Britain, as well as in series one, episode four, as a bystander who gets in the way of character Kenny Craig when he is attempting to hypnotize, from a distance, a man whose car he has crashed into.
He also appeared in series one, episode five, in which he played a journalist called Roy Sloan (from Whizzer and Chips) during a conference with Prime Minister Michael Stevens (Anthony Head). Linehan was one of the writers interviewed by Charlie Brooker in a special interview episode of the fifth series of Brooker’s Screenwipe program, and again on Brooker’s Gameswipe in 2010.
Linehan also appeared as a guest panelist on Have I Got News for You in 2011 and again in 2012, and he made his debut as a guest on the BBC show QI in the 11th series (K series) in 2013, receiving a score of −19. In 2007, a documentary about Linehan, his life, and his career was produced by Wildfire Films for RTÉ One.
This documentary explored the art, craft, and deeply competitive business of creating contemporary television comedy. The program features interviews with several of the UK’s most successful television comedy writers and performers including Steve Coogan, Matt Lucas, David Walliams, Paul Whitehouse, Griff Rhys Jones, and Ardal O’Hanlon, all of whom have worked with Linehan.
It was directed by Adrian McCarthy and produced by Martha O’Neill and Adam Rynne. In 2011, Linehan also appeared with several members of the cast in Channel 4’s Father Ted Night, an evening of the writer’s favorite episodes and two retrospective documentaries.
Graham Linehan Radio
On 6 June 2011, Linehan appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today program to discuss his adaptation of the Ealing comedy film The Ladykillers for the West End stage. During this appearance, Linehan took issue with Today presenter Justin Webb over what he saw as the attempted staging of an artificial argument between himself and the critic Michael Billington.
He later expanded on this criticism in an article published in The Guardian, saying “I’m talking about that very specific, very artificial, very Today program format of a presenter acting as a referee between two people who have been chosen to represent the opposing sides of a manufactured argument. It is a binary view of politics, of life and, as a result, it is also a dishonest one. Replace it with anything – anything – because anything would be better”.
Graham Linehan Anti-transgender Activism
Linehan has tweeted extensively about transgender issues. He became involved after the airing of a 2008 episode of The IT Crowd, written by Linehan, drew criticism on Twitter for its storyline in which a character reacts with transphobia after realizing that the woman he is dating is transgender.
Linehan felt the joke was “harmless” and says he did not understand the “ferocity” of the response, arguing that a transphobic character did not make him or the episode transphobic.
Linehan has described himself as skeptical of the self-identification of gender, objecting to “privileged white people saying you must accept anyone who says they are a woman”. He has said that “anyone suffering from gender dysphoria needs to be helped and supported”, but has voiced concern over early transgender intervention for children.
In October 2018, Stephanie Hayden, a transgender woman, sued Linehan for harassment. Hayden alleged that Linehan had shared photos on Twitter of Hayden’s family and her life before the transition, suggested she was a criminal, and repeatedly misgendered her and deadnamed her by using her previous name. Linehan in turn alleged that Hayden publicized several private addresses linked to his family to silence him. Police issued Linehan a verbal warning not to contact Hayden.
Linehan has compared the medical transition of children to Nazi experiments on children, saying: “If you were around the time of something terrible happening like Nazism, would you be one of the people who said, ‘This is wrong,’ despite being opposed?” In the same interview, he described the trans movement as “provid[ing] cover” for “fetishists, con-men, and simply abusive misogynists”.
In a statement to PinkNews about his comments, Linehan said, “when a magazine purportedly for gay people collaborates in homosexual erasure by indulging the straight fantasy that men can be lesbians, something has gone deeply wrong”. In 2018, Linehan praised lesbian erasure protesters at that year’s London Pride event as “heroes”.
In January 2019, Linehan expressed concern over the news that Mermaids, a charitable advocacy organization for transgender children and teenagers, was to receive a £500,000 lottery grant to open clinics around the United Kingdom.
He posted to blogging website Mumsnet encouraging its users to lobby the National Lottery Community Fund to reverse its decision. The grant was reviewed and went ahead. In response to Linehan, YouTuber Hbomberguy held a 57-hour fundraising Livestream that raised £270,000 more for Mermaids.
In 2019, Linehan was the favorite nominee by viewers to win The Last Leg’s “Dick of the Year” award, following the comments he made on social media about transgender people. When Linehan expressed interest in winning the award, presenter Adam Hills disqualified him from receiving it, stating that under the rules anyone who wants to be named “Dick of the Year” cannot be.
In a February 2020 interview with the BBC television program Newsnight, Linehan reiterated his view that the Tavistock Centre’s practice of treating children with drugs such as puberty blockers is comparable to Nazi eugenics programs and experiments on children, and said that transgender activists had made rape and death threats against feminists.
Following this interview, Eric Pickles, the UK special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, accused Linehan of trivializing the Holocaust. In June 2020, Linehan criticized comments made about J. K. Rowling after she made comments that were called transphobic.
He linked to a blog post featuring screenshots of abuse Rowling had received, describing those who wrote them as “ignoring the abuse received by women who speak out against gender ideology” and “literally useless”.
Hozier, named in Linehan’s tweets, responded by saying Linehan was conducting an “obsessive little culture war”. On 27 June, Linehan’s Twitter account was permanently suspended following what Twitter called “repeated violations of our rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation”.
Graham Linehan Height and Weight
Linehan stands tall at an average height and has a moderate weight.
Graham Linehan Education
Linehan enrolled at Plunkett’s School in Whitehall, in central Dublin followed by Catholic University School, a Roman Catholic secondary school for boys also in Dublin, then joined Hot Press. Linehan also had a column with the magazine In Dublin before moving to London.
Graham Linehan Family
Linehan information about his family is publicly unavailable. This section will be updated as soon as this information is available.
Graham Linehan Wife
Linehan is married to writer Helen Serafinowicz, the sister of actor Peter Serafinowicz. Back in October 2015, Graham and Helen Linehan worked with Amnesty International on a campaign film calling on the Irish government to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which “acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right”.
The pair revealed their decision for Helen to abort a fetus with acrania while living in England in 2004, and their discovery that undergoing the procedure in Ireland would have been an offense carrying a maximum 14-year prison sentence.