Graham George Linehan (; born May 1968) is an Irish comedy writer and anti-transgender activist. He created or co-created the sitcoms Father Ted (1995–1998), Black Books (2000–2004), The IT Crowd (2006–2013), and Count Arthur Strong (2013–2017), and the sketch comedy show Big Train (1998–2002). He also contributed to other comedy shows, including The Fast Show, The Day Today, and Brass Eye. During the 1990s, his writing partner was Arthur Mathews, with whom he created Father Ted and Big Train.
Linehan has won five BAFTA awards, including two awards for Best Comedy for Father Ted and one for Best Writer, Comedy, for The IT Crowd. In 2008, he was awarded an International Emmy for The IT Crowd.
Linehan became involved in anti-transgender activism after an episode of The IT Crowd was criticised as transphobic. He argues that transgender activism endangers women and has likened the use of puberty blockers to Nazi eugenics. Linehan said his activism had ended his marriage and lost him work, such as a planned Father Ted musical.
Graham George Linehan was born in Dublin in 1968 and attended Catholic University School, a Roman Catholic secondary school for boys. In the 1980s, he joined the staff of the Dublin politics and music magazine Hot Press, where he met his future writing partner, Arthur Mathews. In their early collaborations, they created segments in sketch shows including Alas Smith and Jones, Harry Enfield & Chums, The All New Alexei Sayle Show, The Day Today and the Ted and Ralph characters in The Fast Show. They continued their collaboration with Paris (one series, 1994), Father Ted (three series, 1995–1998), and the first series of the sketch show Big Train. They also wrote the "Dearth of a Salesman" episode for the series Coogan's Run, which featured the character Gareth Cheeseman. In late 2003, Linehan and Mathews were named one of the 50 funniest acts to work in television by The Observer. Father Ted won BAFTA awards for Best Comedy in 1996 and 1999.
Linehan wrote for the satirical series Brass Eye (1997), Blue Jam (1997–1999) and Jam (2000). With the actor Dylan Moran, he created the sitcom Black Books (2000–2004). Linehan wrote and directed the 2006 Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd, in which he sought to move away from the British trend towards mockumentary 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 sitcom The Walshes. He co-wrote the first series of the BBC sitcom Motherland and directed its pilot episode. In 2014, Linehan won his fifth BAFTA, for Best Writer, Comedy, for his work on The IT Crowd. He was also nominated for Count Arthur Strong.
In 2018, Linehan and Mathews announced plans for a Father Ted musical. Linehan said it would finish the series as they had planned it before the death of the lead actor, Dermot Morgan. The musical was cancelled by producers following the controversy over Linehan's views on transgender rights. In December 2024, Linehan announced plans to move to Arizona to work on a sitcom and create a production company with the comedians Rob Schneider and Andrew Doyle.
Linehan and Mathews made cameos in their programmes. They also appeared in the sitcom I'm Alan Partridge as two Irish TV producers considering Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) for a contract.
Linehan's memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, was published in October 2023. The month before publication, it had the second-highest number of pre-orders for a book on Amazon. It reached number ten on the Sunday Times bestseller list after it was published. Linehan wrote of his childhood, career, and his five years as an anti-transgender activist.
Reviewing Tough Crowd in The Guardian, Fiona Sturges wrote that while Linehan's account of his comedy career has "verve and charm", the memoir "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". In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith described Tough Crowd as "very entertaining" with "some valuable insights into comedy", but that Linehan "admits to losing his rag in a way that might not always be productive". In The Irish Times, Houman Barekat wrote that it had "two distinct narratives" and was "a discomfiting read not because it contains hard-hitting home truths, but because its author clearly hasn't worked through his issues". For The Spectator, Debbie Hayton wrote that it was "a book of two halves" that "may well appeal to two completely different audiences", concluding that "if they want to understand the man they need to read it all". Louis Chilton of The Independent described it as "a strange, sad read ... that crumbles under the slightest scrutiny".
Linehan's children voiced characters in the 2012 Adventure Time episode "Goliad", with Linehan directing the children while taking the producers' instructions over the phone. He planned to write a sequel episode, and sent versions of the story to the production team. The episode was never made as Adventure Time ended in 2018. In 2023, Linehan performed a stand-up comedy set at the Backyard Comedy Club in London.
Linehan is involved in anti-transgender activism. By the time he went into cancer surgery in 2018, he had already drawn attention for publicly siding with gender-critical people, yet as he describes in his memoir, "I had not quite nailed my colours to the gender-critical mast." From his hospital bed, he "sent a few tweets carefully explaining my position", which he believed to be "sound" and "in good faith", having thus "identified myself as a 'Terf' ally". Later that year, he expressed these views on a podcast.
The topic had come up for him in 2013, when an old episode he had written for The IT Crowd was publicly reexamined and widely criticised as transphobic and sexist. Critics said the 2008 episode, "The Speech", used gender stereotypes and trivialised violence against transgender women. The episode features a man who learns that his girlfriend is transgender and gets into a physical fight with her. Channel 4 removed the episode from syndication and streaming in 2020. 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 said he is sceptical of gender self-identification, objecting to "privileged white people saying you must accept anyone who says they are a woman". He said that "anyone suffering from gender dysphoria needs to be helped and supported", but he voiced concern over early transgender intervention for children. He used the social network Twitter to criticise "trans ideology", which he believes misrepresents transgender people and lesbians.
In 2018, Linehan praised anti-transgender protesters at that year's London Pride event who had carried banners and flyers saying that "transactivism erases lesbians", calling them "heroes".
In a December 2018 interview with Derrick Jensen, Linehan said: "I'm now in a position where I can answer the question honestly of 'if you were around at the time of something terrible happening like Nazism, or whatever it happened to be, would you be one of the people who said "no, this is wrong", despite being opposed?'" He also said the trans movement provides "cover" for "fetishists, con men, and simply abusive misogynists". In an interview with the BBC television programme Newsnight in February 2020, Linehan said that the Tavistock Centre's practice of treating children with puberty blockers such as Lupron was comparable to Nazi eugenics and experiments on children. Following this interview, Eric Pickles, the United Kingdom Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, accused Linehan of trivialising the Holocaust.
In January 2019, Linehan expressed concern over the news that Mermaids, a charitable advocacy organisation for transgender children and teenagers, was to receive a £500,000 lottery grant to open clinics around the United Kingdom. He posted to the internet forum 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. The same year, British journalist Dawn Foster accused Linehan and others of targeting a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) employee who had been responsible for hiring model and activist Munroe Bergdorf, a transgender woman. Foster called the online abuse "transphobic" and "flatly homophobic". Journalist Chris Godfrey called the treatment of the employee "insidious homophobia".