Tough Crowd
How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy
Graham Linehan
Having read it
★★★★★
Compelling and brilliant.
It’s a well written, funny, touching and darn good read that admits to a few mistakes made but has plenty of learnings taken, successes and memories made with plenty of common sense joining in.
As he says about his career-ending moments . . .
One thing I’ve discovered about this fight: the people who dismiss and deride you never have the courage to say why. As my good friend Helen Staniland says, ‘Trans activists cannot reveal their aims for fear of incriminating themselves.’ The same is true of their clueless, careerist, celebrity enablers.
. . . it’s a murky, finger-pointing and ghosting world if you dare to counter the current mainstream view(s) and what the author has had to endure, just for standing up, quite rightly, for women’s rights (that’s the female sex’s) and trying to find balance in a world that seems to have lost its equilibrium (on many a matter) and ability to see actual facts as facts, despite what certain groups might say or do.
The assistance he has given and received for raising and trying to make clear (to many media outlets and people) the facts of the illogical, demeaning even authoritarian gender ideology crusade in recent years is a testament to a good person.
A good passage
Think of your story as a bonsai tree hidden somewhere in the chaos of an overgrown yard. With the micro-scale of a bonsai tree, the imperfections are clear, and you can set about them with those clippers that make a tidy snip. But those clippers arrive at the end of the process. The tools you need for the overgrown yard are a machete and a skip.
Now don’t get me wrong. It is possible to sort of accidentally write a perfect script. The Father Ted episode ‘Flight Into Terror’, for example, barely changed from its first draft to the last. But for the most part, a first draft will not have: foreshadowing (because you don’t quite know where you’re going); set-ups and payoffs; consistent characters; and a comfortable, confident tone that carries through the whole thing. That’s your target, and ninety-nine percent of the time you’re not going to hit it with your first draft. As someone said, ‘You have to write the ending to know what the beginning should be, but you have to write the wrong beginning to get there.’
A second good passage
From the outset, the same online activists were using cancellation, protests and shaming to achieve their aims. Unlike me, some quickly recognised the Left’s lurch to authoritarianism. Mark Fisher, a Marxist academic at Goldsmiths in London, wrote an essay critical of identity politics called ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’. In it, he pleaded for the Left to return to a class-based analysis and reject the aggressive tactics that increasingly accompanied ‘woke’politics. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other,’ he wrote. ‘This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.’
He was cancelled for writing it, and killed himself in 2017.
A third good passage
We now know it is possible for a group such as trans rights activists to poison the internet’s nervous system, to use it to overwhelm society with so much misinformation that reality itself warps and woofs. The most extreme voices are finding it too easy to steer others who have less certainty about their opinions, who have a desire to be told what the right thing to do is so they can go and do it. Not bad people. Busy people, who are nevertheless well-meaning. But when we trust to the cat’s cradle of gossamer-thin connections we’ve made online, fail to check primary sources and even find that our primary sources are suddenly unreliable, then we leave ourselves open to having our society hacked by a loose conspiracy of online weirdos who know exactly what buttons to press to make life’s vending machine give them what they want.