I could tell a tale of a catastrophic accident at the printers, where sixty grandsworth of gargantuan printing machine is fouled up by someone feeding Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity into one end and Helen Joyce’s TRANS into the other, and turning the feed up to max.
But that would be to entirely miss the point. (Hey, I should cultivate that – I could get a job on the Guardian and actually get paid.)
A flick through Graham Linehan’s book may give the impression of two unoriginal manuscripts accidentally bound together, but stick with it. This is an original, useful and educational book with laughter along the way and a hopeful ending that’s more satisfying than average because it’s more than realistic, it’s real.
Linehan’s life story is the story of learning to write – for stage, screen and page. The plodding style is deceptively simple. As he says repeatedly along the way, the trick is to spot all the bits that fit, and ruthlessly edit out the ones that don’t, however in love with them you may be. For example, from Linehan’s hand, a near-fatal car crash is a step-by-step account of who did what and who screamed when, culminating in “Ken turned the engine off and we all took a few moments to remember how to breathe. For a few moments, it was almost as if nothing had happened, as if we had merely decided to park there.”
Then the world starts again, and they have a load of problems to deal with.
If you’ve ever been in an out-of-control car, you’ll know that’s exactly how it is, and that’s exactly what a writer needs to know so if you’re a writer, you can put your faith in these pages, as the author/instigator of Father Ted, Black Books and the IT Crowd leads you through the chaotic and painful process of learning to write, edit and direct. This could be the most valuable book on the topic you ever pick up.
If you’re not a writer, but a happy imbiber of the best comedy and music of the last few decades, and enjoy a good rummage behind the scenes, you’ll love the explorations of much-loved classics from both sides of the Atlantic that Linehan uses as compare-and-contrast pieces as he learns.
There’s also a philosophical thread, which at first appears to be a subplot, about the rise of the internet – but if you’ve been paying attention, you know this is a man who’s learned not to leave anything in the final draft that isn’t vital to the story.
If you’re a real socialist, there are a couple of moments where you’ll slap your own head – one where he writes off the Corbyn movement as the same kind of disastrous aberration as Trump, and one where he fails to distinguish between a woman being criticized for cultivating the far right and being attacked for terfism but at least that’s just two brief paragraphs in an otherwise insightful book, and more importantly, he recognizes personal attacks and the abandonment of professionalism as wrong whatever side they come from. A rare talent these days, that is. Take a breath and carry on – it’s worth it, not least because a study of cowards, traitors and the nature of solidarity is coming up, with important insights for the left…
Whomp. Another near-fatal car-crash. On page 108, the first manuscript disappears, and you’re in the middle of yet another book about “the TERF wars”. But again, to see it like that is to entirely miss the point (writing my resume to send to the Guardian right now – or maybe I should pitch to the BBC – they’re keen on belligerent stupidity, too.)
In the same plodding, observant manner as before Linehan demonstrates, via his personal story, the way hundreds if not thousands of lives and careers have hit the wall of gender-ideology, leaving the victim stunned and yes, sitting in the wreckage of their lives, trying to remember how to breathe. It’s a phenomenon that the mainstream world still hasn’t quite acknowledged, let alone begun to deal with. Vague disapproval of ‘cancel culture’ doesn’t come close. This section of the book opens with one of the best attempts I’ve seen at a no-nonsense, general-reader-friendly summary of the gender-ideology movement and the global-scale bully-tactics it relies on.
Linehan’s talent for uncluttered honesty succeeds where many have failed — the golden driver of part two (the trans half) of this book is that he has achieved what many of us have failed to do. He has managed to demonstrate, clearly and irrevocably, that many of those currently being sidelined as ‘terfs’ will eventually be revealed as the marginalized truth-tellers who recognized and refused to bow to our generation’s major child-abuse scandal and, crucially, he has shown just how that happens — time after time after time.
We follow the hero into the dark pit of cancellation and isolation in which – really – a bout of cancer is a kind of side-issue by comparison and then, gradually, back into the discovery that there still is a place (now known by some as meatspace) where your presence on the street counts for more than what someone said on TwitX, or what a cowardly colleague did to you at work. Now, the transformed hero can resume the original, useful and intelligent story (with laughs) amongst the milling crowds at the Edinburgh fringe, with philosophical discussions of Elaine Miller and Jerry Sadowitz, and and an insightful commentary on just what is happening to comedy.
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Dear Reader,
Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.
Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 