Save comedy from the middle class morons. Bring back Graham Linehan.

The lunatic fringe has captured the culture industry, where professionals fear being called bigot more than they fear the mutilation of kids.

As someone who came of age as a left-wing, bookish, indie kid in 1990’s Ireland, I cannot overstate what a delightful breath of fresh air the 1995 debut of the Channel 4 hit show Father Ted was. I am not the best placed person to opine on what Catholic Ireland truly was like, as I never lived within its confines. But metaphorically speaking, I did hang out next door. I lived in both Belfast and Dublin in the 1990’s, and my memories are of a placed shot through with a heavy, leaden, grey-spirited vibe that matched the forbidding exteriors of the scary looking churches scattered throughout Dublin. The Ireland I lived in was not the same place that was locking up young women in industrial laundries and using them as slave labour. The worst days of church repression were over. But when I began my first year as a student at Trinity, the last Magdalene laundry was still in operation only a few streets away. My college friends and I were mostly free to live as we liked, but the shadow, cast by the state-church power fusion, was a long one.

So the arrival of the show Father Ted was a memorable event.

 Imagine how excited I was when, a few months ago at the Let Women Speak rally in Belfast, I went up to Linehan and asked for selfie, and he kindly obliged.

Father Ted took a firehose of irreverent humour and quenched a collective thirst for a new version of Irishness, one that reflected the funny side of a notoriously hard-done-by but hilarious people. It was shocking in just how much the show took the piss out of priests and their hangers-on. But it was never mean-spirited, it never punched down, it was infused with a sweetness that tempered what would otherwise have been a grotesque spectacle of buffoonery. It was the best of what youth-driven, smart counter-culture could be.

I left Ireland/the UK in 1998 and would not return for over a decade, so I missed the other big hit shows that Graham Linehan created, but my love of Father Ted never went away. The show was a darling of indie kids everywhere, as I found out years later at my local nerd bar in Brooklyn, where some of the regulars could quote as many lines from Father Jack and Father Dougal as any Irish person. To any readers who missed this somewhat niche cultural event, check out this clip of a bunch of priests getting lost in Ireland’s “biggest lingerie section.”

This week, after years of online harassment over his “gender critical” views and the cancellation of a West End musical of Father Ted for the same reason, some pissant, probably Millennial, organisers at the Edinburgh Fringe cancelled an entire event just because Linehan was on the bill.

To the good people of the Edinburgh Fringe: the clue is in your name. You are supposed to platforming the iconoclasts and the outcasts. You are doing it wrong.

What has happened to my generation? How have we allowed the creator of one of our funniest shows to be systematically demolished, banned from the creative sphere of which he was once such a productive member? We pretended nothing was wrong when an unholy union was established between young, humourless fanatics and rich, unaccountable NGO’s with deeply questionable motives — and now we allow them to dictate to us what comedy we are allowed to enjoy? 

In an interview with Winston Marshall, Linehan correctly referred to the “middle class morons” who have allowed this travesty to go so far. Linehan ticks off a list of sectors that have enabled a lunatic fringe to monopolise all cultural output, and they did so because they fear being called “bigot” more than they fear the mutilation of children. Those sectors are exclusively middle class professionals: arts, social work, education, non-profits. And they have been captured. So the people who run them go along with the lie that Linehan is full of “hate” because he fulminates against castrating teen boys and putting sex offender men in women’s prisons. The tender ears of the professional middle class cannot bear to hear the truth.

Let’s be brutally honest here: I’m willing to bet that many (if not most) of the people holding the reins in those culturally influential jobs are Gen X, former indie kids. People like me. People who years ago would have enjoyed the irreverent humour of Father Ted. 

It seems that most of my peers, those went on to make careers for themselves manufacturing culture, think by siding with an ideology that encourages young people to hate and fear their bodies, they are somehow maintaining their street cred. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they think that transing kids is the same as supporting your closeted gay friend in the 1990’s — it was what the cool, indie kids did. 

I wish I could speak directly to my erstwhile comrades, to tell them that trying to destroy Graham Linehan — for the crime of repeatedly pointing out the naked emperor strutting around the place — is not the way to be cool, guys. It makes you look like hatchet-faced scolds tut-tutting that “it shouldn’t be allowed!” and “there should be a law!” It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for you. 

When the history books are written, folks like the Edinburgh Fringe organisers are going to look like the Mary Whitehouses of our time. Linehan, JK Rowling, and the other brave people willing to provoke the twisted establishment — whatever the cost to their professional careers — are going to be regarded as folk heroes.