#172 - Graham Linehan - A Civilisation Built On Lies Cannot Survive

The Peter McCormack Show

Peter McCormack

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4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2026

⏱️ 100 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Graham Linehan wrote Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. Five BAFTAs. Then he said women's spaces should be for women, and the industry that built him decided he was a bigot. He lost his marriage, his career and twenty-five years of friendships.

Once one of the most celebrated comedy writers of his generation, Graham became the first major artistic figure to be comprehensively cancelled for speaking out on sex-based rights - and has never gone quiet to claw his reputation back.

He explains:

•⁠ ⁠Why the people who built their careers alongside him refused to defend him

•⁠ ⁠How a movement that didn't exist a decade ago captured medicine, sport, prisons and the BBC without a fight

•⁠ ⁠Why women's sport, female-only spaces and child safeguarding became unsayable inside his industry almost overnight

•⁠ ⁠How smartphones, algorithms and the collapse of physical community made a generation defenceless against ideological capture

•⁠ ⁠Why activism replaced music, fashion and culture for a generation that was supposed to be having fun

•⁠ ⁠What being arrested - and watching no-one call to ask if he was alright - actually teaches you about the people around you

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Cost Of Speaking Out

00:00:52 - They All Abandoned Me

00:10:54 - Where The Trans Movement Came From

00:24:55 - Sponsor Ad: Ledn

00:25:53 - Women's Sport, Self-ID, And Mixed-Sex Prisons

00:43:52 - Arrested - And No-One Called

00:48:26 - Phones, Algorithms, And The Anxious Generation

00:52:56 - Sponsor Ad: Monetary Metals

00:54:05 - The Father Whose Daughter Took Testosterone

01:04:08 - Everything Is Going To Shit

01:20:08 - October 7th And What Radicalised Him

01:34:18 - Where We Are In Ten Years - And Always Tell The Truth

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

› Email – me@petermccormack.com

› Instagram – /mccormack555

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH GRAHAM LINEHAN

› Twitter – https://x.com/Glinner

› Substack – https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I was arrested and like no one called me to see how I was.
0:04.4	Nobody.
0:05.2	No.
0:06.2	I lost my ability to make a living and none of these people cared and they all joined in with it and they sped up the process.
0:14.0	Every single person I worked with thinks I'm a bigot. They never express it out loud because there's no argument for these things.
0:22.1	They're insane positions. Should men be in women's prisons? Should men be in women's sports?
0:27.1	Should children be sterilized and mutilated? This is purely socially engineered.
0:31.6	Kier Starrmer left the field of battle. It's ordinary people who have to fight his culture war all day, every day.
0:39.3	I'm sure I'm on the good side. I'm pretty sure I am. How do we shift this?
0:44.3	Always tell the truth it's easier to remember.
0:51.3	Graham, it's great to meet you, great to have dinner with you last night and get to know you a bit better.
0:57.0	I've been following your story.
0:59.0	It's wild, what's gone on for you, following you as a campaigner for women's rights.
1:06.0	But I didn't fully understand all the costs that you've paid with these principles you've taken and the isolation that you went through with it.
1:16.0	Can you tell me about that?
1:17.8	Well, in the immediate weeks after, like, it became sort of a quote unquote official that I was canceled.
1:29.8	You know, that was a very isolating time.
1:33.4	And I was kind of waiting for all the people who I'd been friends with and supported
1:38.3	all through the years to do what I had often done for them and step up and say,
1:42.6	no, hang on a sec.
1:43.5	He's not saying anything strange. Of say, no, hang on a sec. He's, he's, he's,
1:44.5	he's not saying anything strange. Of course women need single sex spaces. Of course women need
	...

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