Father Ted musical scrapped while writer Graham Linehan still attached

The Father Ted musical has reportedly been put on ice while Graham Linehan is still attached – and he, of course, blames trans rights activist for it.

Linehan, the disgraced Irish television writer who co-created Father Ted, has seen his personal life in turmoil and his career falter over the last six years as he has increasingly spent his time opposing trans rights.

He has been working on Father Ted: The Final Episode, a theatrical version of his 1990s sitcom, for seven years. But the show’s production company have decided to remove Linehan from the musical altogether, he alleges.

Jimmy Mulville, who has produced two Father Ted documentaries, reportedly told Linehan on Monday (23 May) that Hat Trick Productions, the studio behind Father Ted, won’t be moving ahead with the musical while he’s still involved with its production.

“At first I was gonna be quiet about this because I was protecting the show, but unfortunately my position here is too important to back down,” Linehan said in a YouTube video published Tuesday titled “Father Ted, the musical: update“.

Linehan blamed trans rights activists for this decision. He accused Mulville of “taking sides” in the debate: “Jimmy at one point said to me: ‘We don’t want to take sides. We don’t want to be drawn into this.’”

“They’re taking the side of the people Alison Bailey is fighting in court,” he said of the LGB Alliance co-founder suing the UK’s largest LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall.

The 54-year-old then turned his attention to trans youth. “Another idea is that there’s a such a thing as trans kids”, he said, adding: “There’s no justification for standing by while young kids are getting mutilated and sterilised.”

“And yet,” he added, “they will tell me to walk away from my own show because I stand up for these things.”

He fumed about the “cotton ceiling”, which “refers to the so-called problem of lesbians not wanting to sleep with, as Ricky Gervais puts it, women with penises,” he said.

“It’s for standing up for those women, those lesbians, that I’m being punished.”

“The Ted musical is being sacrificed on behalf of these ideas,” he said. Adding: “It’s a musical. It has nothing to do with this issue but it’s been held hostage at the moment by trans rights activists.”

Graham Linehan told studio his anti-trans views

Graham Linehan claimed he told Hat Trick Productions about these issues: “They said, literally: ‘I don’t care.’”

He also wrote a letter to Sonia Friedman Productions, a theatre production company, as well about trans rights, which he read out loud on the YouTube video.

“I don’t think you all have my back as collaborators or as business partners or as friends. Far from being on the wrong side of history, JK Rowling and I have been proved right over and over again that this is a poisonous ideology that is destroying lives,” the letter said, according to Linehan.

He continued: “The next thing I hear from Hat Trick they brought me to a meeting, and they told me that they want to give me money to go away and to step away from the shop. £200,000 they offered me.”

Linehan said he will try to buy the rights for the musical from Hat Trick Productions. “I’m looking into… seeing if we can buy it off Hat Trick. You know if they sit on it and refuse to make it, that’s just vandalism,” he said.

He added: “They’re just kind of, what, are they hoping I’ll die? Because that’s the only way that I’m going to move away from this project.”

Linehan has previously claimed the Father Ted musical was axed altogether. He told BBC’s Stephen Nolan in March that producers had “rolled over” to trans rights “lobbyists”.

“Just because a group of people have decided that anybody who speaks up against this ideology is evil, they’ve just kind of rolled over for those people,” he said. “No one is standing up for me.”

The IT Crowd co-creator has repeatedly complained about what many view as the consequences of his own actions. Twitter blocked him for “hateful conduct” and he has since devoted himself to asking what a “woman is” on Mumsnet and pretending to be trans people on Twitter and the lesbian dating app Her.

He once compared gender-affirming healthcare to Nazis experimenting on children in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Police issued him a verbal harassment warning in 2018 for allegedly mocking a trans woman online.

In 2021, he urged people to “come out” as gender-critical at Christmas. He legitimately called the event “TERFmas”.

As much as he’s been banned by social media platforms, Linehan continues to broadcast his anti-trans views to thousands. He frequently uses Substack, Medium and Telegram and has spoken to The Telegraph and GB News about being “cancelled”.

“I’m going to keep talking about this,” Linehan said in the YouTube video, adding that he has a “project coming up”.

“If you’re ignoring it, you’re complicit in it and that’s what I’m going to be proving over the next few months,” he concluded.

PinkNews has contacted representatives of Graham Linehan, Hat Trick Productions and Sonia Friedman Productions for comment.