I would lose everything' Writer's gender activism led to career armageddon

It was as he was lying on a hospital trolley, after surgery to treat testicular cancer in 2018, that Graham Linehan picked up his phone and first definitively waded into the issue of trans rights.

- Daniel Boffey

According to his memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, and subsequent media interviews, the Irish-born comedian could not remember quite what he wrote in those groggy early tweets but it nailed "my colours to the gender-critical mast". He did recall the response of one of his readers: "I wish the cancer had won."

"My ordeal had begun," Linehan wrote. "Cast adrift, I was about to lose everything - my career, my marriage, my reputation."

The explanation as to how Linehan went from a nasty Twitter spat seven years ago to career and personal armageddon lies in a peculiar metamorphosis. Linehan used to be known as a superlative comedy writer. Today, the creator of Black Books,