In my time I’ve watched a lot of TV, and so I’ve seen a lot of bad TV. But the interview with Graham Linehan this week on TalkTV marks a new nadir.
Rosanna Lockwood – who I must admit I’d previously never heard of – is currently standing in for Piers Morgan as host of his show
Uncensored. On Wednesday’s edition she was joined via Zoom by Graham Linehan, whose appearance in a show at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a line-up assembled by London-based group Comedy Unleashed led to the entire show being cancelled by the venue because of his entirely orthodox and very widely shared view that there are two sexes and that minors should not be ‘affirmed’ down a path of drugs and surgery.
We’ve all seen hit jobs and car crashes. But this was something else. It had the air of a hearing in Star Chamber or a struggle session during the Chinese cultural revolution. It made Emily Maitlis’s
attack on Rod Liddle look like Frost/Nixon. Cathy Newman and Jordan Peterson? A flirtatious frolic.
I would direct you to the video here, but TalkTV are clearly desperate for nobody to see this – removing it from their own YouTube channel. There are also copyright complaints against anybody else sharing even the briefest excerpts, on any platform. It has simply disappeared. Let me remind you, the show is titled
Piers Morgan Uncensored.
I am, then, necessarily having to work from memory here. Lockwood leaps immediately on Linehan with accusations that he arranged the cancellation as a publicity stunt to sell tickets, unaware of the publicised fact that the show had already sold out before his appearance was announced. She follows up by telling him that he is conflating transgenderism with paedophilia. Linehan responds with simple factual statements about convicted child sex offenders involved in the gender movement and trying in vain to get back to the actual nub of the issue.
It’s clear that Lockwood lobbed the accusation with no idea of the truth of the situation. One imagines that Linehan’s naming of names leads to panic in the studio gallery and that there is immediate squawking in Lockwood’s earpiece.
Lockwood is hideously uninformed and partial. She clearly has no idea what she is talking about, and continues to chastise Linehan.
Worse – she then consults her panellists in the studio, Peter Tatchell and Grace Blakeley. Tatchell blithers about Linehan, incoherently and unchallenged. Lockwood is unaware that Tatchell wrote a very peculiar letter to the
Guardian in 1997 – ‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged that not all sex with children is unwanted, abusive and harmful’ (Tatchell says that his letter was edited, omitting his view that he opposes adults having sex with children and that ‘it still said paedophilia is “impossible to condone”. This means I condemn it. I oppose adults having sex with children’). It is, as always, quite something to see moral aspersions being cast on others by this man. Blakeley displays the toffee-nosed complacency that you imbibe at Lord Wandsworth College and is merely silly.
What this tawdry incident exposes is that so much of this subject has been kept from public view, and suppressed by the broadcast and print media (to the extent that, it was recently revealed, even the basic terminology is not understood by the public, many of whom think a ‘trans woman’ was born female).
So, when some of the truth does break through, it sounds unbelievable. It sounds
mad. (Think of the public reaction to the Isla Bryson affair – incredulity.) Because this can’t be happening, not now in the UK and in the modern age. Somebody would surely have told us.
A charitable interpretation is that Lockwood and Blakeley at least, genuinely don’t know about it, and for social reasons – wanting to be seen to be in the ‘good’ progressive tribe – simply don’t want to believe it. (Tatchell has no such excuse.) They assume that what Linehan is saying must be akin to the homophobic paedo panics of the 1980s. This is a terrible mistake.
Last night Lockwood addressed the incident on the following edition of the show, doing a to-camera statement that frankly made the blood run cold. With a ghastly smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes she pontificates passive-aggressively about ‘misinformation’ and keeping things ‘civilised’ (worth noting again that Linehan remained calm throughout, and responds firmly but factually to her aspersions). Now anyone that’s worked in TV for any length of time knows that it is populated, both in front of and behind the cameras, by the flint-hearted. But this was exceptional.
It’s the blank mask of the tyrant combined with the ethics of the memory hole. As with so much in the last decade of genderism it’s a pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming moment; a sense of the shared liberal framework that we all complacently accepted – many still do – disintegrating, and over such a crazy and frequently comical issue. This is a horrible thing to confront, which is why so many people refuse to.
It also seems rather off-brand for Talk TV. Lockwood’s stablemate Julia Hartley-Brewer has retweeted the most detailed and damning excoriation of the interview. And Piers Morgan himself? From his holiday he retweeted Lockwood’s Soviet-style decree, adding ‘Well said’. Fair enough, nobody wants their holiday cover to shine and show them up. But it’s probably not ideal for them if they burn down your job and everything you – supposedly – stand for.
Written by
Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street
