Having won five Baftas for Channel 4 sitcoms including Father Ted and The IT Crowd, Graham Linehan was a safe pair of hands in the eyes of the BBC when it commissioned him to co-write sitcom Motherland.
That was, of course, before he became an outspoken critic of trans culture, and therefore, a pariah in Britain’s comedy scene.
And now Linehan has turned on the BBC and its writers, accusing them of demonising him in one of its ‘woke’ medical dramas.
‘The writers on Doctors called a divorced character “Graham” and made him the transphobic bad guy,’ he claims, referring to the BBC One medical drama. Aghast, he adds: ‘I can’t believe I’m not making this up.’
Linehan was responding to a comment online which accused BBC drama The Capture of ‘propaganda’ and suggested its plot linked legitimate concerns about immigration numbers with violent extremism.
‘The BBC did the same to me with [Doctors],’ affirms Linehan, 57.
Graham Linehan has turned on the BBC and its writers, accusing them of demonising him in one of its ‘woke’ medical dramas.
Linehan refers to the introduction of character Dr. Graham Elton, who is played by actor Alex Avery in the BBC One drama’s 24th and final series of Doctors, which aired in 2024. The unsavoury fictitious Dr Graham Elton is in his 50s, separated from his former wife, and aggressively transphobic, in one scene cruelly deriding his child for coming out as transgender.
In 2020, Linehan and his wife of 16 years Helen Serafinowicz, with whom he has a daughter and a son, divorced amid the backlash over his anti-transgenderism.
He said their marriage broke down after his critics ‘went after my wife’.
In 2023 Linehan’s Edinburgh Fringe show was cancelled after the venue said anti-trans views did ‘not align with our overall values’.
A BBC Studios spokesman insists Linehan’s claims are mistaken, assuring me: ‘Doctors was a fictional drama, set in a fictional location, featuring fictional characters, not based on any real-life individuals. To suggest that the character of Dr Graham Elton was based on any specific individual is simply untrue.’
Carol’s countdown – to reincarnation!
Carol Vorderman wants to be ‘either an Italian man or an Italian woman’ in her next life
Carol Vorderman was 42 when she finally met her biological father, a Dutchman who had remained a distant presence since her Welsh mother discovered his affair when the TV star was just three weeks old.
The former Countdown presenter admits she finds her sense of identity rooted in the warmth and culture of her Italian stepfather Gabriel Rizzi. ‘I never knew my (real) father, he (Rizzi) was my dad,’ she says at The Italian Awards 2026 at the London Marriott Grosvenor Square in Mayfair.
She tells me: ‘I have written to the Pope, to say when I come back in my next life, I want to be either an Italian man or an Italian woman.
‘He hasn’t written back yet.’ Hopefully he’ll hear her prayer.
He long ago repaid the $14 million he owed US tax authorities, so I hope that ill luck hasn’t returned to dog the splendidly uninhibited Nicolas Cage who once snapped up such essentials as a private island, a castle and a $200 million fleet of yachts.
I’m told that Cage, 62, now happily married after four divorces, had an exquisitely crafted Panama made for him by Lock & Co, the London hat-makers favoured by King Charles. ‘It cost £25,000,’ a St James’s boulevardier tells me. ‘Someone sat on it a day later.’
Lock won’t even murmur about clients, while Cage’s representatives have yet to comment.
Breaking Bad’s Bryan asks fans: What is wrong with you?
Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston is alarmed that some of his admirers still rooted for Mr White
As teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White in Breaking Bad, he murdered his way to the top of America’s crystal meth trade.
And actor Bryan Cranston is alarmed that some of his admirers still rooted for Mr White after he ‘broke bad’ in the hit crime drama. He reveals: ‘I meet fans all the time who say “I never lost faith in you, I was with your character all the way,”’ to which I say to them: “What the hell is wrong with you?”
‘I [as Walter] did some horrible things.’
He may regularly score perfect 10s on the Strictly dancefloor but professional dancer Vito Coppola, admits that pulling off an April Fools prank isn’t quite his forte.
Coppola, 33, whose memoir Love, Vito is out later this year, reveals: ‘I am not that good at pranking people – because my face is so transparent that you can understand if I’m lying – I tried to put some rubber plastic spiders on my brother’s pillow to wake him up, I thought he’d wake up and get scared.
‘It didn’t work at all.’
Jessie’s very unfortunate Norton mishap
Singer Jessie Ware was thrilled when friend James Norton agreed to appear as a ‘sexy cowboy’ in the video for her new single
Will it be a while before Jessie Ware has another bash at collaborative working from home?
The Say You Love Me singer was thrilled when her friend James Norton, 40, agreed to appear as a ‘sexy cowboy’ in the video for her new single, Ride – so thrilled, in fact, that she invited the Happy Valley star to drop in to ‘work out’ their roles.
They got cracking, adds Ware, 41, ‘at the bottom of my garden’. It was only when mounted astride Norton, who was on all fours, that Jessie, happily married to personal trainer Sam Burrows since 2014, noticed a small face staring at them ‘through the window’ – that of her four-year-old son.
School’s out for author Pullman
Novelist Sir Philip Pullman, who used to teach English, was recently praised by a former pupil for having been a ‘fantastic and really engaging’ teacher. However, school is out for the author of His Dark Materials. ‘I wouldn’t mind being a teacher at the time when I was a teacher [the 1970s and 1980s], but not today,’ says Sir Philip at a talk to open the British Library’s Fairy Tales exhibition season. ‘Too many rules, too many forms to fill in, too many ridiculous tests… too much time you have to spend with bureaucracy.’
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