Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch ponders the very different career paths of Graham Linehan and David Walliams. The former went against the “correct” media thinking, and was ostracised; the latter said whatever he thought was required, and stayed on board.

Britain’s creative class functions as a gated community, policed by fashion and bounded by fear. For decades, comedy writer turned presenter and children’s author David Walliams was safely inside the walls: his best-selling books populated the shelves of schools and Little Britain, the show he co-created, became a part of the comedy canon.

Walliams rose to fame portraying Emily Howard, a transvestite whose insistence, “I’m a lady”, in the face of every challenge provoked hilarity. Meanwhile, comedy writer Graham Linehan has spent recent years becoming infamous for disputing the same claim when it is made in earnest. The disparity in how the two men have been treated is instructive.

Linehan, who has refused to apologise for his campaigning against trans ideology, has been effectively exiled from British cultural life and forced to start again in the United States. Walliams, by contrast, perfected the art of saying sorry and was repeatedly granted the benefit of the doubt, remaining comfortably on the lucrative side of history.

Never mind that Linehan was by a long long way the better comic writer, producing brilliant fresh comedy – Father Ted, The IT Crowd – while Walliams churned out mediocre and often properly offensive (“black face” etc.) pabulum.

More than two decades after Little Britain, Walliams has also displayed a keen instinct for ideological calibration. Last year, on a podcast, he offered a fashionably up-to-date gloss on his own identity, reminiscing about going to gay clubs as a student, wearing skirts, and experimenting with his presentation before concluding: “I think in a way I’d probably say I am non-binary. I don’t know exactly.” It was a declaration that cost him nothing and signalled everything.

Unfortunately the recent decision by his publishers to drop him, after allegations of sexual harassment, leads one to doubt the sincerity of his “non-binary” identity – but who knows?

The lesson is not that Linehan should have been protected or that Walliams deserved destruction. It is that British cultural life now operates on a simple rule. Mouthing the correct platitudes is a shield. Say the right things, apologise on cue, and even the most tasteless or troubling conduct can be absorbed. Say the wrong things, particularly those deemed low status, and no amount of talent or prior success will save you. Small wonder, then, that Britain’s creative class is so timid; everyone knows where the gates are, and how easily they close.