The UK will miss Andrew Doyle and Graham Linehan

The departure this week of comedian Andrew Doyle not just from his GB News show, but also from Great Britain itself, feels like a significant moment in the culture war.

This is not a capitulation. Doyle leaves these islands in a considerably better place than he found them when he first got involved in the fight against the mustering forces of intolerance and censorship almost a decade ago – in his comedy, in his writing (including his spiked column from 2017 to 2021), and in his GB News show. Even if his battle, as he readily admits, has been exhausting.

Doyle is now looking forward to creating new comedy in Arizona, with former GB News colleague Martin Gourlay and the estimable Graham Linehan, writer of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. Arguably, Linehan is one the few people whose lives has been even more caught up in and derailed by entanglements with the woke than Doyle’s. Since he began speaking out against gender ideology all the way back in 2018, Linehan has become persona non grata in an industry that once adored him. The palpable impossibility of such a team being able to get a sitcom made in the UK is a sad testament to the impoverished state of the British cultural scene.

Let’s be frank, Linehan was cancelled for holding views that, however brusquely they have sometimes been expressed on social media, are shared by the majority of the population and are well-evidenced in science. Back in 2020, he was sneered at on BBC Newsnight for highlighting the scale of abuse and malpractice by medical professionals in children’s gender clinics. Since then, his position has been vindicated – the Tavistock clinic in London has been shut down and puberty-blocking drugs have been banned.

Yet as penance for his prescience, he has paid an enormous price, in terms of his family life and professional opportunities. He was cast out of TV, briefly banned from what was then Twitter in 2020 and was even blacklisted from performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. And so I’m tremendously excited to see him, now exonerated and free to engage once again with the craft of situation comedy – the medium he had mastered before activism began to demand his focus.

While it’s perhaps too short to call it an era, something significant is also coming to an end with Doyle’s departure.

Free Speech Nation, the show Doyle created and hosted for the past three years until his last episode at the weekend, was for me the jewel in the GB News crown (and I say this as someone privileged to host another show on the channel). It was as good, urgent and vital as anything on terrestrial TV. And it was a show Andrew was uniquely placed to host.

Week in, week out, Andrew gave a voice to the culture warriors’ targets and their collateral damage – those often shamefully ignored by louder, better-funded media. What’s more, he did far more than offer just a platform and amplification. His 90-minute Free Speech Nation special on the WPATH Files from earlier this year, which looked at the shocking scale of medical malpractice coming from the world’s leading authority on so-called trans healthcare, was a triumph of courageous investigative journalism. It was the kind of programme for which the BBC was once universally admired, but wouldn’t dare make any more.

In recent years, Doyle has also been a remarkably fecund spring of comedy. His commentary on the culture has been waspish and hilarious. Both under his own name and that of his most famous satirical creation, Titania McGrath, Doyle has been a one-man pincer movement on the worst excesses of woke.

Titania, a Twitter account posing as ‘radical intersectionalist poet’, was a creation of genius. Doyle started tweeting under that pseudonym back in 2018, and the joke was successfully sustained far longer than anyone could possibly have anticipated. It also spawned two still hilarious books, Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism. The character nailed the internal contradictions and brittle moral certainties of the identitarians with deadly accuracy. The degree of hostility displayed towards Titania from her targets was a reliable tell. And that was before it became clear how many of her most absurd demands would later be sincerely echoed by the activist set: from the removal of biological sex from birth certificates to allowing cats and dogs to identify as trans.

For all this and a great deal more, I will miss both Andrew Doyle and Graham Linehan’s presence in British public life very much. But equally, I am excited to see what comes next. To see what will be unleashed, not only by this new partnership, but also by those famously optimistic, can-do, upbeat yanks.

Bon Voyage! And – in a very real sense – don’t forget to write!

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.