Their departure for the US is a damning indictment of the state of artistic freedom in Britain.
SIMON EVANS
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.
Pictures by: GB News and re:publica.
This article (The UK will miss Andrew Doyle and Graham Linehan) was created and published by Spiked and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Simon Evans
*****
RELATED
Why I’m Leaving the UK Prissy Moralists Have Killed Artistic Licence
People assume I’m Right-wing.
ANDREW DOYLE
The United Kingdom is a totalitarian hellscape. Freedom of speech has been all but abolished. Our police forces are now indistinguishable from the Gestapo. Criticism of the government will soon be illegal under imminent laws against thought crime. It will not be long before artists, political dissidents and other freethinkers will be rounded up and tossed into gulags…
Even with my love of melodrama, I cannot sustain such histrionics. While it’s enjoyable to momentarily inhabit the caricature of the Andrew Doyle that exists in the minds of my detractors, the truth is far less exciting. On a recent appearance on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, I let it be known that I am leaving the United Kingdom to work with the actor and comedian Rob Schneider on a new production company called No Apologies Media. Some of my friends have assumed that I am flouncing away out of a desperate conviction that all is lost. The reality is a little more nuanced.
While I do not believe that we live under tyranny, there are serious threats to liberty that ought to be addressed. Many members of the ruling class have scant regard for freedom of speech, as evidenced by the existence of hate speech laws, the recording of “non-crime hate incidents”, draconian jail terms meted out for offensive social media posts and continued calls for online censorship. These are not the hallmarks of an authentically free country, but one in which the authoritarian instinct has not been successfully tamed. As for the artistic industries, they are now similarly beholden to an ideology that demands self-censorship and punishes nonconformity. For creatives, this means finding ways to work within a system that is antagonistic to genuine free expression.
We often hear practitioners in the arts claiming that “cancel culture is a myth” and that “nobody is being censored”. This is an easy claim to make if your views are naturally in lockstep with the prevailing orthodoxies of the time, but it does suggest a degree of solipsism. The energy it must take to studiously ignore the continual stream of reported cases of artists being cancelled would be sufficient to keep the Large Hadron Collider running indefinitely.
Like many of those with unfashionable views, I have been dragged unexpectedly into the culture war. Whereas I once made my living solely from writing plays, musicals and performing stand-up comedy, in recent years I have found myself drawn to punditry. I have hosted a weekly show called Free Speech Nation on GB News for the last three years, written numerous articles and two books in defence of liberal values, and satirised the worst excesses of culture warriors through my satirical character Titania McGrath.
But while I feel a compulsion to address the ongoing threats to free speech in our culture, and recognise the importance of challenging a journalistic monoculture, I do miss working in the creative field. It is my hope that relocating to Arizona to work with Rob will bring greater opportunities to focus on writing and producing comedy and drama. Rob’s commitment to freedom of speech is absolute and uncompromising. Under the aegis of his new company, I’ve already begun writing a sitcom with Graham Linehan and Martin Gourlay which we hope to be filming early next year. In addition, we have plans for other television projects with a focus on political and social commentary. This culture war isn’t over yet.
It’s quite the team. And it goes without saying that Graham is one of the foremost comedy writers of our times. If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who claims that cancel culture doesn’t exist, it might be worth asking how it is that the creator of hit sitcoms such as Father Ted and The IT Crowd has been unable to work in the UK television industry for six years simply for airing his opinions. You won’t get a coherent answer, but it’ll be entertaining to watch the attempt.
For myself, I’ve never been cancelled. One could even accuse me of finding a way to capitalise on my heterodox perspectives, given that much of my career has depended upon me expressing my views openly and satirising the intolerance of those who would rather I shut up. Yet isn’t it strange that a commitment to freedom of speech, individual autonomy, and equal rights to all irrespective of immutable characteristics, should be considered “heterodox” at all?
Rather than facing cancellation, I have experienced what Helen Dale has described as the “silo effect”. Although most of my political views would traditionally be described as “Left-wing”, my stance on the culture war has meant that I have been pigeonholed as being on the Right. So while I do not hold allegiance to any ideology, the insistence that I must be classified with one particular “side” means that my employment prospects will always be limited. The digital crèche of social media, with its insistence on political tribalism, binary thinking and purity spirals, has infected the mainstream. For many commentators, it’s now a matter of “you’re either with us or against us”.
The first time I became aware of an opportunity missed due to ideological factors was when a senior member of staff at the Soho Theatre in London told me candidly that I had been taken off the shortlist for a new playwriting scheme because I was white and male. Years later, when I taught stand-up courses at the Soho Theatre for up-and-coming comedians, I was informed that my contract could not be renewed because one of the members of the group felt “unsafe” after reading a joke I had tweeted. This impact for me was negligible — I didn’t rely on the work financially and was only continuing out of a sense of loyalty — but it did concern me that a leading theatre had such a casual disregard for the importance of artistic freedom.
A career in the creative arts should not be contingent on toeing any specific ideological line, but such incidents are now, unfortunately, the norm. The groupthink that currently predominates in theatre, film, television, comedy, publishing and all other branches of the arts has catalysed some promising pushback. The choreographer Rosie Kay and arts producer Denise Fahmy have established “Freedom in the Arts”, a project specifically aimed at tackling these restrictive conditions. One of their mission statements is “to protect freedom of expression and make sure that the arts are the place where difficult ideas can be addressed, explored and discussed”. What should be a prerequisite is now an ideal that we must struggle to reclaim.
In the current climate, artists are expected to be activists, to ensure that their work promotes the approved message. In other words, conformity is being demanded of those whose vocation ought to make them the most freethinking. When art is expected to be didactic and propagandistic, very little of interest will be produced. Rather than tailor their output to the whims of prissy moralists, artists should be aspiring to William Blake’s precept: “Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”.
That is not to say that creatives cannot fall in line with intersectional dogma if they so choose, but we have seen how the arts quickly become enervated when this is the default expectation. Widespread self-censorship is inevitable when commissions are conditional on whether they reinforce voguish political trends. This does not mean that there are not exceptionally talented artists currently producing good work, but it does mean that their output is often sanitised.
Of course, the true artistic geniuses — those who emerge once or twice in a generation — can always find a way to play the game. There’s a very good reason why Shakespeare’s masterful narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are preceded by dull and dispensable panegyrics to his patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Michelangelo’s talents were so unquestionable that he was given licence to create explicitly erotic imagery for his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. When the Papal Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained that his nudes were more fitting for a bathhouse, Michelangelo painted the naked figure of Minos in the underworld with Biagio’s face, and for good measure added donkey’s ears and a snake biting his genitals.
We can’t all be Michelangelo. For us lesser mortals, we have to find a way to muddle along as best we can in an industry that expects us to be sheep to the establishment shepherds. I have no idea what my move to America will bring, but it is my hope to find a creative climate in which all this tribalistic nonsense is considered irrelevant. If nothing else, it’ll be an adventure.
Featured image: humanevents.com
••••
The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)
••••
Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.
••••
Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
••••
Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.
_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
Leave a Reply