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Father Ted musical plans axed over trans row as creator says producers 'rolled over'
Father Ted have been axed after clashes between one of its creators and trans activists.Writer Graham Linehan faced backlash recently for a series of tweets dubbed transphobic, resulting in him being banned permanently from Twitter in 2020.In 2018, he was also issued with a verbal harassment warning by police after an online row with a transgender activist.Linehan, 53, who was also wrote Black Books and The IT Crowd, said: “My bet was that the Ted musical was too big to fail.“I thought, ‘If they come after it, then that will be good because then people will see how crazy this is, how absurd and how censorious, how anti-female, how homophobic that this movement is.’"Linehan continued to say that producers had “rolled over” to campaigners’ demands and axed the production, despite it having already begun rehearsals.He added: "Every comedian at the moment is living under a kind of state of permanent blackmail.""I’ve been thoroughly cancelled. I’ll tell you how cancelled I am, there were two programmes called Cancelled and I wasn’t on either of them."Father Ted star Joe Rooney was forced to deny that footballer Jack Grealish was his son recently.
