7 Fun Facts about Graham Linehan TV Shows
TV writer Graham Linehan’s work on the sitcoms Father Ted, The IT Crowd, Black Books, and Count Arthur Strong is a significant contribution to surreal and traditional-style sitcoms. Here are seven fun facts you may not have known about his television shows.
He doesn’t like to write alone.
Graham Linehan co-wrote Father Ted with Arthur Mathews, Count Arthur Strong with Steve Delaney, and the first season of Black Books with Dylan Moran. “I’m trying to find a way that I can stop writing on my own because it’s not enjoyable,” Linehan tells Robert Llewellyn in an episode of Carpool. “Writing with a writing partner is just the most fun you can have.” Although he wrote The IT Crowd by himself, he considers the actors as co-writers. If the characters aren’t believable enough to play, the actors keep at him until he rewrites it.
He makes frequent cameos in his shows.
You can spot Graham Linehan playing minor characters, such as the “I love books” customer in episode one of Black Books, or the customer left to pick fries off the counter when Bernard gets locked out of Black Books and has to take up a job in fast food. Linehan plays one of the Fathers on the plane full of vicars in Father Ted, and he’s been in numerous The IT Crowd episodes, including as a mariachi singer in a Mexican restaurant.
Count Arthur Strong is a reboot of a radio show.
Count Arthur Strong’s Radio Show! was broadcast in 2005 on BBC Radio 4. It was written solo by Steve Delaney. Linehan joined Delaney in 2013 to adapt it for television. Linehan tells BBC One that the TV show had to move “away from some of the larger-than-life relationships created in the radio show and [try] to ground it a bit more. I would tell our audiences that it was a reboot.”
Father Ted inspires real life protesters.
In the episode “The Passion of Saint Tibulus,” Father Ted and Father Dougal protest a film by standing outside the cinema with placards that read “Down with this sort of thing” and “Careful now.” This joke has leaked into real rallies and protests.
“It’s in every protest now. There was a picture recently of some Irish fans standing in front of a kind of mass of Polish policemen with those two signs,” Linehan tells Richard Herring, who also had seen “Down with this sort of thing” placards outside his own comedy show Christ on a Bike.
Father Ted won a sitcom race against I’m Alan Partridge.
Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews started writing Father Ted at the same time as Armando Iannucci, Steve Coogan, and Peter Baynham started writing I’m Alan Partridge. When they realized they were writing next door to each other in the same building, they decided to have a sitcom race to see who would get to the end of their season first. Father Ted won.
The IT Crowd was almost remade in America without Linehan’s permission.
America has made several attempts to remake Linehan’s The IT Crowd, but it has yet to succeed. The 2007 attempt, one which Linehan first learned about by reading on the internet that filming was underway, copied the original U.K. pilot shot-for-shot: the same lines, same camera angles, even the mistakes. In an episode of RHLSTP, Linehan says of his own pilot, “We had these crappy sets because we couldn’t afford better sets because it was a pilot episode. Everything looked wrong and bad…. They thought we did this on purpose!” Even Richard Ayoade joined the cast to reprise his role as Moss. You can read Linehan’s thoughts about an American remake on his blog.
Season three of Count Arthur Strong makes its American debut on Acorn TV.
It’s true! Seven new episodes will be released May 22 through July 3rd on Acorn. In season three, we see Michael (Rory Kinnear) struggle to wrangle in the chaos caused by out-of-work variety performer Count Arthur Strong (Steve Delaney) and his delusions of grandeur. Watch it here.
Jaime Pond writes about British television and is the editor of Anglonerd.com.