'Doctors' pulls the plug

Did Graham Linehan bring about the end of the afternoon preachaton?

Graham and ‘Graham’

One of Britain’s longest-running soap operas quietly came to an end after 24 years just a few days ago, choosing to bow out with a trans storyline that seemed like a deliberate jab at our own Graham Linehan.

Doctors was a daytime medical soap opera that looked at the lives of the staff of a GP’s surgery in a fictional town in Birmingham. It began in 2000, aired on BBC 1 and most episodes consisted of a unique storyline, usually involving a new patient.

In its first few years, the show tried to be both realistic and informative, and it built up a relatively large and loyal audience of mostly elderly people, the unemployed and students. Airing in 2003, the first ‘trans’ storyline was a sign of what was to come. It featured a man who had become suicidal over his transition, and decided to detransition to save his life … only for his doctor to turn up at his house at night to scream at him to start cross-dressing again, as he was a “grown woman betrayed by her ugly man’s body”. In other words, this was conversion therapy presented as effective treatment.

Across the next twenty years, the trans issue continued to crop up in similarly clumsy ways, almost always involving boys or men who wanted to transition (the first of two ‘trans men’, played by Jake Graf, didn’t appear until 2021, the second in 2024). Even those who identified as trans found the storylines ham-fisted, and longtime fans of the show typically responded to these episodes by expressing bafflement on Doctors’ official Facebook page. By approximately 2022, almost every episode focused on a culture war issue, presenting a straightforward battle between good and bad characters. The villains typically included those who disregarded climate change, exhibited racist behaviour, or held right-wing views. Perhaps more than anything else, storylines regularly revolved around LGBT issues.

In September 2022 Glinner’s Substack published this article about two back-to-back episodes, in which a GP’s 14 year old daughter invites a boy who is sexually interested in her for a sleepover. The concerned father finds out the boy is ‘gender fluid’ and a victim of hate speech, so stops worrying and invites him to sleep in her bed whenever he wants.

A few months later Glinner’s Substack published a second article about an episode, in which a ‘gender critical’ man wrongly thinks a female patient is a man. He bursts into her treatment room and pulls down her trousers to inspect her genitals. He later shouts, while being arrested, that “no matter how many operations you have or hormones you take, we can always tell” (even though this makes no sense, as he’d just been proven wrong).

Many of the show’s writers have public social media accounts that they use for political activism. One writer’s X bio in 2023 even stated that they were a trans activist before they got to the bit about them also being a writer. One core writer was anti-Conservative activist Philip Ralph, who Glinner noticed had blocked him without the two ever interacting.

Throughout 2023 and into 2024, the show continued to broadcast Pink News-style propaganda, including, famously an episode that normalised furries, and one that included the phrase: “Let's not go down the old deceitful, predatory, pansexual road. It’s a disgusting cliché. And as queer people, you should know better.”

Soon, even the BBC had had enough, and the show was cancelled in autumn 2023. The final episode, it said, would be broadcast in December 2024, and the production team and writers had a few months to bring about a conclusion to the show that its long-suffering viewers deserved.

"In June 2024, Dr. Elton became a part of the show. With a thriving career, he was willing to invest in the financially struggling surgery, possibly saving it from collapse. See if you can spot any similarities to Glinner: His name was ‘Graham’, he was mid 50s and he had recently become divorced from his wife following his vocal opposition to trans activism.

For good measure, we also discover that Graham is ableist and clumsy about homosexuality. And then comes the proper start of the storyline to see the show out for its final two months: He reveals he doesn’t care about a patient’s ‘they / them’ pronouns, only on treating ‘him’.

As a result, Graham has to attend ‘LGBTQIA training’. However, he rejects what he has been taught.

He then reveals he doesn’t even want to go to a drag show - and tells a cross-dressing man that he should change his appearance if he wants to work in healthcare. We are therefore explicitly told: he is a bigot.

Due to Graham’s transphobia, his colleague Luca dresses as a female nurse to treat patients. This angers one far-right patient, but a female patient who’s afraid of men, because her stepdad raped her, is so reassured by Luca-dressed-as-a-woman that she agrees to live with a homeless man she’s just met.

We then meet Graham’s daughter, Jay, who is, of course, non-binary. Except she’s not, as she now says she’s a man. Her mother says she knew she was a boy since she was six. Graham blames the “woke mainstream media”, and is told he’s driven children to suicide by telling them the risks of taking cross-sex hormones. Ironically, while the viewer is meant to hate Graham or at least see him as a relic of the past, the majority of comments on social media about this storyline were sympathetic with his grief over his child, with many saying he was the only person speaking sense to his daughter.

We are then told that the person who gave him the LGBTQIA training is NOT a member of the queer community, and that might be why it didn’t work.

As the show reaches its final stages, Graham is told he is a “straight, white, privileged man”, he talks about “cancel culture”, continues to not care about a patient’s pronouns, gives misinformation to a lesbian and calls a gay nurse a “spiteful little queen”. We are then meant to sympathise with Luca, who punches him in the face.

We then get to the last ever episode of Doctors. It was meant to be broadcast in December but the BBC, without providing an explanation, brought it forward by a month. This proved to be embarrassing in terms of timing. In the show’s final week, Will-Nyerere Plastow, who script edited 72 episodes, was charged with being part of a Palestinian activist group that carried out an armed burglary, Alexander Westwood, an actor who featured in the show, appeared in court charged with sex offences against children and women, and just three hours before the penultimate episode aired, which starred Timothy West, it was announced that West had died.

And then to the end of BBC Doctors. If we hadn’t got the message that the transphobic doctor is evil, he now starts sacking and attacking colleagues. Then, after 24 years, in the show’s final scene, he is sacked (and bizarrely accused of racism). His parting shot is to call the staff “woke”.

While Doctors has now ended, its demise tells us a great deal about the state of the media, and particularly the BBC, in 2024. The show was not culturally significant - its storylines were not debated in offices, schools and pubs - but it was respected and served a purpose for a loyal audience. Yet it decided to spend the goodwill it had accrued through its focus on medical-themed stories, in favour of clownishly transparent social engineering. As a result, few outside its now-confused audience noticed the show, and then it was cancelled after nearly 25 years.

Perhaps this implies that even with the BBC effectively cancelling him, Graham Linehan still plays a role in bringing joy to its exhausted audience.