In 2006, I ran a website called “Why That’s Delightful”. which I used to stay in touch with fans and talk about projects and share silly videos. I had it when the first series of The IT Crowd came out, and I had the bright idea of creating a post for every show so I could answer questions about it as it went out.

Trans rights activists were discussing ways to harass me

That idea went swimmingly until the sudden arrival of a bunch of blokes from the website Cook’d and Bomb’d. This was a Chris Morris fansite populated by extremely angry young men. They immediately flooded the page with accusations of plagiarism, complaints about every other joke, and expressed themselves in such a tone of sneering superiority that I eventually had to abandon the idea.

In 2021, a feminist friend of mine wrote and told me of a website where trans rights activists were discussing ways to harass me. She told me of the various forums devoted to it, and I asked her what it was called.

You guessed it. Cook’d and Bomb’d.

“They’re not trans activists,” I told her. “They’re Chris Morris fans.”

She went on, “I skimmed back through this forum and saw some really revolting things. There has been massive activity over many years. In recent posts, there is lots of other stuff, but the main thing that jumps out is that forum members are collaborating on:

1. Planning to raise funds for various UK trans charities to spite you.
2. Taking screenshots of comments on the previously-private substack posts that you have recently made public.
3. Identifying sock accounts that they think are you.
4. Contacting people who they believe could take legal action against you (or Substack subscribers who have commented) because of content on Substack.
5. Getting control of your domain names and/or sites to redirect the URLs or sabotage the sites plus poisoning any torrent you might set up…”

Here’s a few examples from the site.

Amusingly, they got very nervous when they saw me chatting to Chris Morris after meeting him for lunch in London.

In case you think this kind of harassment and surveillance is against the rules of the site, this is one of the admins.

Here they discuss trying to poison the torrent which contains folders of proof that trans-identified men are using women’s spaces to indulge their fetish.

Alan Driscoll — who you may remember as the comedian who thinks we should forgive the Lostprophets singer for child abuse, but not Helen Staniland who wants to keep such men out of women’s spaces, and sent a disquieting tweet about Marion Millar’s children — is, of course, a member.

My friend: “They have already filled 11 threads with just under 3,000 messages per thread. Over 200 messages in this latest thread and they started it less than 3 days ago. Screeds of crappy, home-made, collaged-type images (to call them ‘memes’ would be pushing it!), mini-rants about TERFs and transphobes, and such a preponderance of fantasies about your sexual activities that I wonder if there isn’t a heavy dose of self-loathing homo-eroticism in their obsession!”

And, of course, they’re misogynists.

So, to sum up. A group of failed comedy writers/bitter comedy fans took a dislike to me fifteen years ago and have found in trans activism a way to safely continue their harassment campaign. Funny old world!

This article was originally posted on The Glinner Update and was reproduced by kind permission.