Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow Airport on Monday after arriving on a flight from Arizona and faces an investigation over recent social media posts on X.  

“On Monday, 1 September at 13:00 hours officers arrested a man at Heathrow Airport after he arrived on an inbound American Airlines flight. The man in his 50s was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence. This is in relation to posts on X,” the Metropolitan Police told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement on Tuesday. Linehan was not named directly in the statement, but multiple outlets, including the BBC, reported that Linehan was the person arrested. And Linehan himself wrote about the arrest on Substack.

“After being taken to police custody, officers became concerned for his health and he was taken to hospital. His condition is neither life-threatening nor life-changing,” the Metropolitan Police statement continued. Linehan was released on bail “pending further investigation” into three X posts in April 2025.

On Substack, Linehan said his bail condition ordered him “not to go on Twitter” and that his arrest and an initial interview with police officers over X posts related to trans people.

“Later, during the interview itself, the tone shifted. The officer conducting it asked about each of the terrible tweets in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like … oh, I dunno — crime? I explained that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women’s spaces ARE abusers and they need to be challenged every time,” Linehan recounted.

Eventually the police interview for the comedy writer took a toll on his health: “The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life! So I was escorted to A&E, where I write this now after spending about eight hours under observation.”

Linehan shared the allegedly offending X posts on his Substack page. The 1990s Father Ted comedy for the BBC centered on three misfit priests and their housekeepers on a remote Irish island.