ITV’s Transaction is painfully unfunny

The plot of Transaction, a six-part comedy currently showing on ITV2, is simple. A supermarket accused of transphobia hires a transgender night shift worker to protect themselves from an activist mob hammering on the doors. The problem for manager Simon (played by Nick Frost) is that he employs a transwoman on a mission to be outrageous, vulgar and crude, and to lecture the audience on trans rights. Promoted as humour, there’s a big problem: it just isn’t funny.

Transaction was written and created by Jordan Gray who also plays the part of egocentric transwoman Liv, someone more accustomed to sponging off friends and surfing the internet than earning a living stacking shelves on the night fill. Gray is best known for stripping naked live on Channel 4, and playing the piano ‘with her penis,’ in the words of the Daily Mail. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the humour is crude. ‘Bush sniffing’, for example, I learned was something rather different to the appreciation of horticulture.

It’s certainly hard to see the boundary between Gray the actor and Liv the character. Transaction’s audience is treated to regular intrusions of transgender politics. We hear that, ‘despite the objections of the right-wing press, [Liv is] in fact, in the ladies’ bathroom’. On another occasion, Liv asks, ‘Do you know what they do to women like me in prison? Nothing, because they’re too busy trying to figure out which prison to put me in.’

There are also, of course, references to Harry Potter and a ‘Scaniel Radcliffe’ – JK Rowling lives rent free in Gray’s head, I suspect.

Episode three includes the ludicrous idea that Liv might be pregnant after sex in the warehouse. But the impossibility is lost on coworker Mike who decides he is not ready to be a dad and blurts, ‘What if I cut the umbilical cord and I cut the wrong thing?’ It’s just not funny, but it does set the scene to discuss maternity and paternity rights. ‘I’m entitled to both’, demands Liv with that sense of entitlement characteristic of trans rights activism.

The script is rather stronger on trans privilege that trans responsibility. Maybe five years ago it would have worked for Liv to declare, ‘The last thing you can do right now is fire a transgender employee. But here’s the thing – the only thing worse than firing me would be if I quit.’

Liv goes on to break the rules while others face the consequences. Some allegedly transphobic graffiti that kept the cast busy for too long was eventually attributed to Liv. It could have been funny if it poked fun at the way trans people were seen as some saintly class, and most oppressed of all, but self-deprecation is not a feature of the script.

The public has tired of the nonsense, and many have seen through the unfounded claims that are made about gender identity and being somehow born in the wrong body. Liv’s ability to quell that activist mob calling for trans rights simply by standing on a checkout conveyor and delivering a homily speaks more to 2020 than 2025. The rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus and a halo effect from suitably placed ceiling lights added cringe rather than credibility. It might have worked had someone quipped, ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!’ Alas they didn’t, either then or in the final episode when Liv sings, ‘You put me on this pedestal, now I’m never coming down! Don’t let my penis come between us. Born on Mars, now I live on Venus. Dick for brains? Then I’m a genius. There’s a chance I might be Jesus’.

It’s a shame because Gray can sing, and the acting is rather good. Gray and Frost both play their characters very well, while Francesca Mills and Kayla Meikle were excellent as co-workers Millie and Beefy Linda – a woman with dwarfism, and a rather large black woman. I could relate to their characters and I finished the box set wanting to know more about them. But in the end, this series is all about Liv, and hence all about Jordan Gray. Two hours of that was enough to last me a lifetime.