Dear Readers,
Good evening, and welcome to Off The Fence, a weekly newsletter that usually arrives on a Monday, but today lands on a Tuesday: yes, that’s right, it’s a Tuesday bumper special.
Issue 13 continues to prove a treat with readers: we’ve had praise for Michelle Taylor’s superb essay on the boring letters of T. S. Eliot, Oli Franklin Wallis has declared the magazine ‘absolutely fantastic’, and Madeleine Feeny (correctly) says that ‘A Fence subscription is one of the soundest investments you can make’. And she’s right! Now, the magazine will be sold out in a fortnight, so do secure your copy through our webstore here while that opportunity still presents itself.
Today, we’ve got a letter from the editor, a tribute to the late Leslie Phillips, but we lead with a dispatch from Washington D.C, where Margaret Mitchell has been out on the town.
The Poseidon Platter
The Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C. claims the title of the oldest bar in the capital – a contested title, given the Grill’s propensity to uproot every few decades and re-settle itself elsewhere in the city. In its 150-year history (and four location swaps), the restaurant has garnered a reputation for its star-spangled list of patrons.
Following the trail of Sting, Prince, Tom Hanks, and The Grateful Dead, I’m there with my parents to meet Monsieur Hubert, their elderly friend whom they describe as ‘an international man of mystery’ and ‘a cosmopolitan bachelor’. They love him, and love even more doing impressions of him, turning one hand up in a raptor-like claw as if clutching a wine glass, or else in parody of The European, who, as everyone knows, speaks with his hands.
Truth be told, I expect Hubert to be a slim and lecherous individual. On the contrary: he’s rather warm-hearted and comfortingly pudgy of a chunky baby, with rolls of cheek fat convivially folding up against each other. Even his teeth, chiselled down in the middle by a gentlemanly habit of smoking cigars, give him the look of a seven-year-old who’s just lost his central incisors. Although Hubert himself is soft-spoken, his companion, described by my parents as a ‘socialite,’ is bubbly to the point of being effervescent and immediately binds me in a sinewy hug.
The hostess greets the five of us and we penetrate the dark interior, single file. On the left is the white-tableclothed main dining room. Nondescript, remarkably normal diners pass their steak knives from left hand, to right hand, to left again, like storefront automatons. They’re fenced in by mahogany corrals and three etched-glass panels depicting the grand facades of the Treasury, the White House, and the Capitol.
We come into the light, finding ourselves in the saloon’s annex. Really, it’s a vast atrium belonging to the Met Square office building, where the smell of marijuana wafts up from elevators leading to an underground parking lot. In all the times I’ve dined at Old Ebbitt, I’ve only ever sat in the atrium, where one must watch enviously through the windows as silver cloches and porcelain plates catch an amber glow in the warm bosom of Washington.
Hubert orders for the table. Two waiters tiptoe into the atrium carrying a massive, three-tiered silver platter of mollusks and crustaceans which is listed on the menu as ‘The Poseidon’ ($259.99). Its crowning jewel is a sunburn-red lobster head peering out from the top, where its dismembered parts protrude from a shallow bed of ice.
‘So,’ says the socialite, pinching a jumbo shrimp that she never ends up actually eating because she’s too busy talking. ‘You’ve been living in London. What do you think about Meghan Markle?’ We spend the next 20 minutes discussing her theories of the nefarious American influences using Meghan as their conduit. They belong, implies the socialite, to some network run not just by rogue federal employees, but by celebrities and celebrity politicians. She never uses the words ‘deep state’, but when she brings up Oprah and her ties to Meghan and Harry, I get the idea.
I explain that Meghan’s disliked because she’s an American. Worse, she’s a celebrity, and that makes her entitled and improper, even if she’s not an entirely bad person. You just can’t be a celebrity and not be entitled, I say. My dinner companions nod, and I get a little smug. Brownie points have been scored – all conservatives hate celebrities.
For some years now, our two parties have been playing at a popularity contest, and the Democrats are winning. The Republicans despise them for it, but they also know that there’s no way to abstain from the pageant without conceding victory to their opponents.
As we ate our delicacies, Tucker Carlson aired the first installation of an interview with Kanye West, which tanked massively but succeeded in catching people’s attention, if only a little more than Tucker’s rants about the androgenized M&Ms did. And while the Grand Old Party is getting wrapped up in a bootleg brand of the company their opponents keep, the DNC is entertaining TikTokers in the Capitol in the hopes that their influence will keep extending at the polls. But I can’t put aside the empty feeling I get from this situation we’ve found ourselves in, where short-form content and clickbait headings plot the course of our future, and where there’s no content in content, just the vague outline of a concept or position, a collection of words that seem to indicate a general direction – right or left, wherever, but eventually downwards. It seems to me that, as the saying goes, in a race to the bottom, no one wins.
Still, it all fascinates me, especially the ways in which this superficiality starts to encroach upon our restaurants and bars, making whole swathes of city streets feel like suburbs of Disneyland. Places like Old Ebbitt are already wilted by our nation’s waning glamour, but they know the power of looks, aesthetics, postures.
When the night is over, we can leave feeling full on wine and ennobled by our charade as bachelors and socialites. The silver platter was sumptuous, but once we’ve sucked the meat out of the shrimp tails and oyster shells and lobster claws, all that’s left behind is an array of gutted husks.
You can follow Margaret on Twitter here.
All Bets Are Off
You’ve doubtless read some of the voluminous and harrowing reporting on the subjugation and servitude visited upon migrant workers building the infrastructure for the upcoming Qatar World Cup. The building project alone – which includes extensive urban development and eight 45,000-seat stadia designed by none other than Albert Speer Junior – has been borne on the backs of unsafe work conditions, labour arrangements which amount to something like modern slavery, and has directly resulted in the deaths of at least 6,500, mainly South Asian, workers. (Though many, many more than this number have been suggested by advocacy groups in and outside the region). This is not to mention the barbaric treatment of LGBT and minority inhabitants of Qatar itself, or the good deal less important, but still extant concerns about the logistics of holding a World Cup in the middle of Europe’s regular season.
None of this, however, has deterred or even slowed the relentless march toward the tournament, so you’d be forgiven for being cynical about how much any of those arguments would stick once the opening ceremony was rounding the horizon. The expectation was that the blazer wearing chiefs of Football™ would close ranks, putting aside such trifling concerns as human slavery or gay rights, to focus on staging the most lucrative event in world sport once more. This is, after all, what happened when the Russian iteration of the tournament witnessed a similar carousel of outcry-and-acceptance just four years ago.
But then – to evoke Fence-favourite Adam Curtis – something curious happened. Rather than grinding to a halt as the FA’s planes left for Doha, censure toward the tournament has only increased in the past week. Dua Lipa took to Instagram to say she would not be playing at the opening ceremony, and looked forward to playing in Qatar only once they fulfilled their human rights obligations. Gary Neville was bloodily bodied for taking Qatari coin on Have I Got News For You, and Joe Lycett called out David Beckham for betraying his gay fanbase by taking a reported $10 million ambassadorship from Qatar, where homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment and even death.
More curious still, as the rumblings about the rights and wrongs of the tournament’s hosts and enablers have grown louder, chatter about the contest itself has remained eerily – and one suspects for FIFA, worryingly silent. Just five days before the opening game, buzz about the football itself appears to be dead on arrival. Having pushed through a winter World Cup to assuage complaints about 50-degree heat in Qatar’s summer months, it appears FIFA hadn’t anticipated the public’s mood on the hosts remaining quite so sour, or just how much a mid-season tournament would differ in the public imagination.
Many British readers have probably sensed, anecdotally, that this year’s World Cup feels less eagerly anticipated than bygone years, even though Wales will be in voluble attendance, and the England team remain a middling-to-decent outside bet to go all the way. With children in school, adults hunkering down in preparation for Christmas spending, and diehard fans only days removed from the breakneck pace of Premier League and Champions League timetables, it seems like this latest round of controversies have only added to what could be a very expensive flop.
Wary of trusting our guts on this, we reached out to a contact within the neon-clawed monster that is the gambling industry. 'Dire' is how one sports betting insider describes the competition’s preliminary market. 'There’s more action right now in the I’m A Celebrity betting’ he told us. If this does not improve, Qatar’s $220bn outlay for the World Cup may seem something an overpayment. Dare we hope that the most expensive act of sportwashing ever attempted might leave the most powerful people in world football with a laundry bill even they can’t pay?
Gangster Granny and the Spaceboy
David Walliams, the comic turned children’s book author, is currently in the headlines, after an investigation has revealed that he made a litany of truly revolting remarks about contestants on Britain’s Got Talent.
We got a resounding response to our call for more Walliams intel, and having spoken to a number of sources in the publishing industry, came away with more than a few hair-raising tales. The upshot is we have a lot of digesting and cross-referencing to undertake, so that we can offer them the clarity and detail they deserve at a later date.
It seems a curious tale has emerged regarding Walliams' autobiography, Camp David. We are told that Penguin had to excise a chapter from the original manuscript, chatter about which was freely circulating online last week. What was in that chapter? Who is to know for sure. One thing is certain: Walliams now enjoys a very fruitful relationship with a different publishing house, and a trail of legal documents at his last place of letters which makes the reporting of his actions there charmingly difficult for an enterprising little magazine.
A Letter from The Editor
Hello all, this is Charlie Baker. I hope you’ve been enjoying these weekly newsletters – we all love putting them together. It’s been a particular pleasure for me to see Brian Sewell’s TV career enjoy a well-deserved second life, and I’m heartened to have found a vehicle for some of the more arcane YouTube videos I’ve watched over the years.
But I’m also very proud to see how our more serious journalism has found an audience, and to see our pieces syndicated by the Guardian, the Times and Harper’s. I can’t think of any other start-up publications with that sort of track record, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
So far, we have operated under that snappy maxim ‘fake it till you make it’ – while we have the appearance of a bustling, busy newsroom, there is only one full-time employee (me) and the other three members of the editorial team are working four or six days a month. We don’t have any budget for the marketing and advertising at this moment in time.
Until I started work here, I’d never worked in print journalism – but I’d certainly spent a lot of money on magazines and newspapers, and know what it’s like to be ripped off, and I believe we provide excellent value for the year with four print magazines and 50 newsletters.
By the end of the year, we would love to hit the mark of 2,000 subscribers. That would mean we can pay our extraordinarily talented editorial team a little bit more. At the moment, we are a little way off that goal. If you’ve been enjoying what we do online and in this mail-out, I would be very grateful if you would sign up for the year, and allow us to keep building The Fence. And I look forward to digging up some more Brian Sewell videos for you all very soon.
Calling Doctor Karen
We think this might be the worst tweet of the year from Doctor Brett Gray, the Chaplain of Sidney Sussex College College, Cambridge. While this might seem a joke, we are told by those familiar with Doctor Gray that it is very much in character.
Trip and Mix
Earlier this year, Róisín Lanigan went to Blackpool with a bunch of friends to celebrate her hen-do, and she’s written it all up in a dispatch for Issue 13. It’s a trip into the dark heart of Englishness and culminates in a visit to the local strip club – the piece is very much worth your time.
Mags on Mags on Mags
There aren’t that many newish current affairs publications in the Yoo-Kay, and perhaps the finest is Delayed Gratification, who mastered the ‘slow approach’ to news before a certain website thought of the concept. If you want to get a handle on the sort of things they publish, check out this long-read on this year’s discovery of HMS Endurance, or this fascinating piece on Tikon Dzaykho, an exiled Russian journalist. Writing of this quality merits your attention.
The Rhyme of the Ancient Marketer
You know those irritating spoken-word adverts beloved by banks and other global corporations? You know, like this one? Well it turns out that there is one man behind them all, and Hugh Morris interviewed Mike Garry and found out how me makes money for his meter.
The Sage of Yorkville
It’s always slightly suspect when journalists declare that ‘this was the year of <insert overhyped celebrity>’, but 2022 really, quite genuinely, was the year of Julia Fox (and possibly Volodymr Zelensky).
At the start of the year, Fox was just another one of those actors who make a big deal about the fact they grew up in New York and used to take drugs a lot, but she has rebranded herself with such aplomb and winning charm that even the cynics are declaring that, yes, this is the year of Julia Fox.
Her TikTok account is loaded with gems, and just this weekend, she has launched a broadside on ageing and the beauty industry which makes for compelling viewing. For those unwilling to join the terrifying shores of TikTok, one very helpful Twitter user has compiled an account called ‘Julia Fox Fan Updates’, which you might enjoy following – it is updated daily.
In Case You Missed It
The inimitable David Squires tells the inside story of one Qatari whistleblower, Malcolm Bidali.
Over at Bloomberg. Matt Levine does a good job of explaining the mind-boggling scale of the FTX catastrophe that rocked crypto markets this weekend.
What would happen if you answered yes to every PR email you received? For some insane reason, Slate’s Dan Kois did exactly that.
Fast Company’s Sarah Lynch is here to tell you that Gen Z hate your emojis.
Here’s the best rundown of the insanity and incompetence that has marked Musk’s first fortnight as Twitter’s main character.
And Finally
This week saw the death of the iconic Leslie Phillips. The usual harbingers of celebrity death – we’re looking at you, Brandreth – trotted out anecdotes of a charming and hard working actor. In particular, Phillips was known for his tolerance of some of his more extravagant co-stars in the Carry On films; whether it was Kenneth Williams’s rudeness, Hattie Jacques’s drinking or Charles Hawtrey’s rapacious sexual appetite. ‘Well, Charlie was gay, of course’, Phillips put it modestly in his autobiography. Hawtrey’s biographer explains it differently: passersby who went past his house in Deal would often hear Hawtrey broadcasting the following exclamation to whichever sailor he had picked up that evening over the sleepy Kent town: ‘Slap your bollocks against my arse’!
In truth, the most interesting interview with Phillips, where he talks at length about his impoverished childhood, is, weirdly, with the late BeeGee, Robbie Gibb. However, the more interesting reaction to Phillips’s demise came from an unlikely outburst of reaction videos by young people on TikTok, courtesy, not alas, of Carry On Constable, but of his voice part in the Harry Potter franchise. The result is a series of very unlikely crossovers between British vintage comedy and late capitalist online video oblivion: highlights include this attempt, by an LA based blogger to replicate Phillips’s ‘Well, Hello’ catchphrase from the early Carry Ons, this touching tribute with a bizarre Billie Eilish soundtrack, and this appeal to the Grim Reaper not to kill Dame Maggie Smith.
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That’s it for this week. Next time out, we’ll have some prints of the ‘Soho Map of Cokes’ available for sale, which is very exciting. They’re going to be priced at £40 only and signed by Paul Cox. If you have any comments, tips or queries about your order, please do get in touch by replying to this email. Until the next time.
All the best,
TF
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