Dear Readers,
Welcome back to Off The Fence, the free weekly newsletter that acts as a tart little complement to the quarterly print magazine. Now, the magazine costs quite a bit to put together – and this mail-out doesn’t take as much effort or money (no printing, you see), yet according to this poll we’ve conducted, almost a quarter of you prefer ‘Off The Fence’ to The Fence. Which is great to hear, as it’s really fun putting this thing together, and we’re going to keep bringing you our classique blend of featurettes, deep dives, gossip, tips and, of course, links to arcane YouTube clips every Monday or Tuesday. Now that 6,000 of you are signed up to read it, we’re also going to shine a light on various projects being operated elsewhere which we reckon to be worthy of your time.
Thank you to everyone who has shared some snaps of Issue 14 – Jade Angeles Fitton is showing off her bonza article, ‘Ashes to Cashes’ here, Richard Smyth puts one in the eye for those pesky beaver-botherers with this snappy caption and Will Yates pairs Nishant Choksi’s cover with a Gothic Revival masterpiece. Please keep them coming!
Some admin: it’s very important to note all subscriptions renew after a year, unless you direct us otherwise. If you would like to check the status of your sub, please reply to this email and we’ll come back to you promptly.
To business. We’ve got a tribute to Gianluca Vialli, a tour of Westminster Abbey and some brief words on nepo babies.
Handbags at Dawn
We have nothing to say that hasn't already been said elsewhere on Prince Harry (for the time being). But just up the hill from Kensington Palace is a vintage boutique store on the Pembridge Road called Retro Woman, and they have been having significant issues with a customer, so much so that they have had to ban them from the shop. Do you know who ‘Rude Lady’ is? Can you help us identify them? All tips welcome via the usual channels.
White Dudes in Drapes
The first tip from us for the year? We recommend a visit to that little-known church, Westminster Abbey, UNESCO World Heritage Site and burial place of English kings and queens. Seriously: everyone’s trooped round the Tower of London and the National Gallery at some stage of their life, but unless you’re a choirboy, a prince or the Canadian ambassador it’s unlikely you’ve wended your way around Edward the Confessor’s shrine.
It’s not just the kings and queens who are buried there – Darwin, Hawking, Dickens, Chaucer, Newton, Tennyson, Wilberforce, Attlee, Gladstone – but it’s also jammed with great, gaudy monuments to East India Company officials and other rapacious colonial adventurers. There are over 3,000 tombs and memorials there, and while it is an honour to be buried in the Abbey, like all honours, it can be bought. Overbearing, chilly and packed to the gills with looming statuary, it feels distinctly un-English, but then there is, perhaps, nowhere more English than Westminster Abbey.
It’s £27 for a ticket – a lot! – but there is no probably no better time of year to go than now. And you can read up on the tombs and the history of the Abbey with Miranda Carter’s superb piece here, which served as the inspiration for our own little pilgrimage last week.
Madame de Pompadour’s Fan
Has there ever been a really good exposé of the inner workings of reality TV shows? We only say this because we’re slightly baffled by the glowing notices that The Traitors has been receiving. Surely the other contestants are aware who the ‘traitors’ are, given that they are filming in a castle in the Scottish Highlands? Must be quite tricky for the runners to manage? Or is everyone just sitting pretty having signed some watertight NDAs?
There is a lot of excellent television on at the moment – almost too much. We particularly recommend the new Marie Antoinette, which is on iPlayer. You would have thought the French would be a bit handier with the period dramas, given their predilection for costumes, and they’ve really come through with this one. It’s a brilliant ensemble cast, with James Purefoy superb as King Louis XV, and Gaia Weiss a resplendent Madame du Barry. It’s sexy without stretching the boundaries of taste, and it’s funny without trying too hard. And it’s also quite undemanding to watch, which is always a good thing for television to be. A strong recommend from us.
A Farewell to Whimsy
It’s a new year, and with a new year comes a new Fence – well, not quite, but we do have sharper ambitions for 2023, and we want to imbue our issues with a bit more bite than last year. See, while we have had some wonderful, whimsical pieces in our pages (Michelle Taylor’s ode to her beloved cat, Orlando; or Misti Traya’s tale of marmalade obsession in the last issue, to name but two), we have entered the year with a serious urge to give out more kickings.
Across Facts and Features, we’re seeking more pugnacity, more grit; we want writers who are not only experts in their subject matter, but experts in the art of the cutting aside or the diagnosis of rank hypocrisy. Think of James Waddell’s excoriation of the Institute of Art and Ideas from Issue 12, or Harriet Rix’s drubbing of the rewilders. The shining example of the genre exists in our back catalogue, way back in Issue 3, where our anonymous mole in Broadcasting House laid bare the laziness and cynicism of Westminster punditry.
Don’t worry too much, we’re not fully putting on our big boy trousers: the magazine will continue to be footloose and fancy-free where it calls for it, but it’s high time we started leaving a few more black eyes on the unchallenged forces in British society that, let’s be honest, deserve it. If you think you’ve got the chops, then fire over your best to editorial@the-fence.com, and we’ll get to work.
Fill Your Boots
Thank you to everyone who helped us smash our 2,000 subscriber goal. Now, there have been a number of people asking for complimentary magazines recently. Please don’t do this.
We are working very hard to provide high quality journalism at low value in a competitive marketplace, and to do so with general goodwill to all people at all times (except for prominent members of the rewilding community).
If you would like to help us keep growing the project, then please do consider a subscription at £30 – it’s only £3 more than a one-hour tour among the tombs of Westminster Abbey, and a lot more cheerful. Subscribe today.
World of Nepo
We’re finally doing it. After six weeks of sheltering, waiting for the storm to pass over us as it tore the December discourse asunder, we are now, at long last, able to tackle the whole ‘nepo baby’ furore – or, as it was known before, the media-entertainment complex under which we have all lived our entire lives.
It was no revelation to us, or to you, or to just about anyone, that the children of famous people have quite often benefited from their parent’s success in ways that end up turbocharging their own personal ambitions of fame. We might add that the current formulation of ‘nepo baby’ favoured by our American cousins seems predicated on the acting or musical success of those children whose parents were themselves actors and musicians. Perhaps the reason this seems a clumsy fit in a British context, is that this would seem very much like missing the wood for the trees of entrenched privilege.
The past few decades of British life have all but shuttered access to the arts for anyone not born into significant wealth. In a world where making it as an actor, for example, means having enough material resources to live in London without having to work a full-time job – i.e. the richest of the rich – the existence of showbiz dynasties seems almost quaint. To put it another way; does one get a more vertiginous slump in the stomach upon learning the parentage of a Jared Harris or a Domhnall Gleason, or upon discovering that Daisy Edgar Jones’s dad produced Big Brother?
But what we mustn’t forget is that nepotism is just one component in the heady brew of unearned privilege; people find their own niche lubricants in which to better scale the greasy pole from all manner of sources, from incessant Twitter logrolling to boys’ school Good Sportism to the unceasing power of the Home Counties girlboss networks that secretly rule the world.
Plus, ‘nepo baby’ is an ugly construction, six degrees too American, for cross-Atlantic usage. Let’s leave it in 2022.
In Case You Missed It
In an odd move, The Fence’s Features Editor, Séamas O’Reilly bought one of the AI generated bootlegs of his excellent and award-winning memoir, and read it so you don’t have to.
At LitHub, Will Catchcart explores his time in war-torn Ukraine through the cheery lens of Cormac McCarthy.
Sophia Jones pens an extraordinary investigation into the Serbian trance DJ suspected of being one of Arkan’s Tigers, and the subject of one of the Balkan war’s most infamous and indelible images.
For Granta, John Niven shares a bracingly poignant extract from his forthcoming memoir.
VICE’s Becky Ferreira chimes in with the best rundown of the achievements of Ben Bacon, the amateur archaeologist who may have made one of the most seismic discoveries in the history of prehistoric study.
And Finally
It was with the greatest sadness that we received news of the passing of the late, great Gianluca Vialli, and that’s speaking as a publication that is in every way opposed to the institution that is Chelsea Football Club (a point that’s important to underline every time it comes up). Vialli was magic; a bright light of continental verve among the dour bad-times of the nineties Premiership, coming to our league as a gently fading force but still with enough sparkle in his boots to bring the game to life.
He arrived to a nation that was primed for a dose of Italian flair, after years of mooning at the glamour of Serie A through Channel 4’s Football Italia, as communed through the wit and charm of Britain’s greatest sports broadcaster, James Richardson. Vialli’s Chelsea – first as player, then as player-manager, then as manager – were an undeniably charming side, a strange little halfway house full of urbane smoothies like Graeme Le Saux and Frank Leboeuf, playing alongside grizzly little tyros like the snarling Dennis Wise.
It was Vialli who acted as a bridge to the new millennium for both Chelsea and the rapidly internationalising league, and the fact that he did all that he did in his mid-thirties makes his achievements all the more impressive. We leave it to James Richardson, in this moving obituary, to have the last word on the man and his impact. Arrivederci, Gianluca.
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And there we have it, the first newsletter of the year thoroughly bagged and tagged for your reading pleasure. As ever, if you have any questions, queries, or problems with the delivery of your last issue, drop us a line and we’ll get back to you with whatever needs resolving. Of course, if the problem with your last issue was that you didn’t sign up to receive it, then that’s very easily resolvable: click the link below, and get yourself subscribed for 2023. Until next week, that’s everything from us.
All the best,
TF
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