Good Evening,
Welcome to this year’s penultimate iteration of Off The Fence, the fortnightly newsletter-slash-propaganda-arm of our quarterly magazine. Issue 6 is arriving fresh from the printers next week, so if the idea of getting two pieces of post from a quarterly magazine gives you a thrill, then subscribe today.
Today we’re looking at the institutional arm of the royal family, the death of youth-led media and our memories of crunching central defender Martin Keown. Plus, juicy gossip from the literary world, a word on the Substack wars and a few lingering questions about the Booker Prize.
Who’s Going to Play Jeffrey Epstein?
There’s something about the royal family that makes the world abandon its critical faculties. The same is true of glossy period dramas, whose frilly hemlines and high ceilings can break down the defences of hardened cynics. All of which brings us to The Crown. The producers have done one thing well; they have set the meat of the action in private stately homes that aren’t open to the public. Who cares about the sub-soap opera dialogue and pantomime acting when there’s a Titian on the back wall?
A lesser known fact about the Windsor family – or the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, as we prefer to call them – is the quality of the courtiers they have at their disposal. In 2017 Simon Case went from Director General, Northern Ireland to Prince William’s Private Secretary (from cogitating on paramilitaries to organising ski-trips to Courchevel, if you will). Prince Charles’ secretary, Clive Alderton, left a 20-year career in the Foreign Office for Clarence House. And the Queen’s Private Secretary from 2007-2017, Christopher Geidt, has certainly enjoyed an all-action career, too.
These are all people of the highest capabilities, spending the peak of their careers in service of a family who are not... renowned for their intellect. These appointments seem to have been worth the money. In the last decade, as the country shuddered under austerity, the Crown was granted a larger slice of the civil list. Prince William has access to state secrets. Buckingham Palace is being refurbished at vast expense.
It’s all well and good saying we live in a constitutional monarchy. But it would be nice to at least try it one day.
Major Malfunction
James Hewitt, the military officer and former lover of Princess Diana, is locked in a house with four women. Three of these women have boyfriends. One of them is single. They are each trying to trick James Hewitt into thinking they are single, for a £10,000 prize. What lengths will they go to in order to secure the cash? The three boyfriends are watching everything that happens, together, in a room, on camera.
This may sound like an episode of Black Mirror, but it actually happened. Fool Around with James Hewitt was broadcast in 2005, and well, it’s everything you would expect and more. We look forward to seeing this classic slice of reality TV feature in Season 6 of The Crown as a spooky, self-referential subplot.
Stigs and Stones
In Off the Fence 6, we reported on the round of lay-offs that followed a decline in standards at the TLS during the mismanaged tenure of radio host and boring tweeter Stig Abell.
We weren’t the only ones who felt the paper was going down the tubes. Word came to us recently of one well-known writer telling their editor of many years that they couldn’t, in good conscience, continue writing for the paper during the Abell regime.
The individual in question? Former TLS editor, Ferdinand Mount.
York Way, We Hardly Knew Ye
Are the culture wars still on? If so: the columnist Suzanne Moore has published a 7,000 word essay on Unherd about her decision to leave the Guardian. She certainly digs up some choice anecdotes – Seumas Milne reprinting a sermon by Osama bin Laden is our personal favourite. But we were intrigued by her portrayal of the late-80s mediascape, which she paints as the province of haughty public schoolboys tottering off to El Vino.
Really? Go back 30 years and you had the NME enjoying a circulation of a million. They had Stuart Maconie, Julie Burchill and David Quantick on the books. The magazine was feared and respected by the music industry and read up and down the country. The Face Mk. 1, the iconic style Bible, edited by the thirty-something Nick Logan. Time Out was shedding its radical roots, but still publishing ground-breaking investigative journalism. Melody Maker, with Simon Reynolds to the fore, was documenting leftfield music from across the Atlantic, and i-D was covering things a bit closer to home.
Not only did all these magazines commission young writers, but they were also run by them, too. Today, it’s different. There are some new models – like Vice and gal-dem – but the change in media landscape is palpably different. Venerable publications like the LRB, Private Eye and the Times certainly feature work by young names. But the editors at the top level are of a certain generation.
And here, at The Fence, we have writers – big, bold-type names with book deals and all the rest of it – always looking for work. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for Suzanne. Indeed, we hear that she left the Guardian partly because she was offered more money by a large right-leaning newspaper. But freedom of speech, and so on.
The Mayor of Normal
A Texan multi-millionaire-turned-‘DJ’ by the name of Taylor McWilliams has bought Brixton Markets and is attempting to renovate the area to line his own pockets. In Issue 4, we covered his tone-deaf failure to evict the beloved foodie shop Nour. Unfortunately, he has now received planning permission to build a 20-story office tower in Brixton. Needless to say, this is very much against the wishes of the local community. There was some light graffiti on the matter.
You would have thought that the Mayor of Lambeth, a former Labour councillor called Phillip Normal, would be campaigning against this cut-and-dry case of landlordism. But no. His response? To make a t-shirt mocking the protestors. Available for £15 only.
We Want Martin Keown!
Jeremy Paxman is an intellectual heavyweight, if you think sneering at poorly-briefed junior ministers on a television show makes for bold and invigorating thinking. Well, he’s back in the news. Speaking to the Times, he called his interviewer an ‘imbecile’. Classic Paxman! A friend of The Fence told us the following story which we’d like to share.
‘It was 2002, and I was a 13-year-old, football-crazed boy. At our school, there was one very famous parent, who all the pupils were obsessed by. It was the Arsenal and England centre back Martin Keown. We never saw him because he was busy smashing up strikers up and down the country. In assembly one morning, the headmaster announced that “A person you will all recognise will be attending parents’ evening tonight. You are to treat them as you would any parent. You are not to bother them.”
‘We were pretty damn fired-up after that. Our hero Martin Keown would be there that evening, walking across the playground where we imitated his teammates everyday. The plan was set. We would wait until 6 o’clock, we would wait to see Martin Keown, the towering defender we saw on the television every weekend. And so we waited by the gym, as parents drifted past us, marker pens in our pocket and with Arsenal ephemera stuffed in a cricket bag. But by 6:15, we still didn’t have eyes on Keown. Where was he?
At that point, an elderly guy pushed past us. I sort of recognised him from that boring show my parents watched at night. A friend of mine said, “Oh look that’s Jeremy Paxman”. And so it was. It was Jeremy Paxman we had been eagerly waiting to sign our footballs. Looking back, I reckon the headmaster put us up to it. He was a good teacher with a dry sense of humour. But he didn’t suffer fools gladly.”
’Tis the Season...
The Fence recommends Kaitlin Phillips’ gift guide, the perfect way to see what your favourite Twitter Americans are getting their loved ones. Christian Lorentzen recommends a Mikhail Gorbachev shower curtain, ‘for the Gen X-er in your life.’
...To Be Completely Terrified
We admit we are suckers for extreme sports, life-threatening pursuits that are funded to act as a promotional vehicle for energy drinks. In this clip, pro surfer Kai Lenny gets mauled by a set of 30-foot waves off the coast of Portugal. The worst part is when he stops shouting for help. Look and despair.
Garlands of Praise
Congratulations, then, to Douglas Stuart, for winning the Booker for Shuggie Bain. And we mean that: it’s a great book. The laurels are richly deserved. Yet, we would like to inquire upon one small thing. Did that draft really take 32 rejections before being accepted by the small and unknown house of Picador? In this interview, Stuart says that his agent told him it was only 20 at first, before giving him the true number when it was finally picked up.
Stuart’s agent, Lucy Luck of Conville & Walsh, numbers Roddy Doyle, Garth Greenwell and Ben Lerner among her roster, who are all pretty damn famous as these things go. (By comparison, the original version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was knocked back 12 times by publishing houses. But it came from a small-time agent: Christopher Little.)
No publishing house will admit, even privately, to having turned down a Booker-winner. But it certainly makes for a good story.
Stacking the Cash
Writers are leaving the newsroom and heading towards Substack, the trendy newsletter platform that is giving voice to marginalised writers and (enriching bold-face ones too). There’s a good feature you can read here , if you’re interested in the comings and goings of the mediaworld. Our own view is that big-name newsletters feel tinged with narcissism and COVID-era sadness. We’re not rooting for the return of the commute, but we are certainly keen to get back to meeting each other and writing jokes together again. There’s something inherently sad – we speak as experts in the matter – about typing out your view of the world all alone from your bedroom.
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And that’s the lot for this week. We’ll be back a fortnight hence with another round of featurettes, gossip and an absolute slammer of an investigation to end the year with. As always, you can get in touch with us by responding to this email,
All the best,
TF
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