Dear Readers,
Welcome to this year’s final outing of Off The Fence, our fortnightly propaganda-slash-newsletter arm. We have featurettes on Mukesh Ambani and Netflix, Titania McGrath’s humourless futility, the best prank of the year and Martin Scorsese’s British connections. But first to Lancashire, where a member of our editorial team visited the clergymen at the heart of this report.
A Letter from Burnley
It’s the weekend before Christmas, and I’m getting into a car with Pastor Mick Fleming. Am I going to interview people? Am I going to ask them questions? No, I reply. I just want to follow him around for a couple of hours. I want to see what he experiences daily. We move presents and long-lasting essentials round to the back, so I can sit in the front with him. I have four boxes of Celebrations jammed up against my knee, but that’s not a problem, as we drive off together down the steep hill outside St Matthew’s Church.
To drive through Burnley is not a step back in time, but it’s certainly a vision of an England cut off from the present. The houses are built two up and two down, and spray across the town, as we wait at the traffic lights. Pastor Mick runs Church on the Streets (COTS) which was set up to help those suffering from homelessness and addiction in his hometown, but after the pandemic arrived in March, the level of need was amplified in Burnley. People on zero-hours contracts suddenly became unemployed. Landlords and loan sharks pushed debtors over the edge. In partnership with Father Alex Frost of St Matthew's Church, Pastor Mick is keeping his flock from starvation.
We drive round to our first visit, where the family are waiting for us. A mother in her forties and a girl who looks no more than 14 are waiting for us. We unload parcels of food and presents to the door. They are happy to see Mick, because their faces are white with hunger.
We drive away. Mick tells me that the father is working, but on a farm outside of town, and for an 80-year-old boss, who can’t leave the house to get money to pay his workers, because he’s scared of getting coronavirus. ‘They have ten kids themselves,’ Mick tells me. ‘And see that girl, she’s got a baby daughter, too.’
Mick’s phone is ringing the whole time. He tells me that he’s been doing this seven days a week, and that today is exceptional: he usually gets at least 50 calls by lunch. We drive through the town to our next destination, another house down an unremarkable street. We ring the door, and a woman answers it, and again we unload presents as Mick chats warmly to her.
‘She a nice lady, but her husband is an addict, and they’ve got two kids and a grandchild all living there. She’s working two jobs to keep it all going.’ Mick and I are talking about drug use in Burnley. Like the rest of Britain, problems stem from the normalisation of cocaine abuse, which then leads to crack and heroin addiction. This was what happened to Mick before he got clean. ‘I was in rehab, and so desperate for some sort of fix, right, that I snorted a coffee. The nurse looks at me and goes “Mick, what you doing: that’s decaf.” That was when I hit rock bottom.’
I really like Mick, and I really like Burnley. As I walked through the town trying to find my bearings on my iPhone, people would come up to me and ask if I knew where I was going. It’s known as the friendliest town in England for good reason, and watching the locals unload shopping bags at the foodbank earlier, it’s obvious that this proud town is doing all it can to help its own. A town of only 72,000 with a Premier League football club, everyone walks to Turf Moor to watch Sean Dyche’s team battle it out with Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal.
‘The situation could be fixed easy,’ Mick tells me. ‘Social housing is a problem. If it was changed then you wouldn’t see all these coming to me.’ We’re driving through Padiham now, the posher bit of Burnley, with wind turbines dotting the moors all around us. We stop off at a house, where a woman who called us earlier is waiting for us. Her boyfriend has been beating her up and has now left her. The door is broken, probably by the boyfriend. I walk inside with some boxes. The house is cutely decorated, with incense candles and potted plants. The woman has two children to look after. Now, without her violent partner, she has no means of support. She thanks Mick and tells him, ‘When I’m back on my feet, I’ll come find you and help out’.
Mick drives me back to the Premier Inn. His wife is in treatment for late-stage cancer, and Saturday afternoon is the only time they can spend together. The government has abandoned the poor of Burnley, and they have nobody else left to turn to except for Pastor Mick and the church.
***
We have raised £6,500 for St Matthew’s, Burnley, to provide food for the months ahead, and also to provide professional mental health support, which Father Frost is very keen to supply to his parishioners. We have £3,500 left to raise. Please do give generously to those who are desperately in need this Christmas.
Ha! Ha! Ha.
Andrew Doyle is the mind behind Titania McGrath, the ‘woke’ activist Twitter account. He’s written a long essay about being ‘kicked out of the comedy club’ for blowing against the prevailing liberal norms. As expected, it’s a peerless exercise in self-pity. Regarding Titania, there is really little to add apart from quote TF pin-up, Peter Hitchens, who asked ‘is it for anyone apart from the Spikedonline mutual support community? That’s what I’m interested in knowing.’
But on the subject of Andrew Doyle, it is pretty funny that he draws on the wisdom of Norman Douglas, noted paedophile, to delineate the rules of ‘gentlemanly conduct’ within his navel-gazing piece. As most people surely must know by now, ‘woke’ is a term originating in African-American political thought; but ‘wokeists’ are, by and large, young white people using social activism as a vehicle to explore their own particular relationship with privilege. And yes, they do deserve to get a good bashing from time to time. But if Andrew Doyle lived for another 1,000 years, he could never improve upon this cacklingly funny slice of improv.
Horse Soldiers
The Intercept is one of the most underrated media outfits. They have just published an excoriating investigation into the CIA’s deployment of death squads in Afghanistan, which you would think would have made a bigger splash, but there we are. Anyway, that baleful war has now entered its twentieth year, and we still know so little about what is really going on there. In November 2001, there arose an extraordinary series of events. A group of Taliban prisoners were being interrogated by members of the CIA’s Special Activities Division at a fort called Qala-i-Jangi, only to kill one of them and take over the armoury and launch a rebellion which was then brutally put down by Allied forces and the Northern Alliance. A group of journalists were there to witness the battle, and this astonishingly underviewed documentary records it all. The interrogation of John Walker Lindh? Footage of the SBS riding into battle? The rank futility of war has never been captured so immediately on film.
Tender is the Touch
A late contender for article of the year from Megan Nolan, who writes of the time-honoured passage of Europeans travelling to New York and having a... good time. The pandemic has encouraged a moral puritanism, Nolan says, which has made for those of us who have spent the year alone.
Of course, it’s been a tougher time for many other people, but we can vouch for how onerous the year has been for those of us locked at our desks for most of this year, with only emails and Twitter notifications for company. You can’t practice journalism this way. And you can’t live life like this, dredged of joy. Here’s to the pandemic ending by April.
Bombay Dreams
Here’s what happens at Netflix or Amazon. A famous sports team will call them up and offer untrammelled access, 24/7. So we get All or Nothing: Manchester City, which follows the oil-soaked fortunes of the Sky Blues, or Anelka: Misunderstood, where perhaps the most widely-loathed footballer of recent years tries to resculpt his past from his Dubai bolthole. Given the subjects of the interview are uniformly rich and powerful (and obviously have final cut approval), it has created a new, lurid form of hagiography, albeit one laced with unscripted ironies.
Cricket Fever: Mumbai Indians perhaps marks the apogee of this genre. The Mumbai Indians (MI) are owned by the most powerful man in India, Mukesh Ambani. Having diversified his father’s industrial empire into tech and communications, Ambani is infamous for building the world’s most expensive home, Antilla, a skyscraper that was built on land that used to house an orphanage. Valued at $2.2 billion, Antilla houses just six people: the Ambani family (and, of course, a retinue of servants).
Since the inception of the Indian Premier League in 2008, MI’s unending resources mean that they regularly end up as champions. Their team is made up of local-boys-done-good, and also journeyman professionals from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and so on. Taking over the management of the team from his mother, the eight-part series follows Akash, the heir to the Ambani throne. Like many children of the super-rich, Akash possesses a certain gawky unease, and while the program offers an interesting study of globalisation and the rise of India, it also offers a beautiful portrait of the gaudy stupidity of the billionaire class.
This is perfectly witnessed in episode two. As results start to go against MI, Akash feels that it is time for a team-building exercise that might do wonders for the lads. A slap-up dinner? A night on the town? No. He invites the whole squad round to his 173-metre home and organises a treasure hunt, with popcorn as a treat afterwards. Just what every 20-year-old sportsman likes to do.
We Know Where We’re Going!
Some old-fashioned heresy from the Beeb, as they update Powell & Pressburger’s classic Black Narcissus for the Christmas television schedules. Well, there have been mixed reviews, because it’s pretty hard to improve on perfection. Here at The Fence, we are longstanding fans of P & P’s high romantic style, of their ingenious, witty scripts that are unlike anything else ever realised in English cinema (and to be honest, so are loads of people, especially those of consequence, check any director’s recommendations or BFI top 100 list).
What is less known is that Powell and Pressburger’s bravura output languished in obscurity throughout the 60s and 70s, and that their name and their work was quite literally restored by Martin Scorcese. There’s a fantastic programme you can watch here, where the Goodfellas auteur expounds on his love for The Red Shoes, with Michael Powell chuckling by his side.
The Handiwork of Wisdom
We’re delighted to announce that Séamas O’Reilly will be joining TF’s writing squad from January on a part-time basis. He has written for us in every issue save for the last, and his finest hour for us has been his pitch-perfect parody of Flann O Brien, Westminster correspondent.
Séamas has a column in the Observer and the Irish Times, and has a book out with Fleet this year, entitled Did Ye Hear Mammy Died. He writes about growing up on the Irish border with his ten siblings in this moving long-read here. Séamas will be writing, commissioning and editing with us. And we’re honoured to have him.
Spawn of Wetherspoon
The funniest article of 2020? It’s no contest. Clive Martin was the Lionel Messi of the gag-read from 2010-2015, firing on all topics from Americans and rave music to the decline of English masculinity. He’s not heard about much these days, which made his entry into ‘the discourse’ this year all the weightier.
Tim Martin is the boss of Wetherspoons, the cut-price pub-chain. And Martin is a Brexiteer of the most groan-inducing sort. So, Clive Martin (no relation) pretended to be his son on Twitter. Cue pandemonium, as a five-way pile-on ensued on the latest example of rank media nepotism. Except for it was a lie.
Martin (Clive) writes very perceptively of what it shows that people were so keen to believe that he was the son of Martin (Tim), despite being a relatively well-known media personality. What it really displayed was the stupidity of what passes as commentary these days: of how people who like to bill themselves as holding ‘journalists to account’ can’t even bother to perform the most rudimentary fact-checking. But also, just very very funny!: ‘How do you think I felt when people used to call me ‘Curry Club’ and ‘the guest ale’ when I started on the Telegraph culture desk?’
***
That’s that for this damned year. As ever, you can get in touch with us by responding to this email. We’re working by Zoom to bring you the next issue by the end March, by which time normality might, we pray, be back with us. In the meantime, please do give what you can to our Christmas appeal.
All the best,
TF
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