Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that’s scaled the north face of the Eiger before lunchtime.
It’s been a busy week already for us as Issue 27 starts to get wrangled into place. But our editing hand has not been so hot that we have forgotten our sacred weekly duty, and we have many a tasty crumb for you to chew until the mag is out.
Some lovely photos continue to be sent our way and oh how they make our hearts sing so! Issue 26’s black and white cover looks wonderful against these snowy ski scenes in St Moritz and also on an icy lake in Finland. The winner of the week (but will it take the top spot?) is this beautiful cat who is perfect for this newsletter, titled such as it is.
With newsstands shuttering – alas – the easiest way to bag a mag is by subscribing straight to the source. The product is magnificent, and as for the price? It’s very reasonable.
We are also very happy to say that Capital Letter is very, very nearly at the 3,000 subscriber mark. It’s been such a pleasure to see so many of you join up and help us build this newsletter. We’re exceedingly proud of it and we think this issue – the quarter-century – is one of the best we’ve put together with dispatches from the underground rap scene and a church full of clowns. Do make sure to sign up, we’ve got a lot coming, and in the not-too-distant future, it’s going to be evolving, expanding, improving. Do sign up here.
This week, we have a burgeoning cult and the story of possibly the worst animated film ever made. But we begin with a little story about a lettuce-adjacent PM.
What’s That Nancy Sinatra Song?
Last week, we asked for stories about rude politicians. And one of you replied, informing us that Liz Truss ‘made her private secretary remove her boots while she was Foreign Secretary’ – which is a delicious anecdote indeed. Please do supply us with more via the usual channels.
Prydferth & Hyfryd
Charlotte Church seems to be getting stuck into a nice side of woo-woo, having just launched a brand new wellness retreat in Wales called ‘The Dreaming’. The social media ads are distinctly cultish; it’s not a great sign when if you open with ‘beloveds’ as a greeting. The standard packages don’t look too crazy, but some of the retreats led by Church herself look a little more involved. We were especially drawn to one which is simply called ‘Witch’. It promises ‘an enchanting five-day retreat… for 17 souls ready to embody their magic through ritual, nature, and deep witchcraft practices.’ The video package includes some pretty pictures, but it’s hard not to see it as the opening shots of Midsommar 2: Electric Boogaloo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf-wmYom3Ds
Surprisingly, it’s not too expensive. It’s certainly not cheap, but we were bracing for some insane prices. A three night stay is available for £688 per person in the cheapest room, the most expensive running at £999 (save that pound). Given this includes meals and ‘wellness activities’, we’re forced to shrug our shoulders, although if someone tried to charge you to walk around the forest surrounding the guest house you were in, you’d probably be pretty miffed. That said, perhaps this advert for their ‘work-exchange’ programme explains how they are able to offer such a bargain. As Church has apparently ‘spent her life savings’ on purchasing the property, perhaps she has some need for financially-laden idiots and a bit of free labour. Who can tell?
Justice for Joe
The lead investigation from Issue 26 is now available to read online, and what a story it is. Last summer, James Riding travelled to the West of Ireland, to walk with the family of Joe Deacy. On 13 August 2017, Joe was discovered bleeding and unconscious in a driveway in County Mayo. How he came to be there is still to be unsolved, as James reports with deep empathy. Do read the piece here.
The Bermuda Triangle
The Labour Party has been trying to set Twitter ablaze with a series of posts attacking the Green Party’s stance on drug legalisation. They have also been gleefully retweeting a Metro article which is claiming, on pretty thin gruel, that Polanski wants to teach primary school children how to take drugs ‘safely’. As funny as images of Zacky P showing some little ‘uns how to find a good vein are, their actual plans are a bit more modest.
One Labour post, however, discussing proposed plans to legalise GHB, couldn’t help but remind us of Bron Maher’s excellent piece on the use of that drug – alongside meth – in the chemsex scene in London. It’s a fascinating piece about a prominent and divisive aspect of London’s gay community, the activity of which can be quite neatly mapped in a triangle made up of Vauxhall, Stockwell and Oval. Unlike most drug discourse, Bron’s piece is clear-eyed, resists being ideological or giving into moral panic and actually talks to the people involved. It also manages to be quite funny, and certainly puts a question mark over Labour’s claim that the Greens’ plan for GHB is the same as ‘legalising roofies’.
SEND in the Clowns
In July last year, we published one of the most important stories we’ve ever put out: Jack Beaumont’s ‘The SEND School’.
The government is now, finally, wading into these waters. Initial plans to reform the broken SEND system were meant to be put forward in autumn last year, but were quickly shelved when it became clear that the policy in its previous form would prove deeply unpopular with families and MPs. The government’s done some re-thinking and a little bit of ‘preparing the ground’, and now here we are with some big shiny headlines: £4 billion invested, 90% of council SEND debts written off, poorly performing councils to be held to account.
But, as Jack’s piece suggests, the centre of the problem isn’t necessarily one of funding or debt: many of the schools were not short of cash, and yet they were still running a shoddy service. Two of the biggest issues were a complete inability (or refusal) to hire and retain enough staff, and the overreliance on specialist schools to deal with children in need of SEND services. Given that the bulk of the money is going through the same councils that have overseen this process since 2014 and into specialist schools, it’s hard to see what’s going to change. Some money is going to what is being termed ‘in-house provision’ (i.e. regular schools being able to care for children with SEND needs) but given the total £4bn sum has been called a ‘drop in the bucket’ by teachers’ unions – and the money going towards in-house provision is but a molecule of that drop – the reform looks doomed to fail.
There is even less said about the problem of staffing. The poor quality of pay, intense working environment and soul-sapping CCTV-based management style combine to make an environment that anyone would struggle to stay motivated in. On top of this, most of the staff are unable to speak out about these conditions because they fear violating their precarious work visas, something this government is certainly not going to be improving any time soon.
In Case You Missed It
Donald Trump uses a fake name to call C-SPAN.
We finally achieve clarification that the Council of Nicaea (325AD) is not subject to the control of Bedford Borough Council.
Our favourite person at the Winter Olympics.
ScotRail soft launches its retrospective support for the British Union of Fascists in a recent mock-up of a future train design.
Adam Tooze is unable to spot AI and becomes the latest ‘slopped unc’ to fall.
Curtis Sliwa – yes CURTIS SLIWA – has joined Substack to talk about his favourite dance music. What a world.
Larry David in conversation with his daughter Cazzie is the best interview we’ve read recently.
A young Willem Dafoe sings a ridiculous version of ‘The Streets of Cairo’ in a show from experimental New York theatre company, The Wooster Group.
And Finally
What was Sean Connery’s last film? If your answer was 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, we’re afraid you’re 9 years off. And if you think the answer is a rather tedious point of trivia to be left to a bad pub quiz on a Wednesday night, you’re even further from the mark. Behold, Sir Billi a Scottish CG-animated disaster of a film from 2012.
To attempt to summarise the film’s plot would be an exercise in futility. It is full of non-sequiturs, entirely random character introductions and lacks any clear reason to exist. Loosely, it’s about a man, Sir Billi (Sean Connery), and the various scrapes he and his dog-like Goat (Alan Cumming) get into while attempting to protect the identity of an escaped beaver from the Ahab-like pursuit of a local policeman, who tracks the animal for five years after the Scottish government bans the species from its borders. Indeed.
The beat-by-beat action is, if anything, more convoluted, and the terse, punchy tone of this Wikipedia summary is genuinely the best prose description we can imagine of one of the film’s many strange sequences: ‘The group retrieves Gordon, but they are distracted by a submarine. Billi gathers a group to save Gordon with a trampoline, but Gordon gets knocked out. Victoria, a pilot duck assisting with the group’s rescue [and has yet to feature in the film], throws Billi a bottle of water, which he uses to revive Gordon.’ If you’re intrigued, we offer up the trailer below, which genuinely includes the strapline – read out in that bass-boosted American trailer voice – ‘Can this octogenarian… and his goat… save the day???’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a20oRLJ4v4s
All of this was a seven-year passion project by husband and wife duo Tessa and Sascha Hartmann. Prior to Sir Billi they had made only one animated short, and somehow came to the conclusion that the story to break into the film industry was one about a skateboarding – no, we hadn’t mentioned that yet – octogenarian vet in the Scottish Highlands. Connery was brought on board via the then-chairman of Rangers Football Club, Sir David Murray. Charmed by its Scottishness and a David versus Goliath narrative about animated filmmaking, Connery signed on, bringing with him not only Cumming as the goat, but also Miriam Margolyes as Baroness Chantal McToff and Dame Shirley Bassey to sing a Bond-style theme tune for the opening credits.
The production itself was constantly beset with problems. Production members frequently left when better jobs came up; several scenes were lost in what the Hartmanns allege was an act of cybercrime or sabotage; the animators – especially the Italian ones apparently – struggled with models of the women of Cetterness, whom the Hartmanns insisted needed to have enormous breasts. Sean Connery also wanted to record all of his lines from his home in the Bahamas, perhaps aiding in some of these unbelievably crap line reads. All in all, the film cost £5 million to make.
The brutal reviews came as a shock to the Hartmanns. The screening at the Sonoma International Film Festival had apparently gone okay so when Peter Debruge dropped the first bomb in Variety – calling it a ‘woefully anaemic animated feature’ – they were stunned. To cope, a narrative was adopted that the powers that be were working against them, unable to countenance a new upstart on the scene. This had, in fact, been an idea among the core team of Connery and the Hartmanns for a while. When the Scottish Tourist Board issued a special tartan for the release of Shrek, Connery lambasted them failing to back a Scottish homebrew animation over a nasty foreign import. This anger was repeated when the Scottish Government spent £7 million on ‘maximising benefit’ to the Scottish economy from the film Brave. So when things went bad it was easy to keep on this line. Connery apparently told a tearful Tessa that, ‘the only thing that it tells me is that you’ve got a fucking great product. They’re out to get you and you’re independent. You’re a small guy, and they don’t want you in this space.’
Years later, Sascha gave it a rewatch and claims it is ‘actually, objectively OK’. We find it hard to agree, especially as the film winds to a close with a horrendous, strange, sexualised dance number. This is a sequence which includes a local woman’s aside that she’s happy to see that Billi has found someone (a younger blonde American) to give him a bit of joy in his older age, ‘even if she is a brazen lassie with a funny accent and, I dare say, an enviable chest! They don’t make them like that over here any more, do they?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NHAas8AGp0
That’s that for this week, if you enjoyed this mail-out then do buy a magazine or a tote bag from the webstore, as that’s what keeps the whole thing going. Do send general notes to editorial@the-fence.com and order enquiries to support@the-fence.com. Papa New Guinea has more indigenous languages than any other country in the world.
All the best,
TF