Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter with a heart of gold. Issue 23 looms large – it will be landing in the first week of April, and we have our first announcement upon it today. Issue 22 is sold out in nearly every stockists, which is heartening news, unless you didn’t bag a copy.
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To business. Today we’ve got a survey of the life and times of Gyles Brandreth, a celebration of Danny Dyer, but first, let’s pick up where we left off.
Turn Left by the Hanging Tree
Have we helped stoke a culture war? After last week’s reportage from Hampstead Heath, it seems that every single publication in the country has dispatched a journalist to do some gumshoe work at the Fuck Tree. One reporter even rung up a member of our editorial staff for comment, and when asked if there was anyone there, replied ‘No, but there is someone from the MailOnline skulking around the car park.’
Bron Maher’s original piece on London’s oldest cruising ground, published all the way back in Issue 17, still reads beautifully today, and is far from the only piece we’ve published on the Heath. If you’re a journalist, looking to this mail-out for inspiration, do have a look at Isobel Thompson’s feature from that same issue, on the community of Travelling Showmen living on the Vale of Health (note for framing: it is also genuinely a ‘battle’ of some decades standing, with extensive documentation, unlike what is happening around Jack Straw’s Castle).
Midnight Request Line
As stated above, we are just wrapping up the finalities on Issue 23, but, workhorses that we are, we are already looking ahead to the future. As such we’re hungry – starving even – for more pitches. Recently we’ve had some excellent pitches which have translated themselves to a run of excellent pieces: from Gary Grimes writing about his tweenage double life in the depths of the Big Brother forums, Bethany Elliott inserting herself in the bizarro world of people who dress up as serial killers and Michael Holden taking a bad trip to Monopoly Lifesized. Now we want more. If you have an idea for us, please check out our helpful pitch guide here, and get in touch with us directly editorial@the-fence.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
Howay The Boys
We are delighted to announce that we will be publishing an extract of Leo Robson's forthcoming debut novel, The Boys, as our fiction offering for Issue 23. Leo has written for the London Review of Books, New York Times, New Yorker and New York Review of Books, and now is an editor at the Literary Review. His book is a generational romp through London, set in the steamy midst of the London 2012 Olympics. It's very interesting and sexy, and since The Fence is also – people have said this – interesting and sexy, we decided we must have it.
The Boys will be released on 8th May 2025, and you can pre-order your copy here.
A Failure to Convalesce
Five years since the pandemic, many of us have chosen to forget – or ignore – the terrible legacy that it wrought. There are millions of people suffering with Long COVID in this country, including tens of thousands of young people, invalided at home, cared for by others and desperately trying to recover and rejoin the workforce.
Ted Monroe was a teacher at a school in north London, and is now in bed for 20 hours a day. He writes here of ‘the profane blend of Puritanism and Paltrowism’ to which he must now bend. It’s a deeply moving piece.
The Gyles Files
Gyles Brandreth needs a long read. No, in fact, he needs more. Brandreth has lived a life worthy of one of those doorstopper multi-volume biographies. The sort they give to Wagner or LBJ or Hitler. Until that day when Weidenfeld and Nicholson come a-knocking, we shall have to make do with this survey of Brandreth’s career. What has defined it is an absolutely unquenchable thirst for attention. We do not exaggerate when we say that there is literally nothing that Brandreth wouldn’t do to get some sort of social cache or, even better, collect an anecdote in order to then repeat it. If the Queen Mother had told Brandreth to eat a dog turd, he would have done so, in order to be able to tell people that the Queen Mother once told him to eat a dog turd.
As such Brandreth has produced his own economy – both in terms of truth, and in terms of the jobs that he has done to satisfy his craving for being talked about. He started early. He was known as an arch-joiner-upper whilst an undergraduate at Oxford. There, his contemporary Christopher Hitchens produced perhaps the most effective short character assassination of the man Brandreth was and would continue to be: ‘he wore a cloak’.
From Oxford he went from being a staple of daytime TV – as in this excruciating clip with Gary Glitter – to Member of Parliament, where he basically invented the destination wedding with a Private Member’s Bill which became the 1994 Marriage Act. He also served on what was undoubtedly the ultimate nightmare blunt rotation made flesh: Lord Longford’s sex commission, where he, Mary Whitehouse, Cliff Richard and Longford went to leaf through the reams of hardcore pornographic material available in the sex shops of 1980s Copenhagen. After being part of the great cull of Tories in 1997, Brandreth has been, inter alia, a knitwear entrepreneur, global Scrabble champion, pseudo-academic, puzzle compiler, bestselling author, the caretaker of a teddy bear museum, royal commentator, podcaster, lipogrammic Shakespeare rewriter and, once again, a staple of daytime TV. There are now multiple generations of Brits who have no idea what a Brandreth-free world looks or sounds like. He is a microplastic of popular culture: he is literally everywhere.
This has escalated as Brandreth marches through his seventies. He has been blessed to be alive at the dawn of the social media age, revelling in the only real platforms capable of sating his lust for being noticed. He became a self-appointed public health message when he produced this profoundly traumatic video with Judi Dench at the start of the pandemic and in which he de-eroticised the word ‘pussy’ forever. See also Brandreth’s horrifying flirtathon with Joanna Lumley on the subject of cold baked beans, the recreation of which has become a TikTok trend. Here is the totemic weirdness of Brandreth laid bare – nobody else can straddle the dual experiences of being a junior minister in the Major administration and a TikTok meme. So he remains uncancellable, shameless and omnipresent: a reminder that this is Brandreth’s world, and we are merely living in it.
All Adventurous Women Do
This past weekend was the pinnacle of the calendar year, International Women's Day. In celebration of this, we have collated some of the best and brightest tributes to women and all that they do, posted on the internet for all to see.
We begin with a special shout out to Sir Keir Starmer, who shared a touching albeit Partridge-esque Instagram post in which he wrote a letter to his daughter. ‘It's for you, and your generation, that I do this job,’ wrote Sir Keir to his 13-year-old daughter. ‘To make sure your skills and talents determine how far you go, not your gender.’ 13 is the age at which you want all your mates at school to see this kind of posting from your parents, famously, so surely she loved this.
Sir Keir was joined by the staunch feminists at Wellington College, who posted an inspiring video featuring their students, dressed in army fatigues, flexing their muscles in front of their bucolic school grounds and saying ‘I'm a feminist!’
Thank you to all those brave enough to post. If you've seen a more egregious example, please do email us editorial@the-fence.com to let us know.
In Case You Missed It
48 years after his death, the Sunday Times have finally solved the murder of their reporter, David Holden.
Another cloak and dagger slammer, as we go up close and personal with Jan Marsalek’s bonkers Bulgarian spy ring.
A Milton for all Seasons: Catherine Nicholson reviews Orlando Reade’s new book on Paradise Lost.
Antonia Hitchens reports from CPAC.
A bracing work of criticism from Namwali Serpell, on the ‘new literalism’ undoing this year’s Oscar-winning films.
And Finally
Everyone likes having a pop at Danny Dyer – we’ve even been guilty of it ourselves – but there is something a little bit ‘off’, you might say, about his anointment as a national treasure now that he’s making cosy daytime entertainment for Auntie. Canning Town’s finest has been a one-man band of ribaldry and honesty for almost 30 years. Highlights include Human Traffic, his time as Harold Pinter’s protégé and this video from a live DJ set at Tottenham’s Opera House:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4-CcJBYBns
There was a time in the mid-noughties when Dyer was inescapable: as a leading man in Brit flicks, on television – with Danny Dyer’s Hardest Men – and in his capacity as a dating columnist for Zoo magazine.
In the TV show, Dyer travels the length and breadth of the country, meeting Britain’s leading psychopaths for an hour of bullshit and banter. But the leading example of this sadly defunct format comes courtesy of Donal McIntyre, when the Irish investigative journalist met Brian ‘The Taxman’ Cockerill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMDa9R4Qyxo
If you haven’t seen this before, then we feel happy for you – it’s truly one of the greatest uploads on YouTube. Somehow, Brian is still with us, and has a shared Instagram account with his partner Emma, where she advertises her work as a beautician, a service Brian seems to have been benefiting from: a perfect Teesside relationship.
That’s it for this week. We’ll be back again next Tuesday with more gossip, tips, links and investigations. If you enjoyed yourself, do drop a ‘like’ below, and if you’d like to speak to us about any subject – great or small – then drop us a line at editorial@the-fence.com. Until the next time.
All the best,
TF