Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once again and welcome to Off The Fence, the digestible free weekly digest that pairs so elegantly with the UK’s Only Magazine. And you might’ve heard – from this newsletter, from our socials, or from the neighbours who love to leaf through your post – that we have a new edition wending its way to our subscribers. Looking more gorgeous than any edition prior (and that’s saying something), Issue 15 is our best, brightest and boldest effort yet.
Our cover story is Clive Martin’s scabrous exposé on the horrors that fashion inflicts on its workers – a story we can say with confidence that no other publication would have the stones to run, lest they lose their ad sales with Versace. Alongside this, we have a dispatch from a cult-owned deli in Devon, a profile of Soho’s hottest new poster boy, and a great many other pieces from the finest writing roster on God’s green earth: one of which we’ll talk about further down the newsletter. But while we’ve got you, now would be a brilliant time to sign up and get your copy.
A year’s subscription is only £30, postage and packing included, for four issues of the best thing going today, delivered in sparkling form through your letterbox at the turning of each season. Get on board without delay – it’s the best thirty quid you’ll spend this year, we promise. And if you sign up today, we’ll even throw in a copy of Issue 13, and a pdf of the sold-out Issue 12. SIX (6) magazines, all yours.
Now, some news. This year we’ve caught the bug for collaboration, with even greater ferocity than ever before. Fresh off a 2022 that saw us partner up with Dirt, Vittles, Delayed Gratification and Harper’s, we’ve been laying plans to bring a whole new set of exciting publications to you, and in turn, to introduce ourselves to thousands more readers across the world.
First up, we’re delighted to announce that we’re now working with our very good friends at the Liverpool Post: a publication we have admired for a very long time. The Post is something that Liverpool, and regional media, has gone without for far too long – actual, rigorous journalism sensitive to the issues on the ground, written and edited excellently by thoughtful young talents, outside of the grind of the Reach plc machine. To pick but one example, their profile of beleaguered ex-mayor Joe Anderson was one of the best bits of local politics coverage published anywhere in years.
We’ll be running one of the jewels of the latest issue – Josh Mcloughlin’s treatise on the slippery definition of Scouseness – with Post subscribers this weekend, who will have the opportunity to win a gallery-grade print of Paul Cox’s incredible accompanying map, ‘The Pride of Merseyside’. We encourage all of you to go and sign up to The Post’s weekly mailout, and read all of their back catalogue. They’re great, and we’re overjoyed to be working with them this year.
Anyway, on to the meat of the matter. This week, we have a dalliance with Tommy Wiseau, an ode to Early Doors, and a set of links to keep you sated for the rest of the working week. But before we get there, we have the small matter of the chocolate thief roaming the floors of Murdoch’s newsroom.
Choc Horror
When the email found its way to us, we couldn’t believe it. Somebody in the News Building – some abominable snack thief, some craven evening-shift scoffer, some monster – had raided the communal fridges and stolen not just any chocolate, but The World’s Most Expensive Chocolate. And the Sunday Times wants to know who’s responsible.
Naturally, in pursuit of resolving this great and cruel injustice, we circulated the email from our Twitter account with the aim of smoking out the culprit. Sunday Times columnist (and Issue 14 contributor) Charlotte Ivers was first to issue a swift denial, albeit acknowledging the reasons why she may have been considered a prime suspect; politics reporter Geri Scott received a similar profiling, as word of the theft spread through internal comms. Digital sub-editor Jessica Hayden confirmed that the search was, in fact, very real, although she too issued a denial, reaffirming her longstanding commitment to KitKats.
But away from the environs of London Bridge Street, the story took on a life of its own. Over at the Metro, deputy news editor Sian Elvin remarked on the real crime at hand: storing chocolate in the fridge. FT columnist Stephen Bush redoubled upon this, putting himself in the shoes of the person ‘slaving away to make a three hundred dollar chocolate’, only to have it chilled and ruined by a capricious desk staffer. News of the theft even went stateside, with US media chortle-harvesters, The Daily Beast, snatching our scoop and splashing it all over North America, and no doubt to the attention of Mr Murdoch himself.
We trust, from the silence now emanating from his newsrooms over the matter this morning, that the offending journo has now been compromised to a permanent end.
St Edward’s Chair
The Daily Mail’s website splashed the headline at the top of their home page with the red ‘breaking’ icon: the 94-year-old Lady Pamela Hicks has not been invited to the coronation! The announcement was made on Lady P’s daughter’s Instagram account – ‘India Hicks Style’, which has an impressive 371,000 followers, and where her mother is featured disquietingly frequently, and here she is booming away about Rastus, her Malayan honey bear. The last days of the British Raj! What a jolly old jape it was.
India Hicks, who stole a Max Mara coat three years ago, might be casting her eye towards the Lady Anne Glenconner media empire – Princess Margaret’s former lady-in-waiting has written four books in three years and has even made the Graham Norton show, all at the age of 90.
Who’s going to triumph in this duel-for-eyeballs between these two nonagenarian aristos?
Wiseau’s Peak
We asked, you answered: on Sunday evening, we promised that if we got a few late-day subs through the door, we would release the first story of Issue 15, and to our delight, several new subscriptions flooded into our little coven. So we led with one of the funniest snippets from the latest edition, Telegraph columnist Madeline Grant’s scarcely-believable account of a day spent traipsing around the dreaming spires of Oxford with none other than Tommy Wiseau, the auteur-star of the best bad movie ever made, The Room.
Having parlayed her dorm-room obsession with the film into an unlikely 48 hour friendship, Grant soon found herself accompanying Wiseau around the city as he terrified children and marvelled at the peculiarities of English life. We won’t spoil any of the gags, but you should read it as soon as possible. Now, even! Or when you’re done with this, at least.
I Don’t Know Yous But Yer All Sick
Hot on the heels of our ‘Soho Map of Cokes’, which stuffed many a stocking last Christmas, we are back in the cartography business once again, with Paul Cox’s latest masterpiece: ‘The Pride of Merseyside’ – the only map of Liverpool you will ever need. Studded with stars, landmarks, bins and Big ASDAs, it’s a marvel that would sit prettily on the wall of any self-respecting Scouser. We’re doing another print run in May, so email editorial@the-fence.com if you’d like one.
In Case You Missed It
Britain’s most consistently excellent, original and fiercely independent music publication the Quietus is facing a tough time - and they need your help.
Jörg Schindler chimes in with a withering look at post-Brexit Britain.
Mark O’Connell risks becoming the house band of Off The Fence’s links section with another typically excellent offering, this stirring and terrifying piece about the plastic in our flesh.
Ed Caesar gets two ticks for this piece on the crooks who bet on encrypted messaging and lost.
At Vulture, Joe Berkowitz pens this strikingly good oral history of Who Jackie?, the most notorious and inscrutable inside joke in American TV comedy.
And Finally
We were delighted to learn at the tail-end of last year that for the first time since its initial broadcast in 2003, the BBC would start airing reruns of the peerless Early Doors, a sitcom masterpiece on par with just about anything that Britain has produced. Set in Stockport, Early Doors is totally constrained within the walls of The Grapes, and covers the lives, loves and lagers of its landlord and regular patrons – from oddball anoraks to dried-up old sods, to corrupt coppers and swotty students.
Written with skill, care and compassion by Craig Cash and Phil Meaney (who play the hapless husbands Joe and Duffy respectively), Early Doors is a perfectly observed study of a pub, and an age, that is fading into the rear-view mirror – a time when a pub could be its own little universe, and two pints could get you change from a fiver. Thankfully, blessedly, both series are now on iPlayer for the next ten months, and you should dive back into all of them before Auntie Beeb calls last orders again. To the regiment: I wish I was there!
And that’s a wrap for this week! For subscribers, keep your eyes peeled for the postman bringing you a copy of Issue 15, and when it lands, snap a pic and send it our way, wherever you choose to read it – on a train, a plane, or a pub garden on a lazy afternoon. It makes the world of difference to our small and hard-working editorial team, and our merry band of contributors. We’ll share every single photo in next week’s newsletter.
For non-subscribers, why not subscribe! There’s plenty more where this newsletter came from: 64 pages of pure menace, four times a year, thirty pounds sterling. If you have any other questions or queries, or would like to leak us an enormous cache of classified information relating to national security, then respond to this email here and the editorial team will get back to you. Until this time next week, we must bid you adieu – goodbye, and good night.
All the best,
TF