Dear Readers,
Good early-afternoon, and welcome once more to Off The Fence, the once-a-week digestible from the team behind the UK’s Only Magazine, of which we think needs no introduction here. (The Fence, btw). We have been in a brief, beautiful calypso period this last week where, with Issue 16 off with the printers and Issue 17 still a blip on the horizon, we’ve had time to rest, recuperate and soak up the sun that has beaten down on Britain.
Suitably refreshed, we ride again this week with only minimal admin to pass on to you lovely folk. Right up top, if you subscribe to the print magazine already, there’s a digital account on www.the-fence.com with your name on it – or, rather your email. Log in today by inputting your email and asking for a new password; once you’re signed up, you can manage your subscription from here.
We would be remiss not to encourage that, if you do not yet have a subscription of any form to our fantastic magazine, we still have some offers to pull you through the door. Access to the back catalogue, and to all future digital content, will only cost you £1.25 a month – the exact same cost as a full-size Dairy Milk Caramel bar from Sainsbury’s, and infinitely more satisfying. If you’re in the market for some sweet, sweet print, well we have that for you too: four issues a year, sixty pages each, nary a single bit of sponcon or a glossy advert, for twenty-four pounds and ninety-nine pence. We’re selling at 2019 prices here, back when we could leave our gas hobs on all day and fill our petrol tanks up for tuppence. Mug us off by signing up today.
Anyway, allons-y! We’re keeping things whip-smart today with a fun, bouncy selection of bits. We have a curmudgeonly critic, a nineties time capsule that won’t implode under extreme pressure, and a short little Glasto miscellany, but before any of that, we throw up our hands in the face of an ongoing political mystery.
Known Unknowns
There’s still a great deal we don’t know about Charlotte Owen, the woman set to become the youngest peer in British history. We should say at the outset that we mean this quite literally and will not be divulging any kompromat we’ve put our hands to here. There is, of course, all manner of scuttlebutt about what might have led a young woman in the employ of Boris Johnson to gain absurdly large – in fact, very nearly historically inconceivable – leverage within a Prime Minister’s resignation honours, but we won’t dwell on any such rumours here. For one thing, you can get that anywhere else. But also, without useful sourcing or facts, such innuendo has a tinge that’s more than a little unseemly.
Which is, of course, a problem when trying to pick apart the reasoning behind a lifetime peerage being given to someone who could be helping pass laws in this country for the next half century. So, what do we know? Diligent work from Tortoise Media has reported former Downing St co-workers saying her peerage was ‘staggering’ and that her position within Number 10 was ‘extraordinarily junior’. Reporter Catherine Neilan also revealed that several aspects of her already slight CV appear to have been embellished, that a 2011 internship for George Osborne was nothing of the sort, and the time she spent in Downing St was exaggerated, with her starting in 2022 and not 2021 as her LinkedIn claims. Meanwhile, a Whitehall source told the Observer that her appointment was ‘egregious’ and ‘impossible to defend, even as somebody who broadly thinks the current peerage system is right’.
Most recently, Saturday’s edition BBC’s Profile attempted some digging, and ended up creating something quite extraordinary; a segment in which almost nothing of substance could be discerned by any of their increasingly baffled on-mic contributors. School records unavailable. Employment history patchy and/or disputed. And an overwhelming sense among co-workers that neither her performance nor her presence were especially memorable. All usable information appears out of grasp for beleaguered presenter Mark Coles, who wearily admits that they can’t even confirm her age. (The same, incidentally, is true of former Guido hack and Johnson aide, Ross Kempsell, who was born in either 1991 or 1992. Despite being only negligibly older than Owen, it must be said that his appointment to the Lords has not faced remotely the same scrutiny).
What is notable is that even those contributors who enthused to Profile about Owen’s acumen preface their statements with telling caution. Her friend, Caroline Dineage MP, says she’ll make a great life peer, but not before saying ‘I don’t know what Boris’ motivation was for putting her on that list, that’s been speculated about by many people.’
Well, quite. In the absence of any more information, we fear that such speculation will only increase.
Critical Faculties
Last week, we published the first online story of our new era (the era of having had a new website made): Alexander Cohen’s magnificent interview with the most celebrated theatre critic of his generation, Michael Billington, the only critic to have presided over the total upending of British theatre over the last five decades. In this marvellous back-and-forth, he provides a frank assessment not only of the stage, but of the British media, and the role of a critic in modern life. Whether you’re RSC home & away or altogether agnostic toward the performing arts, it’s such an insightful and interesting piece.
This interview is just a little taste of what our online output will look like going forward. We’re hoping to provide you with even more unique insights, silly capers and scintillating essays, on our quest to truly establish ourselves as the UK’s Only Magazine. Sign up today for £1.25 a month – together we will dominate all of the newsstands.
Festen
With Glastonbury now in the rearview, we can look back with clear eyes at the latest iteration of a singularly British fascination; obsessing over Glastonbury to a manner and degree it cannot possibly bear. To some extent, the festival’s exalted position is fairly understandable. Firstly, with 210,000 punters and another few thousand staff, crew, media and artists it’s genuinely quite big. Somerset council – utilising one of those qualifiers so clumsy, you can tell it’s not quite telling the whole story —declare it ‘the largest performing arts festival in the world’, rather eliding the fact that dance music specialists Creamfields cram 70,000 people more on to their patch in rural Cheshire each time out. In terms of coverage, however, there is nothing else like it, with the BBC devoting hundreds of hours of programming on TV and radio to broadcasting, seemingly, the entire run-time of the festival.
This glut of not-entirely-voluntary public awareness, coupled with a sense that the festival’s stated values of openness and love are either a convenient fiction or a decidedly inconvenient truth, has made the festival a reliably whipping boy. So it was that the Daily Mail solemnly informed us that Glastonbury, a festival that has been raising money for CND and Amnesty International since its inception, had ‘gone woke’ for offering artisanal coffees and hosting a talk by Jolyon Maugham. A similarly unedifying derangement was detectable in the comments of Heritage Party leader David Kurten (us neither) who saw hypocrisy in the festival’s ‘Israeli-style border wall that keeps out the riff-raff who can't afford the £340 ticket.’
It's tempting to say this is little more than fear of youth, but since the median age of Glastonbury was recorded as 46 years old in 2016, even that strategy would be confused. There, are of course, levels to the Glasto experience: at the bottom end, you have the average punter, spending the best part of £1,000 to wake up every morning in a boiling tent, then at the summit of Mount Olympus, you have ethical fashion designer, Stella McCarthy, who has documented how the other half live with this backstage pass of an Instagram Reel.
But, even if you’re famous, you can get caught in the heat. As Alice Jones clocked, here’s Dominic Cooper, Gemma Chan, Billie Piper and Lily James enjoying themselves in 30-degree weather, all wearing their coats – we’re sure the cheque from Burberry was worth the sweat.
In Case You Missed It
Sarah Woolley documents the harrowing state of baby formula inflation, as Britain suffers a cost of feeding crisis.
Mark O’Connell lands another stonking piece, lending an extract from his new book formed from his conversations with Malcolm McArthur, the most notorious murder in Irish history.
As tape reclamation projects go, Jake Malooley’s account of how a long, lost Steely Dan song was recovered from its producer’s house, is a high watermark.
Lester Black brings the insane true story heat with this astounding tale of the acid-fuelled San Francisco brothel the CIA ran for eight years.
And TF features editor Séamas O’Reilly penned a charming tribute to his son’s first sports day, but the real bang-for-your-buck is in the video he uploaded of said young athlete in action.
And Finally
We have the the Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie to thank for this week’s eye-popping fumble down memory lane. No stranger to a double entendre himself – his excellent, and exquisitely titled, memoir of priestly life, Touching Cloth is available now in all good stores, and many disreputable ones – perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he spends his evenings watching this kind of sick filth, but in the case of Channel 4’s A Perfect Carry On (1998) we’re very glad he does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rwljo2mxPM
Like all such televisual capsules from the late nineties, A Perfect Carry On works as a double retrospective. Firstly, on the Carry On Films films themselves, the inane and bewilderingly iconic units of bawdry which dominated British culture for two whole decades of the mid-20th century.
But it is also, of course, a retrospective of late-90s Channel 4 at its most jarringly strange; The cheaply made format that hues archive footage to talking heads, resulting in a documentary that looks like it cost roughly the price of a tube of pringles; the tone of consensus glee, blissfully unhindered by any analysis as to why these thirty one films functioned as the only acceptable outlet for all of Britain’s horniness until the adoption of the Metric system; the choice to emblazon the featured speaker’ names in that whimsical ‘SCHOOL SUX’ typeface that Channel 4 would have used for the news back then if they had the chance.
And then, dear reader, there are the names themselves.
Janet Street-Porter appears, of course, since failing to include her in any pop cultural salon during this period was, according to broadcasting union rules, punishable by death. Another omnipresent visitor from Planet 1998 comes in the form of Dale Winton, who is kind enough to pitch his own Carry On film set in the ‘we’re laughing already’ milieu of car boot sales. But where else would you find Malcolm Bradbury straightfacedly saying the exact words ‘bottoms, bosoms and bodily functions of every kind’ before suggesting a revival centred on Boris Yeltsin? Or former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philip Dodd, declaring that any Carry On movie made now would have to focus on New Labour?
The past is indeed a foreign country, and A Perfect Carry On proves it’s a nice place to visit, even if we wouldn’t want to live there.
We hope you enjoyed this week’s edition, and look forward to seeing you at roughly the same time next Tuesday. As ever, shoot us a line if you so fancy – at editorial@the-fence.com
All the best,
TF