Dear Readers,
Hello and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter from The Fence magazine. We come to you from overcast Soho, where dejected hordes of England fans still roam the streets, tattered flags knotted about their shoulders.
More importantly, you join us as Issue 20 is arriving throughout the land, and dozens of territories further afield. Remember – the best photo of Issue 20 ‘out in the wild’ will win a bottle of Bollinger. All you need to do is to snap the mag, tag us and you could win 750ml of slightly overpriced Champagne.
Here are some good ones so far: David Cameron (not that one) snapped this image below from Cyprus. Robert Greer provides a lovely cerulean background in this effort. Peter Christian pays witness to a deserved triumph. There’s a celebration of a certain article in this issue and Liam O’Dowd calls the magazine ‘pure belter’. It really is a good one!
Indeed, in his column in today’s Daily Mail, the alpha papa of English satire, Craig Brown, has called it 'the most original new magazine for years', which is quite a thrill for us.
The thrilling thing for you is that as we are celebrating five years in the print media game, we’re offering all readers 20% off any subscription (print, digital or both) using promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. Click the button beneath to secure it.
Today, we’ve got appreciation for Irish broadcasting, some words about events in Pennsylvania, but first, Will Nott spoke to Nigel Farage’s team.
Putting On A Show
‘Sigma sigma spider, climbed up the skibidi spout.’
The voice is Nigel Farage’s and he is sitting in a white room wearing a blue suit and a blue tie. He looks smart, wearing glasses, his grey hair combed neatly to one side.
‘That spider is you, top sigma James, yes it is. This is Nigel Farage wishing you a big chungus congratulations for being the top G skibidi alpha male. (You can watch the full clip here to see for yourself).
Nigel falters, almost imperceptibly, as he reads something off his screen, perhaps trying to get the pronunciation correct. ‘We all promise to hawk tuah on your bussy as it claps,’ he adds, his face expressionless.
The video was recorded on the website Cameo, where users can pay celebrities to read out messages. For £70, Farage, the Member of Parliament for Clacton, will provide you with a 40-second video, through which users can ‘request messages for a variety of occasions, from birthdays and retirements to roasts and motivational pep talks.’ This clearly extends to credulously repeated slogans, which have gotten the current Reform leader into the headlines in the past.
The Fence contacted Farage’s parliamentary team and Reform’s head office to provide some translation support.‘Does Nigel realise what he said?’ we asked. ‘Hawk tuah’, of course, refers to a recent viral video where a young American, Hailey Welch, was asked how to please a man in bed.
‘In that video, Welch says that you must ‘hawk tuah and spit on that thang’ meaning women should spit on a man’s genitals during oral sex,’ The Fence explained.
‘The term bussy is slang in the LGBTQ community for a man’s anus,’ we added. The Fence received an automated response from Reform saying ‘thanks for the feedback.’
It's not clear whether Farage's Cameo appearances are part of a wider strategy to appeal to young people. In the run up to the recent election, Reform boasted of an, as yet statistically unverified, explosion of support from those between the ages of 18 and 25. In the meantime, we wonder if their leader might want to devote some time to brushing up on his Gen-Z slang.
You can follow Will on a Twitter here.
Pomodoro Technique
Margaret Mitchell headed to Beauchamp Place in Kensington, where she met Ciro Orsini (pictured below with the author), an Italian restaurateur who believes that he’s discovered the secret of eternal life, but during his time on earth has mixed with a wild array of celebrities – including Patrick Swayze and the actor who played Mr Miyagi – and his girlfriend was murdered. And there are longstanding rumours about what goes on upstairs at the restaurant, which Ciro was only too happy to answer.
You can – and you should – read the piece here.
A Pint of Plane
Our pubs columnist, Jimmy McIntosh, relived John Terry and Frank Lampard’s infamous post-9/11 Heathrow booze binge, in which the rowdy footballers got apocalyptically pissed and allegedly exposed themselves in front of a crowd of stranded American tourists grieving the worst terrorist attack in modern history. It’s a very funny piece.
For Your Eyes Only
We asked a suite of nodes who handle intelligence what it’s like to work with top secret material. It’s a fun little roundtable, and there are some truly fascinating answers from ‘John’ a government employee, and from Andrew Lownie, who has been trying to write the truth about Lord Mountbatten for a number of years.
On The Final Lap
To celebrate five years of TF, we’ve been republishing the 50 best articles we’ve ever run. Editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, try and buy a goblin in Zimbabwe (true story); John Phipps interviewed Madeleine McCann (not that one); Sachin Kureishi looked after his father, Hanif; Michelle Taylor warmed hearts with the transatlantic voyage of a cat; Jamie Fewery recounts his time at the heart of the 50 Shades of Grey storm; John Saward cast an eye on Mike Tyson’s retirement and Jack Kidbrooke plucked an undercover piece of reportage from the Herefordshire fields that leaves a pungent smell behind.
It’s a pretty stellar list, and if you want to read it at leisure, then remember that you can subscribe to The Fence at the link below from just £15.99 for the year with that discount code.
The Shot Heard Round The World
The scenes from Pennsylvania this weekend were a shock, even to our blackened, news-addled brains. In the wake of Trump’s near-miss at the hands of an assassin’s bullet, many have been moved to decry the rancour with which politics has been conducted in the modern age. We can only restate those sentiments while wondering, tentatively, whether British MPs being jostled, shouted down, or indeed milkshaked, during June’s campaign trail, is really comparable to facing down automatic gunfire, as the various talking heads on British telly seemed to imply.
Platitudes about the horror of what occurred were ubiquitous – some more egregious than others – as was a wider sense that this moment would define, and indeed ensure, the election in Donald Trump’s favour. The images of a bloodied Trump defiantly raising his fist in the aftermath were, admittedly, striking, but we can’t help thinking this is premature. For one thing, you might have noticed, four days on the story already has the stale breeze of old news about it.
We have, after all, been near here before. At the 2016 RNC in Las Vegas, another 20-year-old man, Michael Steven Sandford, from Dorking (in Surrey!) grabbed a policeman’s handgun in a bid to shoot then-candidate Trump, in an event which now seems so distant that only a few news stories from the time tell the tale. Sandford, who has autism and was in the midst of a psychotic episode at the time of the attacks, was released back to Blighty in 2017 after serving five months of his year-long sentence for ‘being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm and event an official function.’
While clearly a lower order of magnitude than this weekend’s events, it does strike us as odd that Sandford’s case has been so neatly memory-holed. No news of his whereabouts has been recorded since his release seven years ago, which is probably for the best for all parties, but it does strike us as a slightly odd outlier of American judicial clemency. An indication, perhaps, that living in a post-Trump news cycle means even a credible assassination attempt on his person lacks the half-life of newsiness it would have had in previous years.
A Gilded Age
Andrew O’Hagan was in typically scintillating form on the Beckhams for the London Review of Books this weekend, charting the course of 2000s popular culture through his review of Tom Bower’s biography of the de facto celebs royale of 21st century Britain. O’Hagan is characteristically lucid on the madness of fame, and the qualities and contradictions of biography, but one part of his piece particularly caught our eye.
‘The Beckhams’ says he, ‘are British in a new way, a way that wealthy people who live most of the time in places like Dubai and Miami are British, loving the royal family and hating income tax while deploring the press they relentlessly deploy.’
It got us thinking about how many other famous Brits fit this new Monarcho-libertarian paradigm, and so far we’ve got Gordon Ramsay, Gary Barlow, ITV’s daytime line-up, and the entire shadow cabinet. If any more occur to you, answers on a postcard, please. There’s something good here – editorial@the-fence.com
In Case You Missed It
Friend of TF Peter Geoghegan, tackles the mystery of Reform’s phantom candidates.
Alex Karaktsanis exposes the great Cop Bodycam Scam at Yale Journal of Law & Liberation
At Esquire, Madeline Diamond explores the publishing industry’s merch of progress as she digs into BookTok giveaway culture.
NYT’s Maia Szalavitz with a sobering exposé on America’s Troubled Teen industry.
And Finally
Viewers of this year’s Euros were variably pleased with the live coverage on offer, with preferences broadly divided between the BBC’s staid, but governmentally authoritative, bland-a-thon, and ITV’s more knockabout, if ad-shredded, adventures in overstatement.
Common to all such discussions, however, has been an overall appreciation for Roy Keane’s presence on ITV’s panel, specifically his less-than-enthusiastic reactions to England’s last minute winners.
English viewers may, therefore, be interested to know of Irish TV’s long-standing pedigree when it comes to tournament coverage, and specifically the 2010s golden era of Après Match.
Après Match was a long-running comedy program which began in 1996, and centred on comedians Barry Murphy, Risteárd Cooper and Gary Cooke – specifically on their impressions of the typical line-up of football pundits on RTE coverage of Irish football internationals.
With a spark of genius not seen on Irish television since, their show – in which they ruthlessly took the piss out of commentators Bill O’Herlihy, Liam Brady and Eamon Dunphy, among others – was broadcast immediately after those same pundits had concluded their official coverage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUGqYmNOVw
Such was the success of the show, and its numerous long-running gags, that the team were eventually given control over the 3rd/4th place playoffs for subsequent World Cups, providing live buildup, commentary and analysis to the whole game. All of which lead to memorable exchanges like the below, on the Dutch team’s ‘cube strategy’ in the 2014 campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1XQD_AalG8
Or this bravura period of analysis from 2002.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaC3Jt5B5cg
Bliss was it in those days to be alive, but to be watching Irish television, was very heaven.
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That’s it. If you’re a subscriber and you’d like to speak to us about an order, email us at support@the-fence.com and we’ll come back to you promptly. If you are not yet a subscriber, what are you thinking?? It’s 20% off all summer with promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. For blind items and legally questionable intel, hover over to editorial@the-fence.com. And if you’re ever stuck trying to work out a tricky sum, we advise you to remember the reciprocal nature of percentages: ergo, 20% of 5 = 5% of 20 or that 80% of 6 = 6% of 80, and so on.
All the best,
TF