Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter prepared à la minute – even in the holidays.
First of all, we hope that as the tenor of life slows to a gentle seasonal hum, this will be one of the last times this year that you check your emails, and we thank you for indulging your work-based dopamine cravings with us, your friendly neighbourhood quarterly. As a treat, specifically for you, we have lumbered back into the office, eschewing the wails and cries of our own desolate family members, to compile a little round-up of our year’s brightest lights – with a few nuggets of new gossip chucked in for good measure, because we know why you’re here.
Thank you to everyone who has entered The Fence’s Fighting Fund – we are about 50 donations away from reaching the summit, so if you haven’t yet made your pledge, you can do so below and possibly win something incredible.
A reminder to all errant present-buyers that time has not run out to give the gift of a lifetime (provided you keep the Direct Debit open). A print subscription costs just £31.99, and will ensure your recipient gets the greatest of our work before it hits the newsstands; 64 pages of pure menace, four times a year. If they love it – which they will – you will never have to worry about presents again. You can even repeat the trick with literally every single person you know, and your life will become immeasurably better as a result, we promise. We also have a small amount of tokens giving 15 percent off subscriptions with the code PRINT15 at checkout.
We welcome all snaps off the magazine out and about and doing its thing. Here is a particularly good one of a cat called Sid with the mag, please keep them coming through.
Valiantly, we roar: to business. Coming out of the pay window this week, we have Christian potato parables, poorly exported Yank nonsense and a collection of Bad Christmases from TFs past.
Off The Press
Our central feature from the issue is now online and available for everyone to read here. An oral history of the print magazine in the 21st century, with contributions from Graydon Carter, Ian Hislop, Alex Bilmes, Jo Ellison and more. It really is one of the best and boldest things we’ve ever done, and we’re hoping to do many more pieces of similar ambition in 2026.
God’s Own Counties
We have had enormous fun ranking the counties of England, from best to worst. However, we would like to take this opportunity to apologise to County Durham, which a number of readers feel is unfairly besmirched.
Kasting Aspersions
Over in Chile, the aftermath of a decades-old referendum continues to rumble on. Back in 1988, Chile had what feels like a strangely banal end to one of the most brutal dictatorships in history: a public referendum on whether to keep Pinochet in power for another eight years, or whether to elect a civilian to lead the country. Bizarrely, the ‘No’ option – the one for freedom – only received a narrow victory with 56% of the vote, even with $1,000,000 from the CIA and some kindly advice from Mr Soros. A Yes-No split has been a central axis of Chilean politics since then, in a referendum legacy that would put Brexit to shame if Brexit was entirely composed of shame. To save time on any further context on the campaigns’ political positions, their respective logos have been included below.
What brings this nugget screaming out of the deep-fryer of history and into the mouth of the present, is the panko breading of current affairs. Chile’s recent election has just returned José Antonio Kast as its new president. The man – the son of post-1945 German immigrants to the continent; yep, those ones – is, to put it mildly, far right. He becomes Chile’s first president to have cast (get it?) a powerful red-and-blue ‘Sí’ in 1988. In fact, he did more than just vote, making an appearance in favour of Pinochet in one of the regulated 15-minute advertising slots, or Franjas, that were the hallmark of that feverish ‘88 campaign season.
José Antonio Kast en la Franja del SI.
Bizarre if not especially heartening news. It does however give us a chance to recommend to you one of the finest feature-length documentaries ever made: Nostalgia For The Light. You can watch the trailer here.
Oh, I Can’t Wait To See Those Faces
We’re fascinated by the unconfirmed rumour we’ve heard that Gerard Depardieu and Edward Snowden will be spending their Christmas together within the same luxurious Moscow tower block in which they both claim political asylum. If you feel a wintry chill at the thought of them raising shots of turkey borscht as the Siberian Orchestra plays О, СВЯТАЯ НОЧЬ on the streets below, then you fall smack bang within the target market for TF’s intermittent Bleak Midwinter series.
For two Christmas issues in a row – that’s #18 and #22 for the nerds – we surveyed our readers for their most depressing yuletide memories, and received a bountiful crop of solsticial sorrow from the unrelenting miserabilists we call our subscribers. In tribute to the season, please find ten of the very best below, made available for you online for the very first time.
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I worked on a mobile network tech support. Chap was living by himself. His wife died a few years back, and his daughter was living in another country. He kept insisting his email was broken because she had promised to send a photo of herself and his grandchild on Christmas Day.
—Daithigor
Attempted to drive to Liverpool on Christmas morning, but the engine blew up in Luton. No AA so had to hitch back to London. Spent Christmas in freezing flat with no hot water, only a tin of Heinz Beans & Sausages for Christmas dinner, and nothing to read but Martin Amis’s Dead Babies.
—Andrew Harrison
My parents told us they were divorcing on Christmas when we had three days left of a trip. We were staying in rented accommodation with no decor in it, so I balled up green and red paper and piled it in a corner on the floor.
—Erin Fornoff
My grandpa gave me a bottle of windshield wiper fluid once. I was 12.
—Aendra Rininsland
I got a free-standing clothes rail aged 14.
—Steve Cromwell
In 2014, we got burgled in late December, and they even stole all the presents from under the tree. I spent Christmas Eve phoning various generous relatives and friends to find out what they had bought our children, and the precise cash values of same, for the purposes of our insurance claim.
—Dara O’Reilly
My dad somehow - God knows how - managed to get invited on a tour of the Áras [residency of the Irish President] and asked my sister along, and then the following Christmas gave me the wee souvenir book they give you on the way out.
—Executive Steve
Once spent Christmas Day at a murder scene on the edge of Salford, before going to a kFC on the edge of Oldham then sitting, alone, in the work smoking shelter in the pissing rain. I’ve had lower points but I don’t remember it fondly.
—Jennifer Williams
Drank too much at Christmas Eve at my in-laws and felt terrible Christmas morning. I had to walk the dog and she had massive diarrhoea on the pavement outside this house, it was very windy and I found myself with an inflated bag trying to bag this slop one-handed while vomiting.
—Ben Travers
The winter where I broke both of my wrists at the same time after falling arse-backwards in a drama school warmup exercise. When I went into school with the casts on, my Spanish teacher said it looked like I’d broken them ‘in a w*nking accident’, which would’ve been a shade less embarrassing.
—Kieran Morris
A Christmas Parel
Have you tired of the old Christmas stories? Has your annoying friend insisted that Die Hard is a Christmas film again this year? Have you watched the single greatest feat of acting – Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa – one too many times? Gather round The Fence’s fire, we have a yarn for you, straight from 1940s evangelical America. Listen closely to The Potato That Wasn’t A Christian: A Story For Children (Not As Funny As It Sounds). It’s best read in the voice of Monsignor Treeb Lopez from On The Hour and we reproduce it here in full.
Well, you see it happened this way. The huckster (peddler) had been selling potatoes on the street and mother had bought a bushel of beautiful and fine-looking potatoes and put them away in the basement of the house. A little boy lived in this house, one of a family of four children. He did not go to school: he helped mother. Everyday he went down and got the potatoes and brought them to mother. Then he would watch her pare them and prepare them for cooking. One day she cut a big potato right through the middle and it was black and rotten; and he said, “Mother that potato is not a Christian, is it?” Mother said ‘Why what do you mean? Of course potatoes are not Christians, only people.’ It isn’t a Christian, Mother” he said, ‘Because it is [flawed… and] rotten inside.’
A Christian is a person who has a new heart. God never changes the old heart: for the Bible says it is desperately wicked and cannot be cured. God says that it is so ‘deceitful above all things,’ that none can know it.
You cannot always tell when a potato is bad at the heart, and it often looks fair and fine on the outside; but God knows what is in the heart. If you want to see how bad it is in the heart of a man who is not a Christian, then we will let the knife of God’s Word do for the human heart just what the knife did to the potato. Read Mark 7:21-23 and you will see the bad in the heart. The Christian has a new heart. There is no way to fix up the old heart. The new heart is created. It is a clean heart. Therefore the Psalmist when he had gone wrong, prayed ‘Create in me a clean heart.’ Now you understand what the little fellow meant when he said ‘that potato is not a Christian.’ After this when you cut an apple or potato or crack a nut and find it bad on the inside, you can think of the same thing and say That potato is not a Christian;’ for it is a good illustration of corruption (filthiness) of the human heart. A worm gets into the heart of a potato and rots it. It was the serpent of sin that got into the heart of man and made it bad.
The Blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. (1st Jn 1:7)
Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth. (Ecclesiastes 12:1)
Jesus loves you! Pray to Jesus now and ask Him to come into your heart to live. He wants you to have a clean heart and not be rotten on the inside.
Our own in-house vicar is unsure of the theological reasoning at play, but agrees it’s a damn good read.
In Case You Missed It
George Pendle investigates the first couple of the online right.
The ultimate TF piece, and we didn’t even publish it: a Bradford-based funeral director looks back at the logistical challenges of burying Jimmy Savile.
Jan Svankmajer’s bizarre claymation short resonates with us after conversing with distant relatives.
Amelia Tait with some recursive revelry in her piece about films within films.
Donald Trump has given us the worst coin flip of all time.
And Finally
With any luck, or owing to the divine grace of our dark lord Krampus, you’re reading this in the comfort and safety of your home; work shelved for the season; the days of the week beginning to lose all meaning; swaddled among loved ones in soft furnishings, with a chocolate treat in your deserving paw, and a glass of something cheerful perched invitingly nearby. And, on the off chance you’re finding all of this very tedious, it falls on us to give you the last pre-Christmas blast of newsletter video-age to settle your nerves and relieve you from the boredom of watching bad films and having to speak to your relatives.
We’ve greatly enjoyed reacquainting ourselves with this clip from Louis Theroux’s Weird Christmas, in which a positively balmy young Louis accompanying some young adult performers on a yuletide-themed publicity shoot, accompanied by a fundamentalist Christian who objects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcR2Z94uLHg
Our thirst for the BBC Archive far from sated, we luxuriated in the charm of this 1962 account of what British children want for Christmas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhRKO95arSA
And then another blast of retrofuturist nectar from Tomorrow’s World, who in 1984 and 1985 asked: what do you get the computer geek in your life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADzn1bBLIrw
We were suitably fascinated, and enriched, by this rundown from the V&A of the weird history of Victorian Christmas cards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdULP-VYuXk
On a wholesome run, we found the Imperial War Museum’s account of the Christmas Truce informative and moving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaBJhmkDKmc
As usual, we’ve bopped around the office to our perennial Christmas hip-hop favourite: Jonwayne’s inimitably good Yuletide Bangerz mixtape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLzC8WDcjsw
And thought it best to end with this never before seen, and fully 4K remastered, version of David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s famous Little Drummer Boy performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJBFD-Wvc7U
Merry Christmas.
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That’s your lot. Do enter the Fighting Fund and we will, with deep reluctance, be joining you twice more before the year is out. When the Christmas classic Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree was recorded, itssinger Brenda Lee was just 13 years old.
All the best,
TF