Dear Readers,
Good evening, and welcome to Off The Fence, an 10/10 newsletter landing on October 11, snug in your inbox. Speaking of arrivals, Issue 17 is now with subscribers, and the ‘sex’ and ‘nature’ special (not sex and nature, we hasten to add) has proven to be a hit. With the magazine at hand, Heather Mallick has been laughing herself ‘sick’ and ‘shouting quotes’, Sarah Haque has been moved by the beauty of this issue, Katy Hessel has saluted ‘the honour’ of being featured in an article (as has Dolly Alderton); Jimmy McIntosh – true to form – has paired the mag with a pint of Madri and Mark Roberts has sent through a snap of the mag with a menacingly large soft toy (possibly Peppa Pig?).
We love these snaps and we want you to keep them coming. We want to see Issue 17 out and about – en plein air in an autumnal Richmond Park or locked in a Berlin sex dungeon. Or something like that. Send through your pics on Twitter and Instagram and the wackiest and wildest one will win a bottle of Bollinger Champagne from Fortnum and Mason. Get snapping!
If you haven’t yet signed up for the year, then you can do so at this link here – it costs less than half a bottle of champers, and lasts a whole lot longer.
Issue 17 was dispatched on Friday, and has already landed with some international subscribers, but if you have an issue with your orders, please email subscriptions@the-fence.com.
We’ve got some little bits today on memes, vibes and life.
Bully For You
Patrick Galbraith’s dispatch from the XL Bully march is now available to read online – there’s some extra chunks of meat thrown in on the possibility of introducing dog licenses. Woof!
Twenty Out Of Twenty
The first piece from Issue 17 is now available online. Joe Bishop takes a meal with Andy Hayler, who was – briefly – the only person in the world to have visited every Michelin three-star restaurant in the world.
Andy is one of the stars of Foodies, a documentary following a squad of culinary gallivants. You can watch the trailer here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R4DuBbUyRg
The Haunted Shed Of Roald Dahl
One of our leading pleasures is collaborating with the legendary Davey Jones, and in the back spread of this issue we really have made something that stretches the boundaries of good taste – you can have a peek at the start of it here.
It features the shed of Roald Dahl – memorably profiled in this charming 1982 BBC feature - and some altogether unseemly innuendo about its other uses.
The whole thing is, of course, available to buy from the webstore here, and won’t be going online any time soon.
In Case You Missed It
Dan Davies, the journalist who knew Jimmy Savile better than any other, wrestles with what he knew and what he didn’t.
Molly Pepper Steemson and friends celebrate British Jewish food for Vittles.
Hannah Al-Othman on the ‘middle-aged mother’ who ran a drugs empire from a sleepy Welsh village.
Katherine Laidlaw tells the incredible true story of the crooked Toronto cop who attempted the perfect crime.
Lisa Brinkworth, Hugo Daniel and Edwin Okoth investigate the predatory practices of modelling agencies recruiting directly from refugee camps.
Internet savant Ed Zitron defenestrates Elon Musk as the greatest innovator in the history of failure.
And Finally
Few things cheer us here at Fence Towers like the thrill of retrofuturism, and having promised some fusty old BBC Archive clips last week, we have a corker for you this time out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIARcgoVamo
60 years ago last week, the BBC broadcast Time On Our Hands, a speculative ‘documentary’ purporting to show how the world will have changed by the far-off future of 1988. Produced by Don Haworth – who would go on to win a BAFTA and lasting acclaim 13 years later for his work with fellow Fence fave, Fred Dibnah – it’s a wry and dry short film, captured with the BBC’s usual drab élan.
Purporting to be a documentary from 1988, it contrasts its notional present with the viewers’ own reality in the sixties, so cars so choke London’s roadways by 1966 that traffic jams last for weeks, leaving motorists stranded in their jalopies, reduced to watching Russia land on the moon from the comfort of their in-vehicle TV sets. Cars are altogether banished from the metropole by 1968, and the inner city repopulated by suburban salarymen wishing to avoid the horrors of public transport. We watch, transfixed, as the East End is gentrified by bowler hat wearing executives, traipsing off to their offices in full song.
For the greater mass of workers, a larger shift occurs. Mechanisation renders them largely redundant, yet still subsidised in a curiously unspecified capacity. Indeed, the one remaining clip cuts off just as a union man rages not against the precarity of work, or reduction in wages, but having too much leisure time on his hands. In place of such specifics, we read a generalised sense of ennui, summed up by a repurposed Aldous Huxley clip in which he opines that ‘man is being subjected to his own inventions, the victim of his own technology’. This after we witness factory workers at a high-tech plant disappearing with delightfully futuristic zapping noises.
As with any of these things, there is satisfaction in seeing the scope of futurism’s ambition and, well, scoffing at all the stuff it got wrong. All stories about the future are really about the present, and, as autumn follows summer, the past. ‘This Buoyant programme could be repeated a dozen times’ wrote Dennis Potter upon its release, ‘and still intrigue, delight and disturb me’. And who are we to disagree?
That’s it for this week – we will be joining you next Tuesday, as is standard operating procedure. In the meantime, please keep sending those snaps through. There’ll be lots of exciting articles being published online, too. Until then.
All the best,
TF