Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that started its life on a notepad yesterday afternoon, and is now in your inboxes – the marvels of technology know no bounds.
And that’s an appropriate note to announce that we are now celebrating a half-decade in the print media maelstrom, and we’re offering all readers 20% off any subscription (print, digital or both) using promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. Click the coupon below and get after it, or click the button beneath to get after it there – whichever works.
So there are discounts, yes. (20% off. Promo code: 5YOFENCE.) We will also be re-upping our 50 favourite articles, and some of them have been rejigged and refined, too.
Anyway, it’s very exciting to have been going for five years. The first two publications to cover our celebrations – and this is no word of a lie – have been The Face and Country Life, which makes us very pleased.
A bumper edition today, with two of the best video clips you’ll ever encounter, but we kick off with some California-grade political gossip.
Puffing on a Draw
For a variety of reasons, not least legal risk, we think people in the public eye are entitled to private lives, and when this comes to the issue of drug (mis)use, then we’re even more reticent to blow the whistle.
But as the prospect of an authoritarian Starmer government hovers into view, we feel it’s important to share a story we were told last week, of the senior Labour politician who smokes weed on a ‘near-daily’ basis. It’s not something we particularly care about – yet. But you might soon…
The Member for the Clock End
Some might say that Keir Starmer is the most authentic politician in living memory. He entered Westminster in his fifties, has good hair, a pretty wife and hangs out with his old friends the whole time over plenty of pints. And he absolutely loves football, in case you hadn’t heard. Still plays at the age of 61. Arsenal season ticket holder.
Yet, for whatever reason, whenever Starmer is invited to talk about a subject that he knows intimately – which also happens to be the national obsession – he is given to clamming up.
Last week, he was asked to nominate the greatest midfielder in Arsenal’s history, and gave the answer ‘Dennis Bergkamp’, failing to appreciate – like so many managers before Arsène Wenger – that Bergkamp made his magic between the lines of midfield and attack. The Rt Hon. Sir Keir has previous: when pressed for a starting partner for Bukayo Saka on BBC 5 Live in September 2022, he drew a blank, and was unable to name a single England striker.
We’re told that Starmer and his team are profoundly irritated by the fact that people think he doesn’t like football. It’s a source of real ire for them at the moment. You’d think they’d have more pressing matters to cogitate upon, but there we are.
What’s more incredible is that Starmer is older than Martin Keown, Ray Parlour, Lee Dixon, Tony Adams and David Seaman. No point to make beyond that, really. He’s old!
Bot Fucking Invited
Cast far into the recesses of your mind, past the stolen snippets of your grandad’s voice & your first game of hopscotch, to last week’s newsletter. In it, we asked you clever sorts if you’d been to any Q&As that’d been derailed by audience members, and like we knew you would, you delivered.
One reader, Rowan Hunter, a veteran of the rowdy BFI Q&As on the South Bank, compiled a series of dreadful interventions from his time on the cinephile frontline. His lowlights included:
- ‘Someone inadvertently asking director Peter Strickland if he’d ever been to an orgy, after a showing of Flux Gourmet.
- At a screening of The Holdovers, a woman spent so long telling Alexander Payne, Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph about her dad – complete with a dramatic, ‘he just died’ plot twist – that there was no time left for any more questions. Hers was the first question.
- At the exceptionally fun ‘Danny Dyer in Conversation’ event, a very drunk & incomprehensible Welsh woman, who had apparently been in The Football Factory, repeatedly demanded to know if Danny Dyer remembered her.
- Dishonourable mention to one man – already notorious at the BFI for yelling ‘rubbish!’ every time the Lloyds advert plays before films – who made another questioner cry at a Q&A by shouting at her for not using the microphone to his satisfaction.’
Now that you’ve answered our call for examples, perhaps you’ll go one further, and disrupt the next Q&A you attend. If you do, send your reasons and your details to editorial@the-fence.com, and we’ll publicise your insolence.
OH-t-HELL-NO
From his appearances on the pitch on Soccer Aid, it seems that TF un-favourite Tom Hiddleston is trying to become a global megastar again (he’s a very good Shakespearean actor, and should really be content with that). Tales of Hiddleston’s cringey behaviour abound. We’ve got our hands on a particular clanger of an episode today, where the guy the man who wore a short saying ‘I Love T.S’ pulled a bizarre stunt at the retirement party for the popular Eton teacher, Simon ‘Dormo’ Dormandy, who was head of the drama at the school until 2012, and taught Harry Lloyd, Eddie Redmayne and many others.
A leaving bash was held at the school’s Farrer Theatre, with various Old Etonians – some famous, some not – gathered to toast their beloved teacher. One of the guests that evening tells us what happened next.
‘We all sat in the theatre, with Dormo on stage, as a montage played on the big screen of the alumni in film, TV and theatre productions. This was interspersed with various talking head reels from the most illustrious actors – including Tom Hiddleston – praising Dormo to the camera, with Hiddleston lamenting that he couldn’t be there that evening in person, as he was on set.
‘At the end of the evening, the doors crashed open, and Tom Hiddleston came charging down the stairs from the back of the theatre, jumped onto the stage and did a Loki impression, telling the audience to ‘kneeeeel!’. Then he chuckled, turned to Dormo and said, ‘you don’t need to kneel.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g_niOqohcY
Bread, Circuses and Podcasts
No one who works here has ever been to a shit party, for both personal and professional reasons. But we were shocked and appalled to learn that sadly the same cannot be said for many of you. In Issue 20 we investigated each industry to find out which hosted the most miserable – and the horniest – work parties, which you can read here.
Last week the podcast Paper Cuts discussed our thoughts, and elected that bone doctors did the most drugs and fashion parties were the most miserable, where people just ‘waft around’ on Ozempic.
We couldn’t possibly say whether we agree with that or not (we do).
I’m Ready Fiddem
For last week’s And Finally, we chucked out one of our favourite comedy sketches of all time: Peter Serafinowicz’s star turn as an increasingly stoned Terry Wogan, on the Christmas edition of his eponymous 2007 sketch show.
As anyone already au fait with this clip knows (and as one reader sent over like a shot), Serafinowicz’s Wogan had a second life as a jungle MC in 2012, when the comedian was asked to host the Saturday morning slot on BBC 6 Music for six weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z9uLdARaNU
If this is your first time hearing it, we are so, so jealous of you. If it isn’t, then we won’t need to tell you twice – you’ll have it on already.
‘Ain’t No Houellebecq Girl’ is not a Funny Joke
Is there anyone sexier in the publishing industry than Gallic casanova Michel Houellebecq? Arguably not. It is both his blessing but also, as Olly Haynes discovered, his curse.
For Issue 20, Olly met the Dutch artist who has a video tape of her shagging the French novelist – and Houellebecq wants it back. A chaotic tale of OnlyFans, achilles heels and honeypotting ensues. It’s online now, so you can read it here.
In Case You Missed It
Ursula K. Le Guin has bad news for writers: you have to actually write.
Amelia Tait tells the story of AQA and 118-118: the people who were paid to be Google.
At the LRB, the most perceptive review thus far of 14 years of Tory misrule, from William Davies.
Aida Edemariam gives a stunning and moving account of the value and precarity of Britain’s libraries.
And the NYT finally got an interview with the actual most interesting person in the world right now: geo-guessing savant, Trevor Rainbolt.
And Finally
It’s lighters up, and ham sandwiches down, for all here at Fence Towers, as we salute the passing of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, renowned Irish national treasure, globally recognised sports broadcaster, and favourite of Off The Fences passim.
Ó Muircheartaigh, who passed today aged 93, is best known for his truly incredible retinue of colour commentary, which he provided on Gaelic football and hurling matches from 1949 to 2010. The quotes, truly, are endless, but we’d be remiss not to package a few here in memoriam.
‘Teddy McCarthy to Mick McCarthy, no relation. Mick McCarthy back to Teddy McCarthy, still no relation.’
‘The stopwatch has stopped. It’s up to God and the referee now. The referee is Pat Horan. God is God.’
‘I saw a few Sligo people at Mass in Gardiner Street this morning and the omens seem to be good for them. The priest was wearing the same colours as the Sligo jersey! 40 yards out on the Hogan Stand side of the field, Ciarán Whelan goes on a rampage… it’s a goal! So much for religion.’
‘Stephen Byrne with the puck out for Offaly. Stephen, one of 12. All but one are here to-day, the one that’s missing is Mary, she’s at home minding the house.’
[Of the legendary Cork hurler Seán Óg Ó hAilpín]: ‘His father’s from Fermanagh, his mother’s from Fiji. Neither a hurling stronghold’.
But, if you first encountered him in these very pages, it’s likely you’ll remember his late-in-life turn toward accidental ASMR, with this exquisite video in which he makes a ham sandwich for the Irish paper of record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPB6LTWThH4
Sleep easy, Mícheál, and may your heavenly fridge be fully stocked of ham.
That’s it for this week. If you’d like to speak to us about an order, then you can email us at support@the-fence.com and we’ll come back to you promptly. For blind items and legally questionable intel, then editorial@the-fence.com is the one to send to. Keep safe and stay hydrated out there. And buy a sub – 20% off all summer with promo code ‘5YOFENCE’.
All the best,
TF