Dear Readers,
Hello and welcome to Off The Fence, a Tuesday newsletter that is coming to you today, as a special treat, on a Wednesday. We have been hard at work putting the finishing touches to Issue 21, which if we say so ourselves is an absolute corker.
In the meantime we’ve still been enjoying your pics of Issue 20 out in the world enjoying the last of the summer wines. Here she is sunbathing on Hampstead Heath, in fact. If you’d like to send us your last minute bank holiday snaps to join here, a reminder that our competition for the fizziest photo of the issue is still running. Tag us or email us at editorial@the-fence.com and you could win a bottle of Bollinger champagne. It’s true!
As summer comes to an end, so too does your chance to read The UK’s Only Magazine for a frankly absurd price. Our fifth anniversary sale wraps up imminently, and you’re in the last chance saloon to bag yourself 20 percent off any sub by entering the promo code ‘5YOFENCE’ at the checkout. The deal applies to print, digital – or both. Get after it through the image below or that endearingly shiny red button.
Now, without further ado, to the meat and two veg of the newsletter. This week we have seen the editorial team – 20% of which are Scouse – pressed to their limits by reuniting Gallagher brothers, so obviously we have some kind words about Noel Gallagher’s estranged wife. There’s also an exciting opportunity to feature in our next issue, and a list of all possible plots by every author you’ve lied about ticking off your summer reading list. Let's go mad for it (sorry).
Sally Can Wait
Mutterings abound in the wake of the Gallagher brothers’ public reconciliation, pointing to the £20 million cost of Noel’s divorce from PR exec, Sara MacDonald, as the impetus behind a tour that’s set to net the pair a cool £50 million each.
Others look beyond the financials, and point the finger squarely at MacDonald for preventing Oasis from reforming – and by ‘others’ we explicitly mean Liam Gallagher, who put it bluntly in 2018, ‘She’s the reason OASIS is no longer. Have to put it out there, she’s DARK.’
For much of the 2010s, Noel was a fixture on the Notting Hill social scene, cavorting with Delevingnes, much to the fury of his brother (who was keeping it real in Highgate). Will Noel be keeping things more ‘real’ now that he’s flying free of Sara?
From what we can ascertain scanning the gossip columns, Noel is now dating a hilariously named west London socialite called Sally Mash, which suggests that the answer to that question is ‘no’. If you have a funnier name than her, or know someone that does, reach out to editorial@the-fence.com and we will publish that name in a follow-up to this newsletter item.
Bring Out Your Dead
Issue 21 is being wrapped up by our designers as we speak, so we’re looking ahead to Issue 22 (literally nobody works harder than us, and yet somehow not enough people are talking about this). Anyway, we’d love to have lots of pitches from writers new and old to stock our pages with before 2024 is out. If you want to write for The Fence, check out our pitch guide here and then email us at editorial@the-fence.com. We are particularly interested in publishing more ‘insider’ pieces – previously we have gone behind the scenes of publishing, probation services and the film industry, and we are always happy to receive more.
If The Walls Could Talk
If you are the sort of person who peruses the internet looking at houses that only billionaires can afford, then you might have come across this address on Portland Place.
We commend the good taste with which porn baron David Sullivan has updated the Robert Adam property. But he is not the only interesting owner in recent vintage. For decades, the house was party HQ for the fraudster ‘Lord’ Eddie Davenport, a vampiric sort who is well-captured in this brilliant doc from the Vice glory days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJDSi_ZXp0E
Did you ever trip the light fantastic at 33 Portland Place? Let us know via the usual channels.
The Maltese Falcon
Paul Caruana Galizia and Rachel Johnson’s investigation into the author, showrunner and screenwriter Neil Gaiman’s alleged assaults against women has, for various reasons, not received the air time that it merits. Might that have something to do with Gaiman’s dominant position in the publishing and TV industries? He makes a lot of money for a lot of powerful people.
A fifth woman has come forward with allegations, and we recommend that you listen to the Tortoise podcast here.
The Claret Communard
A joyous discovery from the YouTube cellar this week, in which a youthful Jancis Robinson speaks to the finest noses in the fine wine world, finishing with a positively charming profile of Edmund Penning-Rowsell, a privately educated Marxist who was also the world’s foremost authority on First Growth Bordeaux. Things were done differently in the 20th century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av0ESUM8lXM
Please Notice Us, BookTok
Some years ago, we made a silly little article listing all of the possible plots by all major authors. Everyone from Evelyn Waugh to Alice Munro, minimised into digestible format for our attention-starved readers. Slaves to originality that we are, we have now updated it with yet more plots from yet more authors. Read on for pocket size synopses of Philip Roth, Rachel Cusk, David Foster Wallace, and many more. Click here.
Party Like It’s 1994
Oasis are back, Labour are in Number 10, and St. JOHN are bringing back 90s prices. Well, so they claim. Last week the restaurant announced a radical plan to mark their 30th anniversary by selling the entire menu at 1994 prices, from the 9th to the 27th of September. The only problem is that it was impossible to get a booking.
If, like us, you failed, you can commiserate by instead reading our account of what it was like to work in the iconic restaurant’s kitchen, from Issue 20, right here. Which is almost as good as being there yourself, eating apricots on toast. Still, Fergus Henderson, you will pay for your crimes.
One More Thing
Price of the sub is going up. Or has already gone up, to be candid – we have raised the price of a digital subscription by a fiver, to £24.99 for the year. You’re going to see in a couple of weeks’ time why we’ve done this, but trust us, we have some really exciting news on the horizon that we’ll share when the time is right.
But what’s this? Oh no, someone seems to have left a voucher lying on the floor here. The voucher says ‘use promo code ‘5YOFENCE’ for 20% off any subscription – print, digital or both.’ We’ll have to put it in the bin, otherwise you’ll be able to get a sub for only £19.99, the old price of a digital sub. And we definitely wouldn’t want that. Click the button below to buy your subscription, and whatever you do, don’t use that promo code.
In Case You Missed It
Ryan Mac & Kate Conger with one of those ‘we interviewed 100 people who worked for Elon Musk’ pieces the NYT do so well; a rhapsody in Twitter Blue.
John Sainsbury lands a punch beyond the grave as his diss of the National Gallery’s fake columns is discovered upon their demolition.
Who says print is dead? The Onion argues otherwise.
Marianna Giusti tackles a cineastic cold case: who merked Pasolini?
Ahead of his push for the Celebrity Masterchef crown, Tamer Hassan gets a carve-up in this week’s edition of The Upsetter.
TV writer Joel Morris on why TV characters don’t have money issues and ‘the chink of departing coin’.
And Finally
Last week, as part of its Hitchcock Night, BBC4 screened Hitchcock at the NFT in its entirety, a Q&A with the great man first broadcast in December, 1969. The conversation is remarkable, not least as it seems an early progenitor of the sort of filmmaker interviews which now make up about a third of YouTube’s library.
Particularly fascinating are the grim looks and dress of those asking the questions – all males styled in a fashion we might now term Soviet Nerd – addressing their queries to Hitchcock in their best phone voices.
All of which is as nought to the reclining smarm of the man in the moderator’s chair, Bryan Forbes. A reputable director in his own right, with credits as varied as Whistle Down The Wind and The Angry Silence - and, six years after this Q&A was filmed, The Stepford Wives – one feels he rather overdoes it in attempting to unseat any notion of Hitchcock as his better, conducting their conversation with an almost parodic hauteur; seven minutes into their conversation, he insists to Hitchcock’s face that The Birds was a failure because the effects were bad and the film was shot in colour.
That’s it for this week, a Wednesday helping of the Tuesday best. If you’re waiting by the letterbox like an overeager Dachshund, praying that your mag is on the way, email support@the-fence.com and we’ll see if we can speed things up for you. For all else, editorial@the-fence.com. We’ll see you again in precisely six days time, enjoy the end of summer.
All the best,
TF