Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that knows where the national off button is.
This is, excitingly, the last newsletter from us until the launch of the next issue. That’s right, 28 will be greeting the world at the top of next week. It features a brilliant investigation by our own Cormac Kehoe, tales of Shetland separatism and the longest, most ambitious feature we’ve ever published. Get giddy.
Of course, this means that it is an unusually good time to subscribe to The Fence, even more fantastic that it has been through all other moments of human history. This isn’t just because the new issue is coming out, but we also have the final run of discounts on subscriptions for the foreseeable future. 20 tokens have been printed and they are already running out. Soon there won’t be any left so use them up while they’re live.
So, what treats do we have in store for you this week? Well, we start off with a story we’ve covered before.
Snakes and Ladders
We reported on the case of Yonas Girma, aka ‘TY from the Wyld’ at the start of the year. An aspiring ‘hood Steve Irwin’ – seen here harassing an anaconda – Girma was charged with murder alongside Ellis Heather, aka Rack5.
It was alleged that they had murdered Stephen Morrison, the brother of musician Morrison, the only white drill artist of any note in the UK. Girma and Heather had both been members of the 1011 crew, based in Notting Hill’s Colville Square, who had chart-topping rapper, Digga D, as their frontman.
After a trial at the Old Bailey, Heather has been convicted of murder and Girma has been found not guilty. The full details of proceedings can be read here – it is pretty astonishing how little coverage the proceedings have received, especially as the details are so lurid (for example, Heather stabbed Morrison under the influence of MDMA, a drug not known to encourage acts of violence.)
Girma gave evidence against Heather at the trial and has been held to have ‘snitched’ on his friend, but more compelling is the ‘self-snitching’ music video played in court, which found that Heather boasted about killing Morrison, which really doesn’t seem like a particularly wise thing to do.
Will Girma make a return to our Instagram reels manhandling some unsuspecting wildlife? We look forward to find out.
The Real Killer
Bruce Robinson, writer and director of Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, is back and better than ever, living in what appears to be one of the most spectacular and bucolic parts of England, and entertaining us all through the heat with some orchestral choreography of some very vocal cockerels and with a only very slightly bad-tempered description of his lifelong devotion to vanilla ice cream. He has always been endlessly interesting and carnivorous in both his interests and output, for instance when he got lively in front of a small film festival audience a few years ago, and then wrote a book about Jack the Ripper. And now, three weeks ago, he announced his intention to take off on ‘Innagram’, and he has certainly pulled through. He’s like standing in front of a lovely and cool fan on a very hot day.
Carts of Darkness
We greatly enjoyed stumbling back across this 2008 documentary following the lives of homeless extreme shopping cart racers out in the States. It’s a surprisingly heartfelt and sad story as well as being pretty bonkers and well worth the watch for the quotes alone: They don’t have shopping carts and hills in jail, That’s what they really take away from you.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi-f_J6hV-g
Hoggmanay
One of our real favourites from Issue 27 is now online for all to enjoy – the Guardian’s senior fashion writer Lauren Cochrane saluting the legend that was Pam Hogg.
Known to many simply because of her outstanding and extreme outfits as well as her presence on the glam party scene, Lauren’s piece digs deeper into the life of a legendary fashion designer, whose uncompromising vision, perfectionism and outsider status always kept her on the fringe of mainstream fashion. There are, of course, a great number of anecdotes which are too good to miss:
‘Hogg, who was living in King’s Cross, proceeded to tell all about the previous night, when she got picked up by the police for soliciting. Convincing the officer that she could prove she was, in fact, a fashion designer, she took them to her flat. She was then arrested for possession of a firearm and preventing a lawful and decent burial of a corpse.’
Buy Now, Pay Later
The heatwave is doing a number on all of us, but especially the Brits who bought a house in a hot country mistakenly assuming that the UK would never fit the bill. How wrong they were! It’s possible that an entire industry and its resulting reality TV programme is about to collapse. We are referring, of course, to A Place in the Sun, which Eve Webster not only watched, but actually lived when she worked for a brief spell on the Channel 4 series. It wasn’t an auspicious start (to insiders, it was known as APITS), but it proved a meaningful and fascinating gig. As the producer said, ‘It doesn’t have to be complicated. Think of this programme: two Brits go abroad, they look round some houses, if they like one, they buy it.’
Lovely Stuff
You could spend £23 on a pack of Malboro Lights from a west London convenience store or on two large glasses of house white wine in a mid-tier central London restaurant. Or you could subscribe to The Fence with the code LRB25 and get four issues of the UK’s only magazine delivered straight to your door.
It really is very good too as you can see from this wall of praise that we have made below from some of the most eminent names on either side of the Atlantic.
Who Is Running the Country?
Once again, Britain is between PMs, something that has become a remarkably common theme in modern British politics. In such times it is usually a comfort to think on that great British institution, the civil service who, come what may, keep the old ship afloat.
That is, it’s comforting to think that if you happen not to know anyone in the civil service. Plugged deep into the matrix as we are, we have no such luck, and recently we have been struck with the frequency with which dear friends in the service hit us up with daytime ‘wuu2’ texts; midday bootycalls for coffee that reveal the extent to which hybrid work is a cover for doing shit all. We’re not exactly work-obsessive over here, but it does get a little worrying when the work rate at an independent magazine and the backbone of the nation seem to be roughly equivalent. So who’s at the wheel? Maybe it is only Jesus, maybe it’s nothing more than hope…
Truly Essential
The Kingsland Road is the most cocktail-bar-laden place in London. Brixton’s phone-free Club Cheek really is worth a visit. Closing galleries in extreme heat should be forbidden. Ignore all cultural reviews in the Guardian and shut up.
No other London newsletter does it like our very own Capital Letter with everything you could possibly want to know about drinking, dancing, art, theatre and everything else in this horrendously wonderful city.
You should be reading it here.
It’s Blue, Actually
Andy Burnham’s home turf has had much good rap in the past two weeks, but not here at The Fence. In our ranking of ceremonial counties in Issue 26, Lancashire duly suffered for its ‘historic association with Manchester, the worst city in the country, perhaps even the world.’ If Burnham is on your mind, you might also be enjoying the competition of down-to-earth-ness currently playing out, which has been unexpectedly covered most doggedly by Russell Kane doing TikTok impressions of Burnham’s man-of-the-people routine.
In Case You Missed It
Mary Berry look-a-like enquiry.
What Keir Starmer eats for breakfast.
CeeLo Green’s fit checks are something special.
Having a cup of tea at the lido.
A reminder of Jimmy Mac’s drinking advice ahead of the big game tomorrow.
And Finally
The Rare Film Archive proves itself again as a wonderful repository for wayward B-movies. There’s some outstanding Italian fare on there, not least H2S (1969), a European tale of an alternative reality in which a very chic regime is promptly deposed by a legion of revolutionary students. We’re told it’s despotic by the streams of sheeple clad in white. The regime actually seems to be managed by a squad of young women playing sort of agents of the guard, but with jaunty sailor hats and mini skirts. At one point, the born-yesterday hero sits in a waiting room in anticipation of a medical exam led by a woman in stilettos on a seat that is just a naked mannequin. Then we see a few cuts of mid-century furniture before all the young people rise up, allowing the protagonist to run away and live in an Alpine igloo with a girl he met in the thick of political upheaval. This also proves fraught, but we won’t spoil the perfectly Italian ending.
There’s also some only fractionally less bombastic English stuff, too. Devil Doll (1963) follows the story of an American journalist, Mark English (it’s already getting complicated), set on exposing the tricks of the magician The Great Vorrelli. But, English quickly finds himself in a web of lies and stolen identities that emerge when the doll starts to make designs on his heiress girlfriend, Marianne. A good start, and an enjoyable trope, too. There are, of course, some immediate questions raised with the conceit, the most thorny of which being why an editor would send a journalist to do an exposé of someone whose career is predicated on the free admission of deception. But, no matter – it works for narrative purposes, and the first third is excellent. The best scene is maybe when the magician is on stage and makes the heiress girlfriend do a jive with a grave face. That she is under hypnosis is indicated by the X-ray camera on him when he asks her if she is a shy girl and a good dancer.
So much more on there, but if anything is missing, you can write in to the early-noughties-style forum pop-up on the home page. All niche suggestions are dutifully attended to by the admins.
Remember there are less than 20 of those token left and then it’s back to full price from midnight tonight. Subscribe here. We’ll join you next Tuesday. At the age of 100, Mel Brooks is older than sliced bread.
All the best,
TF