Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off the Fence – we’ve only been apart from you for 72 hours. A long weekend of separation, now over. We’ve got Issue 19 landing on Thursday, Brexit border checks permitting. So this is your final chance to make sure your address is correct on your account on the website if you are a subscriber. If you’re not, it’s also the last opportunity to bag yourself two pieces of post in a week by signing up for the print – you’ll get Issue 18 and Issue 19 the same week. Very exciting stuff indeed.
Earlier this year, we ran a competition in which we asked readers to send us the most engaging photo of Issue 18 ‘out in the wild’. While there were a number of outstanding entries, the winner is Nick Pearce, who supplied this snap of the magazine enjoying a mountaintop vista in Kazbegi, Georgia. Congratulations, Nick. The bottle of Bollinger is yours. Please get in touch with us to claim your slightly overpriced but extremely delicious prize.
Today, we’ve got some choice cuts on SATC, Irvine Welsh, Eric Bristow and our close personal friend, Paul Mescal. But first, a scoop of a different form.
The News At Ten
Millions of pounds of Netflix bounty have been lavished on Scoop, a dramatisation of the BBC’s infamous Prince Andrew x Emily Maitlis b2b set from November 2019. Andrew is played by the devilishly handsome Rufus Sewell, and Gillian Anderson plays Emily Maitlis. The reviews have not been kind, and from our point of view, should have been a whole lot crueler.
An anonymous Newsnight insider we spoke to found the whole charade bemusing. ‘Emily has been completely stitched up,’ they tell us, in regards to the portrayal of the presenter as some sort of Thatcheresque figure. ‘She’s witty and jokey and cynical and energetic, not geriatric and husky and earnest and cold’.
Our man on the inside continues: ‘None of the Newsnight behind the scenes stuff was remotely believable. Stuart Maclean is rather gentle, not some hard newspaperman. Esme Wren is normal, and not prone to cheesy, rousing speeches.’
Sam McAlister is the producer who made the programme possible, and is portrayed by Billie Piper in the mini-series, who plays her as an outsider, railing against the smooth patrician forces of the Beeb. In our source’s telling, ‘she’s slick, a former barrister, who fitted in well. I recall the deputy editors always saying nice things about her and her bookings.’
Anyway, there’s a chance for the record to be corrected, as there will be another screen adaptation of the Andrew interview coming soon, imaginatively titled A Very British Scandal, starring Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson. Will it be any good? Probably not.
Tell Us What You Know
Over the last few years, we’ve published quite a few ‘insider’ pieces, all of which have held up pretty well indeed. There are some real highlights: Henry Jeffreys laboured as Russell Brand’s publicist during his noughties pomp; a bone-chilling article explaining why the Special Air Service can act with deadly impunity; a trenchtop view of the carnage that came with working at an infamous digital media company; some cacklingly funny confessions from a Moscow-based governess who tutored a host of minigarchs and ‘12 Rules to Get Your First Book Published’, written by a secretive figure who a number of authors are desperate to unmask.
And there are more coming in Issue 19: there’s a superlative slice of writing from someone who manned the pans at an iconic (a genuinely iconic!) restaurant, and also an informative and highly amusing screed from an anonymous film producer.
But we want more. If you work in an industry that is misunderstood by the public, or misrepresented by the media, and you’d like to issue a correction of sorts, then send through an email to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll take it from there.
Let It All Hang Out
We’ve got an absolutely cracking piece for you here, in which Bethany Elliott interviews a number of streakers, including the legendary Erika Roe. You will learn what encouraged these middle-aged exhibitionists to disrobe in front of tens of thousands of strangers.
Streaking was very much a ‘thing’ back in the 1990s, and now, in these straitened times, it’s very much less in evidence, for a number of quite obvious reasons. Still, what larks were had.
Big Is Moving To Paris
One of HBO’s most beloved offerings – at least for millennial women and the men that love them – has finally landed on Netflix. Sex And The City, in all its glory, is now available on Gen Z’s favourite streamer. The pre-9/11 depiction of New York is about as good as TV gets, but some of the 94 episodes of the show have aged worse than others.
Things start out strong with Carrie comparing dating in 1990s New York to The Troubles, the 30-year conflict in which 3,000 people died. ‘Maybe the fight between marrieds and singles is like the war in Northern Ireland’, she muses. ‘We’re all basically the same, but somehow we wound up on different sides.’
This geopolitical analysis appeared in the third episode ever aired, and things pretty much go downhill from there. In season three Samantha moves to the stylish Meatpacking District but is distraught to find it populated by transgender sex workers (our phrasing, not hers). She engages in a turf war for a neighbourhood she calls ‘trendy by day and tranny by night’ and throws water over them.
Later, Samantha gets into a lesbian relationship and her closest friends say it’s only because she’s run out of men. Carrie – a sex columnist – says she doesn’t believe in bisexuality, and refuses to wear a wedding ring because she only wears ‘ghetto gold, for fun’. The day the zoomers discover these episodes will be the day Twitter spontaneously combusts.
Two Paths for the Novelist
You would think that writers wouldn’t be much use on Instagram, the visual social media channel for the beautiful people, but you couldn’t be more wrong. There’s Hilton Als, of course.
A couple of legendarily hedonistic novelists are tripping the light fantastic over IG, and doing so in very different ways. Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is still not slowing down at the age of 65, and is posting really quite sweet photos of him and his friends dining, raving and travelling all around the world.
Jay McInerney, the former ringleader of the Brat Pack, also eschews Twitter for Instagram, where he publishes photos of his trips to the best restaurants in the world where he drinks the finest bottles available to humanity. Which vibe do you prefer?
All Of Us Strangers, Apparently
We have reason to believe that there is a man in the Cotswolds pretending to be Paul Mescal. Punters at The Bull in Charlbury this weekend reported sightings of a man with an Irish accent looking shifty by the bar. He later engaged in conversation with a group of women speaking to them via only their dog, and encouraged the general assumption that Ireland’s hottest sadboi actor was nestled in the picturesque Evenlode Valley for a decidedly unwild Saturday night.
Things were complicated somewhat by the fact that the demonstrably real life Mescal posted on his super-secret finsta account (@bigbreadpedlar) that he was in fact spending his Saturday night reuniting with director Charlotte Wells – who cast him in A24’s Aftersun – in what appeared to be an American city and not a sleepy civil parish in west Oxfordshire.
There are two possibilities here: one, that Mescal, one of the world’s most wanted men, posted the photo to detract from his real whereabouts because he simply wanted a rare quiet pint. Two, that a brunette man who can do a reasonably convincing Irish accent is using our collective Mescalmania to pull. Have you spotted an itinerant hunk in your local? Do let us know.
In Case You Missed It
Gurle Talk: Mary Wellesley looks at the various etymologies for the female body.
Luke Mogelson’s latest Donbas dispatch tracks a drone commander commanding a battlefield from his basement bunker. One of the best pieces of 2024 so far.
It’s time to book the flights to Turkey, lads: the great John Phipps digs into the devastating effects of finasteride, the anti-baldness drug.
Lachlan Cartwright, once muckraker extraordinaire, turns his guns on the Catch & Kill campaign that paper engaged in on Trump’s behalf.
It feels like climate scientists rarely come to the table with urgent good news. We’re sorry to report no buck to this trend, as they’ve just registered the single largest jump in temperature ever measured.
And Finally
Nowadays darts is a young man’s game, led by precocious 17-year-old superstar Luke Littler. But it wasn’t always glitz, girls and glamour. Back in 1979, Mr Darts was 22-year-old ‘Crafty Cockney’ Mr Eric Bristow. Bristow died in 2018, aged 60, after a heart attack in Liverpool’s Echo Arena, after making World Number 1 a record five times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA1WDB29hrw
But before all that he was the subject of this documentary, Arrows, by John Samson. A 30-minute short, it was released as a sort of teaser trailer for the 1980 British gangster film The Long Good Friday (which is, as the name might suggest, mainly about the IRA). There is of course no suggestion that Eric Bristow was himself in the IRA, or involved in gangland London.
He is merely, as you can see here, just very good at darts.
We hope you enjoyed this particular iteration of the newsletter, we’ll be back at some point this week to launch Issue 19 and all the contributors within. It’s really by quite some distance the best one yet, and we are going to tell you all about it very soon. We hope this buffet of treats will tide you over for the next few days. Until then.
All the best,
TF