Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that tops and tails.
Congratulations are now in order (to us) for the latest issue – 28! It is chock-full of fantastic reported features, golden eggs from our columnists, a lonely hearts page, fabulous fiction, dispatches from all corners of the country – and even a GCSE guide to help you through the exam season. Don’t say we don’t know how to treat you. Cover, standfirst, running text, bylines and illustrated advertisements to come, but in the meantime, remember to get your print subscription by landing on the large, orange button just here.
We are launching the issue on Thursday so everyone who subscribes today will get two pieces of post in a week from a quarterly magazine, which is really living life as it should be. Here’s a lovely image from the fiction section in Issue 28, which fills up the social media box on the CMS and also looks really nice too.
Some exciting news. We are delighted to welcome Alice Lindsell to the team – she joins Rachel Dastgir as an editorial assistant. Alice has written for Capital Letter and the Daily Telegraph and you should follow her on Instagram here.
And, to wet your whistle and summon your appetite, we present our weekly offering of a newsletter.
Sing Your Song
In Issue 11 (how time flies!) Luke Dunne told the story of Michael Flatley’s thriller, Blackbird, a cinematic venture that the tap-dancer wrote, produced, directed and starred in. While at one time the film was so impossible to see that it was more a rumour than a feature film, the whole thing has now been whacked up on YouTube, and very enjoyable it is too, a genuinely terrible film of the type that gets made all too rarely these days.
Look at My Tail
Did you know that there are real-life mermaids all across Britain! It’s absolutely true! John Nugent travelled across Britain to meet them, and you can bone up on the Ariel actuelles here.
Schism!!!!
The big ecclesiastical news is that we may have a papal schism on our hands. People have been excommunicated, words have been had, but for all the excitement it just doesn’t feelall that crazy. What’s happened to the modern world that we can’t even get a proper papal ruck going? Does being schismatic mean nothing??
Times were – those times being the 9th to the 12th century, of course – that papal schisms were proper affairs. Not only did we get full-on wars, but we had antipopes with brilliant names like Calixtus III, Anacletus II and even Anastasius Bibliothecarius, many of them backed by warring kings and emperors. And sure, this modern lark has numbers –1,500 or so priests, possibly as many as 200,000 followers – but where’s the grit?
Even the few recent antipopes, and there are more than you might think, have been a bit of a washout. A number of them have been, surprise, surprise, accused of certain abuses of their pastoral care and many others are rather uninteresting cranks. Aside from a few different claims to be the future Peter II, and what a claim that is, we here at The Fence feel the Catholic church needs to up its schism game and hope to see improvements pronto.
Neil the Seal
For those who remember (and miss) Freya the Walrus, we have good news. The important role of large aquatic mammals causing chaos in suburbia is being heartily taken up by Neil the Seal out in Tasmania. Of course there is hand-wringing that could be done, is he a threat to public safety, is he in fact, very lonely, etc, etc. We don’t really care. For our money, he’s a bloody great seal that, best of all, is terrorising Aussies, giving us all this fantastic content of them chatting to, and reasoning with the beast, in the best possible accent for the situation.
An Affair to Remember
It seems love is in the air across the Atlantic as New York was rocked by outlandish romantic declarations last week. On Wednesday morning a couple of Russian ‘rooftoppers’ climbed to the top of the Empire State Building, unfurling a Pinterest-worthy banner and getting engaged in the process – the entire incident wryly commentated on by a couple of onlooking air traffic controllers.
Not to be upstaged, two days later pop star Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce got married in front of over a thousand guests at Madison Square Garden – seemingly ignoring our editor’s always sage advice this weekend in The Spectator. Unfazed by taking over the city on one of its busiest summer weekends – rubbing shoulders with Fleet Week, the World Cup and the Fourth of July – cops armed with jauntily formatted binders shut down parts of Manhattan’s main thoroughfares for the event. A staple of any billionaire wedding, a smattering of surprise guests materialised, including Fergie, Hugh Grant, Sacha Baron Cohen, Sir Paul McCartney (who played a rendition of I Want to Hold Your Hand) and Zadie Smith – seen sharing a car to the ceremony with Lena Dunham and Andrew Scott. Adam Sandler was also in attendance, officiating the ceremony and singing an original song written for the couple that sources described to TMZ as ‘humorous yet touching’. Swift’s music of course was featured throughout, the singer-songwriter walking down the aisle to an acoustic rendition of one of her own songs, and the couple are said to have written their own vows, lasting twenty minutes each. Although this may have been Swift’s bread and butter, we can’t help but wonder what Kelce made of the task, given the viral output of his now neglected X account.
Frosty the Snowman
People like to say that being cool doesn’t matter as you get older, which is somewhat true, but anyway… the Swift-Kelce nuptials really did remind us how many incredibly uncool people there are currently in public life. So we thought we’d ask our readers who they think the least cool celebrity there is… our vote, of course, is for Tom Hiddleston, seen here in an advertisement for Ralph Lauren with a CGI bear. Send through all nominations and your detailed rationale behind them to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll tot it up in a future OTF.
Continued Archival Bliss
The sentence ‘the BBC Archive is a treasure trove of amazing old documentaries’ is so obvious that if you’d said it to us between 21 April 2025 and 8 May 2025, we would have responded ‘Is the Pope dead?’ the best version of an old phrase ruined by a rare instance of Vatican efficiency.
All the same, it is hard not to encourage, even order you to watch this one, titled The Last Days on Grande Parade. Here the Beeb made its way around the promenade of Eastbourne, finding the last of its hotels’ permanent residents. We meet Muriel McNabb, who has been occupying the same table for 17 straight years and Mrs Sybil Bloom, a remarkable woman who looks like a cross between Thatcher and Grand Moff Tarkin.
All of these studies have the perfect backdrop of these eerie seaside hotels, with their long-suffering staff and ambitions of their remodelling owners. One of the main hotels, The Burlington, was undergoing a remodeling to appeal to the exciting new ‘conference crowd’, a move that included a gold-coloured ‘Cleopatra Suite’, which the hotel manager assures the camera ‘will certainly have its origins in Egypt’.
As with the best of these archive pieces, it’s a wonderful mix of some rather funny types and a kind of peak-through-the-hands unbearable poignancy. When Mrs Sutherland describes selling off all her possessions and shows off the few knick-knacks she has left as ‘her treasure’ it’s hard not to feel a strange, sonder-riddled sympathy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgpK5YxqmDo
Sister Stuff
The Reform MP Sarah Pochin gave a speech on Thursday in the House of Commons detailing her mother being forced to give up a baby in a closed adoption process organised by the Church in the 80s, which Pochin only found out after her mother had died. A rare moment of interest for Pochin, who has become a slightly wayward advocate for women’s rights in Reform; last month, she encouraged England to continue doing well in the World Cup in the hopes it would stave off domestic violence. Anyway, the point is: what must it be like to realise that your lost sister is Sarah Pochin?
It’s not bad enough to have been a victim of one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in Britain – you now have to have a relationship with someone who gave a conference to TalkTV about being driven mad by seeing Asian people on TV. Her Instagram is a veritable treasure trove of troubling sister content, including some edited shorts of her walking around Runcorn Old Town lamenting the existence of Turkish barbers.
In Case You Missed It
It’s here and it’s the piece of the year. Gabriel Pogrund’s piece on George Cottrell might well end Nigel Farage’s political career.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s prison diary.
The only England-Mexico pre-match hype that matched how good the game was.
Those American football fans sure can ruin a good thing.
A street preacher fit for Róisín Lanigan’s description.
And Finally
Last week Penelope Keith – a TF-coded icon – died from complications related to cancer. Of course, everyone has been talking about her spectacular run on The Good Life and To the Manor Born, and with good reason, but there is a whole offering of morsels from her very long career on YouTube, including her fantastic advertising work. It’s not the first time we’ve spoken about actors and comedians doing adverts in this newsletter, but this is a particularly compelling pair.
For the Parker Lady Pen (RRP £9.95), Penelope Keith played a school mistress teaching girls ladylike penmanship at the ‘Seurat School for Young Ladies’. Sitting in front of a panel of mint-green flock wallpaper and wearing a Liberty-style, oblong, silk scarf, Keith beams down at 12 pupils from a comically wide desk, before leaping up and pulling a sheet over the blackboard to reveal the lesson of the day, also covering the last lesson, which apparently detailed a list of the best vintage Champagnes. But today, they are moving on to the importance of filling out and signing Daddy’s cheques – with a Lady Pen, of course. ‘Signatures flow with a flourish,’ Keith trills, doing her best quasi-Margot. ‘Chequebooks open, girls!’ Everyone obliges, pulling out sheets from the ‘Richman’s bank’ book. Only one hitch arises. ‘Madam, does one spell pence with a “c” or an “s”?’ Keith smiles knowingly: ‘I don’t think you need to worry about that, dear.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spTqlpekjmg
For slightly more wholesome fare, you might like Keith selling high-fibre soup for Heinz, showing her among a small coterie of children and a large cornucopia of organic vegetables. But, in our humble opinion, the Lady Pen reigns supreme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAUfFhO600
So we dismount from the bucking newsletter bull for another week, our hides hardened and are minds all shaken up. We can still think straight enough to remind you that we are pitchable on editorial@the-fence.com and willing to support you in your needs at support@the-fence.com, as long as its about the magazine. Bob Dylan once sparred with Sean Penn in his private boxing gym in Santa Monica. New Zealand’s has no native mammals other than bats.
All the best,
TF