Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that doesn’t mind hot weather as long as there is air conditioning. Which is, alas, not in supply in Studio Mathias Clottu in Islington, which is where we join you from on this ludicrously hot day.
Important news: Issue 28 is being sent to print tomorrow and will be with subscribers soon. What this means is this is your last chance to update your address on your account on our website so you can receive the magazine safely and securely. You can be assured that this is the best one yet, and we look forward to telling you more about it next week, and in great detail.
The photo competition has been won by an entry from the Sycamore Gap, but that hasn’t stopped people sending in photos of the magazine, and here it is taking in the view at Lake Malawi.
There has never been a better time to subscribe to the magazine. If you sign up today, you’ll get Issue 27 this week, and then Issue 28 thereafter – two pieces of post in seven days from a quarterly magazine. We’ve also got another five codes giving you 25 per cent off a year’s subscription. Just enter the code LRB25 at the checkout.
With your subscription presumably purchased, we can move on to today’s events. We’ve got much to say about Starmer and Burnham and some wonderful content from Brian Sewell. But first, off the US of A.
La La Land
The broadcast of this World Cup has had much to hate. The hydration breaks are an obvious money grab that has seriously impacted the flow of the beautiful game, most of the sponsors are ludicrously evil in some form or another and we are constantly forced to watch Gianni Infantino get paid to watch football and cosplay as an Ozempic-addled Kingpin.
None, however, have quite captured so much rage as ITV’s token American correspondent, Alexi Lalas. His annoying, uninformed opinions (shouted at full volume) have so excised British minds that the subject has been tackled in a near 2000 word piece for the Guardian by Aaron Timms.
We get it. The man is an idiot, a prime FOX plug, and it is a genuine pleasure to watch Henry and Ibrahimovic hate to be around him – Forget the words, nothing was funnier than them refusing to pass the ball to him in a fun studio kick-around. But we would argue that sometimes ignorance is a virtue, and if Lalas has one saving grace is that his lack of comprehension around whether certain English words are broadcastable or not gave us this moment where he described James Corden as a ‘full kit wanker’ live on air. It remains Lalas’ only accurate take of the tournament, but hey, England have been proving for 60 years now that one great win is enough to secure a reputation.
Denys Lasdun’s Lament
It’s been a pleasure to see the Carbuncle Cup make the rounds of the internet. Intriguingly, the Farnham ventilation pipe has become a sleeper success on our Instagram. The sweet fumes of the train station flow directly back onto the roof in a loop of pollution that is strangely moving. With warmest thanks again to all nominees and nominators, and to chair of judges, Cath Slessor, who wrote about the importance of the CC here.
Everyone Says We’re Great
The coming of a new issue always gives us a moment to pause and rudely congratulate ourselves on what a great job we’re doing, to be humble about it. More earnestly, it is such a pleasure to see so many of you subscribing to the print magazine, we really do feel it is going from strength to strength.
And indeed, it is not just us who think so, as this illustrious list of praise would suggest, with a lovely recent addition from William Boyd whose wonderful fiction is set to appear in the print mag shortly.
All of this is to say, SUBSCRIBE! It really is remarkably inexpensive, and an offering that will please any reader of this mail out immensely. It also makes a phenomenal gift and with discount code LRB25 it’s only a shade more than £20 for the whole year.
They Call Him Nostradamus
It’s all over baby blue for Keir Starmer who can nonetheless stand tall as the longest serving Prime Minister since Boris Johnson, falling just sadly short of the two-year mark that has proved so difficult to break over the last few years. Indeed, having another strong, brave candidate fall so swiftly to the political sword has had an oddly reassuring quality to it, as our politics draws ever nearer in resemblance to our reality TV. We look forward to future seasons of I’m A Prime Minister, Get Me Out Of Here!
But what has excited us most is that the seemingly inevitable coronation of the King in the North is one that has been predicted for months now by none other than Harry Hill. The legend of TV Burp has been enjoying a nice online resurgence with his really rather good and typically strange comedy podcast, The Harry Hill Show. One of its features which was just funny some months ago, but now looks prophetic, is his bit of getting his guests to stand up and do ‘The Andy Burnham Dance’. Both Nish Kumar and Ed Gamble have given their renditions, and we look forward to the first dance done with AB in the driver’s seat. Until then, ‘Pipe the Buttercream!’
Naughty Boys, Willing Boys, Lascivious Boys
This publication is now long in the tooth, but in its salad days, it was given to delineating its inspirations and influences, such as this essay by Jonathan Coe on British political satire or this piece by Zadie Smith, entitled ‘Fences’ (!), which came out in the wake of the Brexit referendum.
Truth be told, it wasn’t just blockbuster essays by boldface names that made us want to start a little magazine. What we really needed was a place to share Brian Sewell videos. Clips of the late art historian’s 2005 TV series are perhaps the most popular things we’ve ever shown. Entitled Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour, it follows the provocateur as he retraces the steps of the 18th-century English aristocrat, discovering the crumpled ruins and secret pleasures of Italy.
There are many riches within. We are not alone in hailing the segment from the Pitti Palace, which you can remind yourself of below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RsSnuqe8JU
Then there is the Venice episode, where Sewell’s snobbery reaches a truly operatic scale, as he attends a masked ball, ‘full of bitter resentment’ to be surrounded by ‘fat lesbians’.
It’s come to our attention that the rest of the series has now been deposited on the World Wide Web. It’s all a bit rich, and dare we say, a touch middlebrow when consumed as a whole, but we would be totally remiss in our duties if we did not direct you to this clip of our dear, departed friend outside the Colosseum. Enjoy.
Cringe Crawl
All this talk of Andy Burnham has us thinking about Manchester and a very different crawl than Burnham’s to number ten – when Joe Bishop toured the city’s cringest spots, including bars that resembled ‘a child’s idea of an adult’s indulgence’. As we have slowly learned in real-time observation of Burnham’s activities in the city, all our ‘highfalutin London posturing about Manchester simply doesn’t work in 2025. The capital has been morphing into a version of this for the last decade, with its blank new builds, expensive pints and nightclubs with interactive clay pigeon shooting.’
When You’re Tired of London, You’ve Forgotten to Read The Fence
Our other newsletter offering, Capital Letter, continues to go from strength to strength. The last issue (#33) featured some serious gold including a guide to travelling around Southwest Asia and North Africa without leaving London, courtesy of the ever-popular Sama Ansari Pour, whose Instagram you have almost certainly come across. It also featured more great advice from G’s Selections for the best places to get your music fix in London (have you heard of Shai Space?) as well as a wonderful art review from one of Issue 27’s feature writers Phin Jennings.
It also included some history of Lucian Freud’s time in London which included the prophetic sentence, ‘David Hockney looks set to die in France.’
You should be subscribed and you should be reading it.
Lady Hale’s Brooch
While it easy and correct to blame David Cameron and George Osborne and Jeremy Corbyn for the events that led to the Brexit vote ten years ago, Steve Bray’s tragic megaphoned intervention at Starmer’s final press conference yesterday reminded us that the FBPE clan had their part to play in leading us to our current situation. In Issue 5, Séamas O’Reilly wrote a sterling piece on Remainiac delusions that sadly reads all too clearly today.
Stunting in the Bando
The phrase ‘cuckooing’ sounds innocent enough, but in contemporary parlance refers to when a gang of drug dealers exploit a vulnerable adult and take over their living space to shift their supply. Which is exactly what happened to Will Kaye, who was living in an HMO in Tottenham with a certain Julian, a 52-year-old poet and schizophrenic alcoholic. It’s one of the best personal essays we’ve run in a while and is available to read here.
What’s Happened to Andros Townsend?
Does anyone know what’s going on with Andros Townsend? The former footballer turned pundit was a pretty standard, lower-table side player who would turn up in an England shirt every couple of years. But his online presence has become increasingly strange from his newfound obsession with chicken feet (possibly as a replacement for a series of ‘pills’ he was taking every day), his shirtless promotion of raw beef, musings about whether sunglasses are an implied affront to god and whatever the hell this is. (We did consult our editor-at-large and priest Fergus Butler-Gallie on this matter but the results were inconclusive). Has the man always been like this?
In Case You Missed It
David Hockney’s first boyfriend, Peter Schlesinger, has an Instagram account that is a veritable goldmine.
Andy Burnham’s arrival in Euston.
Andy Burnham’s AI arrival at Number 10.
An important drinking game for those watching the World Cup.
The 42 reasons why Sir Keir Starmer failed.
And Finally
In these politically turbulent times, we often like to turn to silly, slightly informative, videos as a means of feeling better about things. And a real recent favourite has been the work of one Chris Spargo. He makes some really wonderful, non-political, easily enjoyable stuff. Did you know, for example, that Britain used to have many nationalised pubs, with a civil servant behind the bar, until Ted Heath got rid of them in 1971. Chris visited one – The Greyhound – in Carlisle. Likewise, Chris has made videos getting to the bottom of the ‘Peter Pan clause’ and why it is that we have colour-coded milk. He’s got 300,000 odd subscribers, it’s a nice time.
All of this is perfectly lovely and un-noteworthy. In this relaxed manner, we recently booted up a video of him discussing the video game SimCity 4. Centred around simulating building a whole city from scratch – like Magnitogorsk – the game is fundamentally based around US urban planning systems – unlike Magnitogorsk. Chris asked the question, what would it look like if it used UK systems? And why would this prove to be a disaster? We were quite contented with this quasi-informative pap, until the end of the video, where he said he had a special guest he’d been chatting to, who might know a few things about this. And then the camera cuts. And it cuts to Keir Starmer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hgJ2gKE09s
What makes this bizarre jump scare even more bizarre is that it came out just five days ago. For whatever reason, Starmer’s comms team, who clearly are (were?) the best in the biz, felt this was a core market to target. So it comes to pass that one of Keir Starmer’s last acts as PM was to appear in a video about city-building video game. He has truly left a remarkable legacy.
Well, go on, get! Get out of here! We ain’t got nothin’ more for ya, ya dirty rotten scoundrels. But do of course come back again next week and remember to subscribe to the magazine, we do love you so dear readers. Until we parachute into your nefariously dull inbox next week we wish you the best and remind you that we can be reached on editorial@the-fence.com for pitches and support@the-fence.com for your other needs. The only distinction between a herb and a spice is what part of the plant the item comes from: herb=leaf, spice=everything else.
All the best,
TF