Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that more often than not is sent from Soho, but this time is dispatched from Islington, as the editorial team are currently gathered at Studio Mathias Clottu, finessing the final touches to Issue 19. We shall say only this: it looks very beautiful.
We haven’t let a little thing like finishing a magazine get in the way of giving you an outstanding iteration of this mail-out. Not at all. Today, we will satiate the gossip-hungry among you all with a superior banquet of top-tier intel.
Before we get into all of that, it has come to our attention that Issue 18 is now sold out at many of our major stockists. Now if you want to beat yourself a dash to the shops – and bag yourself a copy in the bargain – then we really do recommend subscribing to the print magazine at the link below.
Right. We’ve got some bits from Mark Blacklock about the new Groucho Club in Yorkshire – some members of the TF editorial team were there at the weekend, and observed Darren Grimes dominating the smoking area – how’s that for glamour? And we’ve got some other tasty morsels too.
Heading Down T’Grouchie
The Groucho in Wakefield? Are you seriously fucking with me? The truth is, it’s a stroke of genius on the part of the Hauser and Wirth cru who now own the Groucho. They’ve picked up a magnificent Palladian mansion in the middle of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, one of the finest collections of sculpture in the world. It sits in an arcadian, Capability Brown-designed valley, with signature manufactured lake and follies, and is one of the greatest places in the world, as I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen for the past two decades.
Most reporting locates it in Wakefield, already home to the Hepworth Museum and a northern focus for art, but Bretton is actually just off Junction 38 of the M1, some eight miles from Wakefield. Bretton Hall, the building the new Groucho will occupy, used to be the outpost of the University of Leeds’s performing arts programmes: the League of Gentlemen all studied there. Jamie Dickson, editor of Guitarist magazine, was also there in the 1990s: ‘It may be that the place sits on a hedonism leyline.’
In his second year, Dickson lived off-campus in the village of Bretton itself, more traditional Yorkshire than the YSP, it's safe to say. ‘While unloading a van in the small hours, after a gig, I was assailed by a coal miner who lived across the road from our music student digs. I just had time to see him swing the wooden end of a hammer at me and deflect the brunt of the blow, cleverly, with my neck. There then followed a tense but ridiculous chase around our garden, where he pursued and cornered me to deliver a long monologue about what a parcel of twats we were, which included the memorable line: “I’ve seen ye smokin yer ‘ippy grass – well I’ve done more drugs than you can even fookin’ imagine!” As it happened, I could imagine quite a lot of drugs.’
Groucho Club members – the ball is in your court.
You can follow Mark on Twitter here.
Quick, They're Hiring!
Another quiet week for the royal family. Somewhat surprising then, that they’re advertising for a (crisis) comms assistant via Indeed. It is understandably full-time, but as the role is only billed as 37.5 hours per week we doubt that the new recruit will be in any position to help quell the ever-growing tide of public-facing shitshows. The job description reads: ‘The reaction to our work is always high-profile’. No shit. Who wouldn’t want to be at the centre of a worldwide media firestorm for the princely sum of £12.74 an hour?
In the 'About You' section for prospective applicants, the essential criteria includes ‘an eye for detail [...] including proficiency in copy editing’. Skills in photo-editing are not mentioned. However, if the late Queen's rating on Glassdoor is anything to go by, they at least used to be a decent company to work for.
Not So Silent In The Library
We had a brilliant dispatch from the London Library this week. Despite one member claiming that they'd ‘need to think about whether there is any universe in which [they] would gossip’, it is absolutely packed full of juicy tidbits. Gus Carter has really gone above and beyond with this one, and it shows. Having done thePlaybook & Popbitch double bill already, it's well worth your attention. At a bargain, you can read Gus’s insight into this elite literary hang here, free of charge – which is incidentally £565 less than an annual membership to said institution would cost you.
This Must Be The Piece
If you like A Place in the Sun, we have the dispatch for you. Eve Webster blessed us last week with her account of her time working on said daytime distraction, and it's delightful. Her time in rural Hertfordshire, where she worked as a researcher, was thoroughly well-spent as it has furnished us with this brilliant piece. Take a well deserved holiday from whatever it is you're doing, and feast your eyes on it here.
Pret? More Like Prat
It seems the sandwich giants have finally got wise to the glaring loophole in their subscription service. Currently, it's £15 a month (for new sign ups) for five coffees a day. The financially savvy among you will have already calculated that this means, if you share your QR code with four of your most caffeine-starved friends and have a WhatsApp group chat to keep track of how many coffees have been redeemed, you can each have a burnt-tasting flat white a day at the absolute steal of just under 10p. Alas, they have changed their policy. From the 18th onwards, the golden era of 10p coffees will come to an end as, from then on, you will have to be logged in to your Pret app to access your QR code. Boo! Another victory for what the terminally online are calling ‘late capitalism’.
The Cabbies Trust It
If you’re enjoying The Fence, you should try The Knowledge. It’s a short, sharp and seriously entertaining daily newsletter that condenses all the most interesting stuff from news sources around the world into a five-minute read. The best bit? It’s totally free. Sign up by clicking here.
Minister For Gossip
A pretty credible narrative for what has happened to Kate Middleton/ the Princess of Wales have circulated in the mediaworld recently. Who’s the leak? Is it a chatty courtier? An impoverished member of the aristocracy? Or is it a former Prime Minister who was renowned, during their tenure in Downing Street, for spilling the royal family’s many secrets? Who amongst us knows…
The Marquess in His Momain
You might’ve heard a fair bit about the Cholmondeley family in the last week, for reasons that the good folks at Mishcon de Reya will not allow us to go into. Never mind – there’s plenty more about the residents of Houghton Hall that we can dredge from that lovely well we call ‘the Public Domain’. Take 1997’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, the debut directorial effort of the seventh Marquess, the former David Rocksavage. An adaptation of Truman Capote’s semi-autobiography, scant few clips remain of the Marquess’ noble efforts: we can only find a naff trailer, and then eight minutes from the film snipped seemingly at random from the lost tapes themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D30YHsrY7ZY
There’s plenty more that any amateur sleuth could pick up amid 30 errant minutes of their lunch hour, but another fun tidbit from Vanity Fair: the Marquess bought his first place in Paris with François-Marie Banier, a home they’ve boasted of entertaining Johnny Depp in (presumably pre-cancellation). Banier, a photographer and socialite – two occupations that really make easy company, in our experience – might be known to long-time society snoopers as the man who swindled L’Oreal scioness Liliane –ettencourt out of literally ONE BILLION EUROS. The courts smacked him with a four-year suspended sentence and a €375k fine, which, you’ve gotta say… worth it?
Cider With Fergie
Our editor-at-large brings news from Cheltenham’s ‘St Patrick’s Thursday’, where it was a triumph of the football managers. Highlights of the day witnessed by our man in Gloucestershire included a victory for Harry Redknapp’s phonetically spelt horse/accountant, ‘ShakEmUpArry’. Redknapp’s post-win interview was as sublime a piece of Arry-ism as we’d ever heard. ‘Me and Fergie, right, we used to send the players out ten minutes early, pop back in and watch the races. Lavverly days they were.’ Harry’s H.E. Bates-style turn into reminiscence was delivered at such breakneck and incomprehensible speed that one punter dashed out of the Jockey Club’s Champagne Bar under the impression that the race had started and the commentary had begun.
The real winner of the day was Sir Alex Ferguson. A cool £1.2 million in the Ryanair chase with his horse – presumably named by the ghost of Paul von Hindenberg – ‘Protektorat’. The cash will have to be split between co-owner, the Teletubbies magnate John Hales and, of course, put towards hospitality for his guests on the day: pints o’wine enthusiast, Big Sam Allardyce, and Tyrone off Corrie. And people say this country’s finished.
In Case You Missed It
TF features editor, and hunky Irishman, Séamas O’Reilly reviews Netflix’s latest inhuman Hibernian romance-drama.
Anand Gopal gets incredible access to Al-Hol, the massive Syrian prison camp run by Islamic State.
Antonia Cundy pens this searing investigation of abuse and drudgery within Opus Dei institutions.
Frederick Kaufman lands the probing profile of the week for Harper’s. with this fascinating look at the life and times of ‘QAnon Shaman’ Jacob Angeli-Chansely.
Phoebe Philo breaks her silence over at the NYT.
And Finally
Most people can tell you where they were on 9/11. Mark Wahlberg was thanking his travel agent. Dana Carvey was filming the most insane scene in cinematic history. Princess Margaret was having a stroke.
James Cameron, on the other hand, was having lunch on the deck of the Titanic, leading to two seconds of quite incredible footage from his film Aliens of the Deep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyW_sA9AI14
Emerging from the craft looking visibly confused by the chatter he’d been hearing over comms, he greeted the growing mass of crew who’d come to meet him with ‘What’s this thing that’s going on?’.
Astoundingly, the person on hand to give him the news was none other than Bill Paxton, leading him to deliver it in the most Private Hudson manner imaginable. ‘Worst terrorist attack in history, Jim’ he says with the strained gravity of a galactic marine, ‘two separate, hijacked commercial jets’.
It got us thinking about notable moments of news being broken on film. Like these young scousers hearing about Bill Shankly’s retirement by Tony Wilson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dGkgjeRqkk
Perhaps it’s a sign of the inveterate navel-gazing beloved of such pampered press elites as ourselves, but we can’t help being intoxicated with such clips. So, we’re putting out a call to readers to let us know of other, similarly excellent moments of discovery committed to film. In lieu of passing these on at the door of a submarine, moments after our ascent, please send any and all submissions to the usual address – editorial@the-fence.com
That’s it for this week, and we hope you enjoyed it all. If you’ve got a query about an order, please email support@the-fence.com, and we’ll attend to you promptly. Lots more exciting pieces in the pipeline, more of which anon. But until that time…
All the best,
TF