Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a weekly newsletter that now has 7,500 subscribers, which really is a lot. On to 10,000!
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It’s the longest day of the year tomorrow, so we thought we’d give you a bumper edition, and we’re introducing a new series ‘On The House’ – where we give ideas away for free. Plus, we’ve got the usual bevy of tips, gossip and simply unbeatable YouTube clips.
Passports, Please
Christopher Zietek, 67 years old, and Anthony Beard, 61 years old, were jailed last month for the sort of caper that will have a film producer licking their lips, where the two elderly crooks provided fraudulently obtained passports for other criminals.
But there’s no real slapstick here: they helped murderers and drug dealers evade justice. Some of the biggest names in organised crime, too, like Christy Kinahan, and the Stephen Lawrence murder suspect, Jamie Acourt.
Zietek’s real name is Christopher McCormack, and he is something of a Zelig-like figure in the underworld, an armed robber with associations to the Adams Family, and as this jaw-dropping report by Michael Gillard details, an ability to manipulate the Metropolitan Police.
We’re looking forward to the long-read on Zietek/ McCormack – if any journalist is brave enough to try and talk to him.
A Diverse Portfolio
Odey Asset Management is no more, but its proprietor’s bizarre hiring practices – ‘earls and girls’ – (in the words of one onlooker) have prompted us to look at other boutique financial houses and who they have manning the desks.
Now, there’s no suggestion of any malfeasance at Ruffer LLP, but we can’t help but notice that of its 50 or so employees, three of them are children of British Army generals. Jonathan Ruffer has no military service himself, so can anyone tell us why he is drawn to the progeny of the officer class?
Hugh Grant’s Last Dance
As some of you will be aware, we are going to have some articles briefly featured in our ‘Spotlight’ section, where you can read some of our choicest cuts, and all for free. So from Issue 13, we’ve got our lead feature, ‘Blair’s Blokes’, in which we profiled the fruitiest rotters who rose to prominence in the Age of Tony.
We’ve got Francesca Gavin on Damien Hirst. Peter Oborne on David Blunkett. Neil Kulkarni on Noel Gallagher. Fergus Butler-Gallie on Fathers 4 Justice. It’s lean, mean and available to read here.
Brand Management
And here’s another piece from the back issues, in which Henry Jeffreys recounts what it was like to work with Russell Brand, tousle-haired shagger, when he was on the precipice of global fame. Now that he’s become a YouTube controversialist, whinnying on about Tucker Carlson, ‘COVID propaganda’ and, for some reason, the global sperm count, it’s amazing to think how famous Brand was, a perennial tabloid fixture who charmed himself into Hollywood and a brief appearance as Mr Katy Perry. Everyone fancied him and everyone thought he was funny, which is odd, given his present circumstances.
Back in 2007, Henry worked as Brand’s publicist for his first foray into the publishing world, and gives the inside scoop on the comedian’s strange proclivities and serpentine allure.
Light Our Fire
If you’re new or newish to what we do, and you’ve enjoyed those two pieces, then why not subscribe at only £14.99 for the first year. And if you’ve been reading us for quite a while now, then there’s no time like the present to dig your hand to purse and stump up for a subscription, you’ll get Issue 15 and Issue 16 within a fortnight of each other, which really is very exciting postage frequency for a quarterly magazine.
People are signing up at a decent whack now, and if you want to help us grow, expand and become a permanent fixture on the newsstand, then subscribe today.
Archer Street Shuffle
As promised, we are starting an occasional series, titled ‘On The House’, in which we give an idea away for free, because we're generous types, and because we want to see the thing get made. Now, many of you will have seen the discussions around Soho nightlife, the decline of which has even been featured in the Daily Mail, and is often the topic of a bleating Twitter thread by the junior shock jocks at GB News. Why does W1 shut down at midnight? What can be done?
There’s an idea that a couple of ad executives living in multi-million pound Georgian houses on Meard Street have managed to deaden Soho’s pulse. As ever, it’s more complicated than that – 23 percent of the neighbourhood’s residents live in some form of social housing, and the area is still home to immigrant communities, many of whom work in the restaurants and bars in the streets below.
At the same time, the area has been extensively redeveloped by two or three major commercial landlords, who have extensive holdings throughout the area. Long-term independent businesses are shuttering or struggling. In many ways, not much has changed since this 1981 documentary, Sex in Soho: People Live Here Too, which is fascinating portrait of an area when it was loaded with clip joints and brothels, rather than bubble tea emporiums and streetwear shops:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTZ-4Tge90
Maybe it’s time for an enterprising TV producer to make a 2023 version? Interview the landlords, speak to the residents, and make a balanced programme of London’s ‘naughty’ square mile.
Lifting The Drawbridge
Long-time readers will know of our dedication to public service journalism, and with the weather heating up something horrible, we asked our Twitter followers for the cheapest pint in centralish London.
We had some excellent responses: The Tarmon on Caledonian Road has sub-£4 lagers (though we imagine quite a few of you would cross the pub’s threshold with some degree of trepidation). More approachable, perhaps, is the RCA bar in Kensington, a dreamy little space abutting Hyde Park, and with subsidised negronis and £4.40 pints of Guinness.
For south Londoners, there’s the promise of octopus salad and £4 pints of Sagres at Max’s Snack Bar in Brixton. But for cheapish pints in W1? We’re still on the lookout. Any tips, any ideas, please send them through to editorial@the-fence.com – don’t be a gatekeeper.
It Wasn’t Like A Movie Anymore
The latest documentary series from James Bluemel, is now available in five parts on iPlayer in the UK (or, indeed, anywhere providing you have a little VPN handy) and we’d recommend it. There have been a few sweeping appraisals of The Troubles lately, not least those tied to the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, but few have managed to put across the story like Bluemel’s first-person chronicle of events from the ground.
As with his previous series, Once Upon A Time In Iraq, accounts from pundits and politicians are eschewed entirely, and the focus is instead on, for want of a better word, real people. Seated facing camera, they tell the everyday stories of growing up in a place beset by conflict, offering perspectives that reveal the ordinary and extraordinary character of those thirty years, with many of those interviewed speaking publicly for the first time. The series deploys an extraordinary catalogue of archive footage to illustrate these stories and the results are, as you’d expect, often harrowing.
But there is also life and humour, not least in the glorious tranche of footage relating to Northern Ireland’s nascent punk scene, the emergence of which proved an unlikely source of community cohesion in Belfast, just as the very same music was being lambasted in England as the worst of social evils. In its final chapter, the series manages the best attempt we’ve best seen of making the Peace Process seem like just that – a process, and one that was a good deal harder than newsreel footage of documents being signed and ballots being cast might suggest.
Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland is not a deliberation over politics, statecraft or military strategy, nor a dirge of death statistics rattled off like football scores. It’s a people’s account of The Troubles that gives context to the human beings who survived, and were lost to, an often wilfully misunderstood conflict.
Thatcher On The Pole
Kudos to friend of the mag, Clive Martin, who has collated this most astonishing series of screenshots. The late nightlife impresario, Peter Stringfellow, was known for his eponymous stripclubs, grey ponytail and all-year-round tan. Before he died at the age of 78, he maintained an active blogging presence, uploading photos of celebrity guests with dry, amusing comments. Here’s the Iron Lady herself.
The whole thread is available to read here, and there are some hysterical highlights – Lee Ryan and Lemmy, together at last – but also, as you might expect, some slightly NSFW snaps.
In Case You Missed It
Dani Garavelli has written an extraordinary piece about a new prosecution for the 1992 murder of Sunderland child, Nikki Allan, and the wreckage wrought in the 30 years since.
LiveScience’s Sascha Pare asks, and answers, the real big question of the week: Why are orcas attacking boats?
An excellent Twitter archivist has uploaded just some of the insane things Val Kilmer said about David Mamet on the DVD commentary for a mid-00s schlockbuster.
What lengths would you go to find a hidden bagel? GQ’s Katie Notopoulos meets Trevor Rainbolt, the wizard of Geo-Guessing, to find out.
Over at Air Mail, have a gander at Paul McCartney’s snaps that capture the start of Beatlemania.
And Finally
Goddamit, we’ve done it again. Promises were made, but they’ve been broken – we’re off the wagon with another fag-ash strewn clip of London As It Was, this time courtesy of Chris Coates, who has brought this amazing short film to our attention, and so, we bring it to yours. Here we have Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, filmed in 1968:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tqCT6IQH38
A parody of the Jacques Demy classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, this 30-minute film is, despite the film’s title, filmed entirely in Hampstead Village. The songs are written by Les Reed and Barry Mason, who between them had written such bonafide pop hits as It’s Not Unusual, Delilah, and Leeds FC chant Leeds! Leeds! Leeds! Their efforts here, however, are dirge-like and the film’s narrative nonsensical, but it’s worth watching to admire what a sterling job the bookish NIMBYs of NW3 have done.
Hats off to Melvyn Bragg and the gang – there can’t be another district of London with its architectural fundamentals so well preserved. There’s some glorious shots of Parliament Hill, and Judy Huxtable plays a love interest whose winsome loveliness transcends the film’s surrounding doggerel. She would marry Peter Cook just five years later, from which one might discern that men who ran satirical magazines were considered a much more eligible class of bachelors back then, but we couldn’t possibly comment.
On that baleful note, we will end there, and we look forward to joining you again next week. If you would like to speak to a member of the team, please get in touch at editorial@the-fence.com – we’re always open for tips, pitches and the odd chit-chat. If you’d like to speak about an order, then send an email to subscriptions@the-fence.com and we’ll attend to you promptly. Enjoy the weather and we’ll speak soon.
All the best,
TF