Off The Fence: Choirs with Alan Bennett

And the hated Hiddleston returns.

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that aims to please and occasionally thrill. Life continues to be pretty busy at TF HQ, and we’ve got some exciting news about various expansions, merchandise and also a book announcement coming soon. But no mergers and acquisitions quite yet. An independent magazine can but dream.

Issue 20 has been seen in quite a dazzling array of locations: at a Bayswater sauna, on a French beach; outside one of the ugliest buildings in Britain; listening to some John Peel tapes; at a K-pop gig in Hyde Park; at the pub in Covent Garden; being trampled on by our pints correspondent’s kitten; being seized by a surly Greek cat in Patmos; at a hotel in Portland and providing transcendental pleasure at a famous pond. 

It’s really a very good haul, and our competition for the most winningest snap of Issue 20 doing ‘its thing’ on holiday or at home continues. You can either tag us with a photo on social media or send one in an email to editorial@the-fence if you’re feeling shy. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

A reminder that as we are celebrating five years in the print media game, we’re offering all readers 20% off any subscription (print, digital or both) using promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. Click the pic beneath to secure it, and if you don’t like clicking pictures, there’s a button for you, too.

To business. 

West End Confidential

Clive Martin’s cover story from Issue 20 is now live on the website, and it’s already proved a palpable smash with readers. It’s a series of peregrinations through the revolting, striving capital, searching for the ‘shadowland where villainy collides with ambition, eroticism, slime and glamour.’  

If you savoured Patrick Radden Keefe’s blockbuster piece on the Zac Brettler case, then we’re pretty sure you’ll enjoy this. Very few people can write about London like Clive can.

What The Bellhop Saw

London is stuffed with ghosts and ghouls clanking about in chains, much like you see in those pre-war cartoons. So it follows that there could be – and there should be – a 21st century spectre. Alex Calderwood, who was an American, died of a drug overdose in the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch in 2013, the London outpost of the boutique chain he had founded some years before. Calderwood, like many visionaries, was a deeply troubled man, and the legacy of what he built up is slowly crumbling, mired in bitter legal battles.

According to staff at the hotel, a presence can be felt outside the front steps of the hotel. The stereo system turns on and off at meltingly high volumes for six sharp seconds. There are muffled voices on the third-floor corridor where the owner’s body was found. Is Alex Calderwood the first Gen-X ghost? We sent Jordan Michelman to go and find out. 

Please Spare Us

For the latter part of the 20th century, the Olympic games medal table served as a shining symbol of American hegemony, with Team USA imperious at the top. That’s very much the vibe in play with NBC’s jaw-droppingly good prelude for the Paris games, helmed by Queen Bey herself:

Compare this, if you will, to the BBC opener, in which TF unfavourite Tom Hiddleston – for it is He – makes a series of hack observations over the weepy synths of Yazoo’s 1982 hit Only You. 

The BBC is facing a number of internal investigations at the moment. Working out how this travesty came to be broadcast should be the next report in the Director-General’s in-tray.

Uncle Banya

Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, some 300,000 Russians are said to have emigrated to the nation’s stolid southeastern allies, Serbia, settling predominantly in the beautiful, bizarre city of Belgrade. Roving reporter Camilla Bell-Davies has been filing copy from the former Yugoslavia for a host of publications, and brings us her latest here – a darkly funny dispatch following two young Russian refugees navigating their new city, one where attitudes toward the war have come to dominate domestic politics. You can read this jewel of the Issue 20 feature-sheet right here.

1 + 2 ≠ 3

Ever since Mr Michelin first ventured down the highways of post-war France, looking for taverns he could sell tyres from, his eponymous guide has held fine dining by the boudins. One star can change a chef’s fortunes, two can make them a millionaire, and three can push them into immortality, celebrity, or in other cases, to ruin. 

But what separates one from two, or two from three? Joe Bishop discovered the answer to this very question while panelling some of the city’s pre-eminent gourmand. With commentary from Sola’s Victor Garvey (*), Bibendum’s Claude Bosi (**) and of course, Andy Hayler, the Roger Ebert of turbot, Joe’s latest is a sparkling commentary on the capital’s restaurant scene, which you can read here. 

It’s All Gone Pete Tong

A number of tedious trend pieces have suggested that Brat summer is now officially over. Not so fast – have a brief gander at Charli XCX’s Boiler Room at Amnesia.

Want to feel old? Some of us here remember Boiler Room’s beginning almost 15 years ago, when surly DJs, almost always men, played to crowds nearly entirely comprising young men nodding their heads arrhythmically and silently to four-to-the-floor beats. 

Here, one of the biggest clubs in Europe is packed out by a crowd largely comprised of young women bellowing along the words to smash hits. It’s all very joyful stuff and the world is richer for it.

But for those of you who have made becoming middle-aged-at-30 your personality, then we commend to you this clip from 2014, which will never make you want to go to a festival or a nightclub or very possibly leave your house ever again:

A Game of Fives

As we may have mentioned in newsletters passim, we are in the midst of a celebratory summer, one which marks our fifth year in existence, and we’ve been listing our 50 best features every day, day-by-day, throughout July. 

Back in Issue 8, Sejal Sukhadwala went looking for the traces of an Indian restaurant in Putney with a very singular PR campaign. Sarah Haque’s beautiful personal essay on the horrors and delights of an all-girls school still reads beautifully today. Among other things, this is the article that spawned our first book. The amazing John Banville – one of the greatest living writers in the English language – wrote this sumptuous piece for us last December. Joe Bishop interrogated his Nipponophilia in the very same issue. 

Josh Mcloughlin provided the definitive map of Scouseness. Our biggest story ever? Mark Blacklock’s investigation into the paedophile who bought a school. Tim Wyatt’s longread into corruption in the Diocese of London is a story that has a lot more to it. A bit of levity? Here’s a funny piece about those weird lifestyle festivals. Secret Chef reviewed Giles Coren all the way back in 2020. Before the revelations of last year, Henry Jeffreys published this piece for us about what it was like to work as Russell Brand’s publicist.

It’s a pretty good list, no? Remember, we’ve got subscriptions starting at just £15.99 with the promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. Sign up now and get it over with.

Warm Riesling at Hatchards

It’s nice for any author to see that their book has escaped the ritual beatings of the review cycle, and found its way to the safe harbour of being a ‘summer read’. It’s lovelier still that the only two books we’ve recommended in our newsletter this year – Sophie Elmhirst’s Maurice and Maralyn; Orlando Whitfield’s All That Glitters – have been handed this dainty assignation by the team at the Economist, in their roundup of the year’s best books to date.  

We said it then and repeat it now: both books are an absolute delight – buy Sophie’s here, and Orlando’s here. And if you’ve got a book coming out that you think we’ll like and want to recommend to our readers, feel free to send us a copy through the usual channels. 

In Case You Missed It

Is Jeremy Bamber innocent? Here are 17,000 compelling words on the subject from Heidi Blake

The 100 Best Books of the 21 century – a list that is largely correct.

A brief history of the toilet. 

‘The continuing war in Gaza ushers in a new age of immorality’: a scintillating op-ed from Nesrine Malik.

The witty sensualism of noted cat lover, Karl Lagerfeld, as reviewed by Adam Thirlwell.

And Finally

Longtime readers will know that we carry something of a soft spot for that little-known UNESCO Site of World Heritage, Westminster Abbey. 

So imagine our delight when we came upon this three-part BBC series helmed by Alan Bennett. It’s simply titled The Abbey, was filmed in 1995, and almost seems precision-engineered for this section of the newsletter. 

There is nothing so vulgar as a story in the series – it’s just 180 minutes of Bennett poking around a series of buildings over a non-sync narrative.

It’s from the glory days of television when TV producers could do what they wanted – whether that was setting up huge lighting rigs in densely populated areas, or filming a middle-aged man gazing wistfully at a crowd of departing teenage boys while commenting on their ‘careful languor’.

It’s a riveting watch, and you can dive in here:

But if you want to make an evening of it and watch it interactively – a family viewing, say, in which everyone competes to perform the best Alan Bennett impersonation – then the whole three-parter is available on iPlayer.

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That’s for this week. If you’d like to speak to us about an order, then you can get in touch at support@the-fence.com and we’ll get to you promptly. Enjoy this glorious weather and keep to the shade. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday…

We’ll be back next Tuesday with another bumper edition. Until then.

All the best,

TF