Off The Fence: Michael Barrymore Covers Coolio

And here are our most popular articles of the year

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter entering the festive spirit. We trust that you are all having a wonderful time, or, at the very least, are on your way to doing so. This is the penultimate mail-out of the year, and it’s been a real treat to see Issue 22 supplying cheer: Conrad Quilty-Harper has snapped it alongside a host of other titles at Good News in Berwick Street; here’s the magazine around the corner at Bar Bruno; now at Barnet’s oldest pub; paying homage to our art director in Wengen; in transit somewhere between Kings Cross and Edinburgh and at W H Smith Selfridges, the toniest outlet – by far – in their nationwide sprawl.

Please keep sending these photos through, either on socials, or to editorial@the-fence.com, and you can win a very smart prize, as has been detailed in previous newsletters.

If you haven’t already picked up Issue 22, then now is the time to do so, and you can get at it via the image below or sign up for the year. All orders placed before lunchtime tomorrow will be fulfilled before Christmas Day.

Let’s get it going, we’ve got a feast of links for you today.

The Zest of the Rest

Four issues, 90 articles, a beautiful new website and a tidal wave of newsletters – it’s been a bumper year for The Fence, and we’re very proud of everything we’ve published. Here are the most popular articles we’ve published this year, in descending order.

Kicking off with Gus Carter’s dispatch from the London Library, the clandestine haunt of the capital’s young bookish set (and a few eminent oldsters). Can you think of anything worse than living in Clapham and working in Canary Wharf? We sent Lotte Brundle to E14 to meet commuters shuttling between ‘The Deadly Double’. In the Cotswolds, a billionaire’s wife known by her employees as ‘Lady B’ has a burgeoning retail empire: Claudia Cockerell reports from the Daylesford Organic mothership. When not agitating upon artificial intelligence for the Press Gazette, Bron Maher finds the time to scour the capital’s fleshpots for hard views and tough truths. At the start of the year, he descended the stairs at Vault 139 – a sex club – to ask punters how they planned to vote in the upcoming General Election.

Ed Cumming has had a busy 2024. He had a cameo in Industry, which he’s been reticent to broadcast. He also found the time to finally meet his nemesis: his name twin, Ed Cumming KC, for a very long lunch at Kolae. It’s a very funny piece. Miles Ellingham and Cormac Kehoe struck the ideal partnership to profile Evgeny Lebedev, the tragicomic press baron and peer (lots of wonderful material couldn’t make it in, alas). One of the star features of Issue 21 is Max Daly’s long read on Clapton’s ‘Murder Mile’, in which some of the policemen and the gangsters involved in the turf war speak on the record for the very first time.

Over the last decade, the capital has become suffused with a filthy glamour. In the cover story from Issue 20, Clive Martin went in search of London Noir. Ella Fox-Martens hugged her boyfriend at Heathrow Airport. But it was the first time they had ever met. This is their love story. In third place is Francisco Garcia’s feature from the current issue. He spent months talking to the dwindling band of residents in Soho about what the future holds. One of the most extraordinary investigations we’ve ever run is in the silver position – Tim Wyatt threads a story of suicide, fraud and deceit at the heart of the Church of England.

And the most popular piece we’ve run all year? It’s Lotte Brundle for the second time, with the first piece she ever wrote for us: a dispatch from The Old Queen’s Head on Essex Road, a pub with a very, very famous local.

We have noticed that 11 out of 12 of the pieces are based in London. And would you believe it, but the most popular newsletter of the year was Joe Bishop’s defenestration of the Yellow Bittern and the most popular Instagram post was Kieran Morris’ ‘Small Plates-o-Matic’. There we are: what a gathering.

The Top of the Tree

It may have been a difficult year for the journalism industry as a whole, but a truly astonishing amount of brilliant pieces have still been published. Do have a look at the FT’s further reading collation and the Bloomberg ‘Jealousy List’ to load up on some tabs.

But for our money, the best article of the year was published all the way back in February.

Nobelists, Oblige

Some years ago, we asked a series of deeply silly questions of Nobel Prize winners, and we have once more harassed them, and they have generously replied. Without looking it up: is your father’s first cousin your second cousin or your first cousin once removed? Think about it…

Malcolm Muggeridge’s Failed Threesome

William Clarke has detailed some particularly repulsive acts of moral turpitude from London’s writers over the centuries, and the whole thing can be savoured on our Instagram account, as can the latest installment of 146 Questions, our landmark interview series. This time out, we’ve got Jacoby Shaddix, lead singer of Papa Roach, in the hot seat. Read everything we asked – and everything we didn’t have time to ask – right here.

On the South Col

In the FT’s further reading list, Robert Smith kindly writes ‘The Fence continued to be a reliable home for the best in British longform writing’, which really is the sort of thing we like to hear. We are aiming to close the year with 2,000 new subscribers, and are currently at 1,874, if you would like us to summit Mount Sub please do share the appeal, or if you’re on the tens of thousands (it’s that many now) of readers who enjoy this mail-out every week, and haven’t yet subscribed, then why not pull the trigger now?

In Case You Missed It

What’s it like working in a restaurant on Christmas Day? Róisín Lanigan Lime-biked to Chinatown to find out (this was Christmas Day last year: good things come to those who wait).

It’s a piece that everyone’s talking about: Mark Blacklock profiles Humphrey Smith, the owner of Samuel Smith Brewery.

A triple-bylined deep-dive into the smear campaign against Blake Lively from the NYT.

How does it feel when a global superstar breaks up your marriage? ‘Not great’ is the answer.

Madame Pelicot is the Person of the Year.

And Finally

While the 1990s are justly lauded for being a ‘cool’ decade with game-changing music topping the charts, it was also an era in which weekends were still ruled by what is nebulously termed as ‘light entertainment’. Cilla Black was cackling away to millions of households every Saturday evening, and then there was the figure of Michael Barrymore, on whose post-Y2K activities we will draw a discreet veil. His thunderous cover of the Backstreet Boys has been mentioned here before, and we would be remiss in not sharing it again:

But let us close out with another MB classic, in which he is joined by a gospel choir for a rendition of Coolio’s C U When U Get There. The comment section, as you might expect, is electric:

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That was the newsletter, all wrapped up. As it’s Christmas, we’re going to have a break till the weekend, when we’ll join you for the final newsletter of 2024, and then there will be a fortnight’s break after that. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all the rest of it. We wish you a Merry Christmas.

All the best,

TF