Off The Fence: Stakeknife's Dirtiest Secret
And we reluctantly salute our American cousins
Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a proud member of the newsletter family. We’ve got a particularly weighty edition for you all to enjoy this week, but first we’d like to announce that we have a fresh offering for you. Many people have told us of incidents of eye-poking and hair-pulling as readers battle for possession of a pristine copy of The Fence magazine. We are now able to offer a solution.
A group subscription starts at three copies per issue for £49.99 a year, which is a pretty mega reduction. This is the perfect deal if you run a truculent household or operate a boutique hotel or work for a newspaper with a billion-pound endowment headquartered in York Way. Get yourself a big box of Fences every quarter, give them out to your nearest and dearest, and watch your life change for the better.
If you’d like to buy some back copies, then you can dip into our little shop here. Should you want one of our ‘solitary saddo’ subscriptions, they’re available below at £29.99 for the year. (Will be interesting to see if abusing our readers works, please let us know if it does.)
Right. To business. We’ve got some bits on Stakeknife, Kate Middleton, Shane Gillis and a few tips, too. Enjoy!
Proper Photoshop Job
What is going on with Kate Middleton? Nobody really knows. We’ve asked a few people who make it their business to know about these sorts of things, and they all say they don’t know what’s going on at all. At all. Sorry! Which, to our minds, suggests that something really is afoot.
Looking at the goings-on at Kensington Palace, you can see that the former private secretary to the Prince and Princess of Wales, a civil servant by the name of Jean-Christophe Gray, has just departed the service, to be replaced by Ian Patrick, a former ‘diplomat’. Was it Patrick who signed off on the botched editing job? Who knows.
One thing that is strange, if you think about it, is that the royal family has so many leading actual diplomats, ‘diplomats’, soldiers and civil servants working for them, and all at the height of their careers. These people are, notionally, the best minds in Britain. Simon Case went from spying for GCHQ to cogitating upon the Irish border to working as a secretary for Prince William (as he then was).
If the royal family have no executive power or political influence – as we are so often told – why does the government allocate so many of the country’s ablest brains to work for them as bag carriers? Or do they have powers that the government still wants to hide?
Blue Moon, You Saw Me Standing Alone
So, Freddie Scappaticci then. A bully, wifebeater, tout, torturer, animal pornography enthusiast, serial killer, and most tellingly of all, so it transpires, a lifelong Manchester City fan. That’s right, the man they called ‘Stakeknife’ (‘they’ being the British intelligence services) had a soft spot in his black heart for Malcolm Allison and Colin Bell, and sadly, one must assume that the feared IRA gunman enjoyed every trophy of the Sheikh Mansour era. That’s not libelous to say, is it?
The Normie-Based Spectrum
Louis Elton has created an entirely faultless method with which to taxonomise all human personalities, ‘BETI’, the Based-Evil-Turbulent Index, and we recommend you have a look to see where you turn up on the spectrum. It’s also got some cracking illustrations from Miki Lowe.
Glued In
It’s Cheltenham season, baby – something we were completely oblivious to until this morning, when a tipster associate of ours came through with some horses for us, having parsed the runes that lay beneath this most ancient and barbaric of sports. Looking to jolt some excitement into our rainy Tuesday, we had a bit of an office flutter, and found our tipman to be right on the money.
So, because we love every last one of you, we thought we’d pass on a couple of our guy’s picks for tomorrow’s races. For the Coral Cup, Built By Ballymore’s your horse (not to be confused with reclusive light entertainer Michael Barrymore, who will not be racing at any time according to his press contact). And for The Bumper, you can’t go wrong with any horse that has a fancy French name, so stick your bets on Jalon d’Oudaries.
If you put the cost of a year’s Fence subscription on either of these horses, you could win hundreds, maybe thousands – or nothing. Whereas we can absolutely guarantee you that £29.99 gets your four fresh copies of the UK’s Only Magazine. So spend your money wisely, and if you do make your millions off the tips above, buy a sub and we’ll call it even.
It’s Actually Not Weird, Mes Amis
We trust the French's judgement on many important things: cigarettes, food, wine and make-up. Music, less so. Certainly if we go by Wikipedia's list of the country's Top 100 Singles of the 2000s. Nestled amongst the certifiable international bangers of the decade by Black Eyed Peas and Eminem are some deeply odd choices from our friends across the water. The number one choice being The Ketchup Song (by Las Ketchup, you remember them) is not even the weirdest inclusion on the list.
That gong goes to Alizée’s Moi... Lolita. The debut single from Alizée, which dropped when she was just 16, racked up over 1.2million streams in France. The translated lyrics to the song include ‘student below, tight jeans’ and ‘silent and a mouth that doesn't tell’.
A later hit from Alizée, which sadly did not make the Top 100, is called J'ai pas vingt ans, (English: ‘I'm Not Twenty’). Ceci n'est pas une noncé.
See You When You Get There
Coolio, the rapper who sadly died two years ago from a fentanyl overdose, is best remembered for his track Gangsta’s Paradise. One of his other hit tracks was covered by Michael Barrymore, with a full gospel choir in a BBC show in the 1990s. We have been searching for this clip for some time – it appears to have been under our noses all along. Anyway, without much further ado, here we are:
The Life Of Reilly
Do you want to read a dispatch about three drunken media lads stumbling around Zone 6, pretending to have a good time? What if we told you that it’s written by everyone’s favourite booze hound, Jimmy McIntosh?
The trio took the tube to Uxbridge to Betjeman’s hallowed Metroland, that suburban Arcadia now compressed by the A40, M1 and M25, and you can soak up the piece here. Partner it, maybe, with Betjeman’s original documentary from 1973.
In Case You Missed It
Britain’s best crime reporter Michael Gillard aims square at the Beeb, over some kowtowing to Nottingham villains.
Elon Musk has a charity. Turns out it gives a lot of money to [checking our notes due to sheer shock] Elon Musk.
Forteza Lafisi on the trials and tribulations of former child influencers.
Beverly Hills ain’t what it used to be: it’s full of squatters.
Filip Hadjar Drnovsek Zorko takes us on a mind – and vocabulary – bending trip through the world of pseudo-translation
And Finally
Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony celebrated a lot of outstanding films, and it was pretty funny, too. John Cena’s naked crab-like walk. Messi the Dog with his bow-tie. Jimmy Kimmel’s mean jokes. And, of course, Ryan Gosling’s magisterial performance of I’m Just Ken, which even if you’ve seen it, we’ll link below in high quality, as that is the format it requires:
Away from the bleakness of the Rogan Extended Universe, it’s a fertile time for primetime American comedy. Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinson are experiencing near-perfect runs across several projects, as are Rachel Sennott and Emma Seligman. Even habitually mirth-optional comedy institution Saturday Night Live has been in a rare current of recent form, with great guest turns from Nate Bargatz, Ayo Edebiri and Shane Gillis in the last few months. We’re also big fans of cast-member Bowen Yang, whose Truman Capote impersonation is a must-watch:
Sophisticated, cutting humo(u)r airing on a major broadcaster? In Britain, we have clenchingly unfunny Jongleurs clones and Footlights bores doing ‘political’ panel shows. Come to think of it, there are only two extremely funny people left in Britain – Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse – and they make a show every ten years and will be dead soon. Anyway, much to ponder.
*
That’s it for this week. If you’d like to email us about an order, then the best place to do that is support@the-fence.com, and if you’d like to send us a pitch or ‘talk shop’, then wing through an email to editorial@the-fence.com. This weather is a bit depressing so we will do our best to raise spirits next Tuesday. Until then.
All the best,
TF