Off The Fence: We've Found Britain's Worst Columnist
And MBS goes to the movies
Dear Readers,
Good morning, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter brought to you by the good burghers of The Fence magazine. Except we really aren’t burghers per se, rather a bunch of young-to-youngish hacks putting together a weekly mail-out in a Google doc. We’re not living that lavish.
Issue 19 being sent to design on Wednesday ahead of an early April release. You can be rest assured that we will drone on at length about its contents over the next six weeks or so, but we will just say – as we always do – that it’s the best and broadest iteration yet, with a particularly heavy-hitting investigation that’s taken more than a year to ready (standard behaviour for heavy-hitting investigations, you might say).
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Enough of that. Let’s get on with it, we’re kicking off with a piece on how London’s film industry is getting into bed with the Saudi soft power machine, courtesy of William Clarke.
I’m Ready For My Close-up, Mr Bin Salman
For a country that only legalised cinemas in 2018, Saudi Arabia has become a surprising hub for the film industry. And the UK film industry has been particularly eager to wet its beak, with a conspicuous outflow of talent from London to Riyadh. Amanda Nevill, former chief executive of the BFI, now sits on the board of the Saudi Film Commission while Neil Peplow, former director of industry affairs at the BFI, now heads up talent development at the NEOM media hub.
But the Kingdom has also made more discreet forays into the film industry. London luvvies might be surprised to find out that some of their movies are just one step removed from a media machine aimed at furthering the geopolitical interest of Saudi Arabia, and shoring up the interests of its ruling family.
Azimuth Post Production is a small operation based in Holborn. The company is credited for ADR work on the charming BAFTA-nominated romcom Rye Lane. Azimuth’s website (which seems to be down at time of writing) also showcases work contributed on Ken Loach’s Syrian refugee drama The Old Oak, also BAFTA-nominated, and the oddball Peter Strickland comedy Flux Gourmet.
But most of Azimuth’s credits are for post-production work on documentaries produced by their sister company OR Media, a documentary production company with offices in London and Riyadh. OR Media has produced a large number of films on the Middle East. Although ostensibly apolitical, the subject matter generally falls into three general categories. There are films about Iran, taking a broadly anti-government, pro-democracy line. There are documentaries about Islamist terrorists and international efforts to suppress them. And there are films about modern-day Saudi Arabia, with a particular focus on the Kingdom’s ambitions. A recent puff piece for Discovery UK, starring Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman on The Line, an eye wateringly ambitious megaproject in northern Saudi Arabia, gives a sense of the tone.
The chosen subject matter of OR Media’s projects, produced with the assistance of Azimuth, just happens to dovetail very nicely with Saudi Arabia’s current foreign policy interests. The editorial line attacks both Iran-backed groups such as the Houthis, as well as Sunni Islamism as practised by non-Saudi aligned groups such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban, while hyping up the ambitions of the House of Saud.
And a look at the paper trail of the two companies gives a sense as to why that might be. According to Companies House, one Abdulrahman Al-Rashad was a director of both Azimuth and OR Media until 2016. Al-Rashed is a figure with a long history in the Saudi media world. He served as the general manager of the Saudi state-owned news network Al-Arabiya for 10 years, and in 2015, he joined the board of SRMG, an MBS-aligned media company that is a key peddler of Saudi soft power in the West.
In 2023 the FT reported that SRMG had consulted media consultants about the feasibility of launching an English-language news service, to rival Al Jazeera, which is funded by the Kingdom’s regional rival Qatar.
A regulatory filing by SRMG on the Saudi Exchange in 2022 names Abdulrahman al-Rashed as still holding a direct stake in OR Media as of 2021, in relation to payments made by SRMG to the production company. But perhaps most intriguingly, given Azimuth’s London-location, is Al-Rashed’s links to Iran International. The Parsi-language media service launched in London in 2017, taking a pro-democracy, anti-Ayatollah line that has made it the repeated target of threats from Tehran, which has designated it as a terrorist organisation.
The sudden appearance and lavish funding of Iran International has led London’s intelligence community to assume it is directly funded by the Saudi Royal family. This is not the only detail linking Azimuth to Iran International. According to Companies House, the only current director of Azimuth Media is one Adel Abdulkarim, also director of OR Media. Adel Abdulkarim is presumably the same person as Adel Abdulkarim Abdulkarim, director and secretary of Volant Media, which owns Iran International.
Abdulkarim is a Saudi film producer, who has worked on three films produced by OR Media, including the company’s only feature documentary, which compiles Al Qaeda-shot footage captured by the Saudi security services. Based on these links, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Azimuth Media shares the same close relationship with the Saudi Royal family that Iran International enjoys.
Azimuth did not respond when approached for comment for this article.
It is unlikely to be news to anyone working in the UK media right now that Saudi money is flowing into the sector at an unprecedented rate. And ultimately, there is nothing inherently sinister about governments investing in film, particularly in Europe, where state subsidy has been propping up the industry for many decades. But the example of Azimuth Post Production shows that Saudi Arabia’s influence is unusually deep, pervasive and difficult to trace.
You can follow William on Twitter here.
Shane Smith’s Private Island
After years of rumbles and months of tremors, the earthquake finally came for VICE. On Thursday evening, groupchats and slack channels from here to the gulf were trilling with news that the quasi-Canadian media behemoth was shutting down. Not merely shuttering offices or laying off staff, but – it was claimed – shutting down their CMS, closing the site and deleting all material.
At this juncture, the content still exists on the site, although the backend has been closed, so it’s too early to know what will come of the house that VICE built. What is clear, is that the scale of this blow to jobbing journalists, most especially freelancers and underrepresented voices, is huge.
As reported in these pages before, the digital media ecosystem has long rendered dysfunction ubiquitous. There are many layers to VICE’s failures and foibles over the past few years, which raise them above even those peaks of incompetence. Among the best explainers of the collapse came from Cory Doctorow, who summarised it thus: ‘Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership’.
VICE was also, however, a vital entry-point for hundreds of British journalists, including two of our editorial staff, and at least a dozen regular contributors. It was, for over a decade, a major platform for good writing and good writers from non-traditional media backgrounds. We hope that people remember that alongside the various hijinks of their controversial three founders.
On The Cloak And Dagger Tip
We’ve published quite a few ‘insider’ pieces over the years, all of which hold up pretty well Henry Jeffreys told us what it was like to work as Russell Brand’s book publicist. Our publishing supremo gave you 12 Rules to Get Your First Book Published. A former staffer at the BBC gave amazing insight into how the Brexit TV debates where produced. A soldier who served alongside the Special Air Service explained why the fabled regiment are allowed to kill with impunity. This piece, by a governess who worked in Moscow for a series of oligarchs, is really very funny.
It’s a pretty good haul. There are a couple more crackers coming up in Issue 19. If you feel like you can do one for us – or you know someone who can – send through an email to editorial@the-fence.com. We’d love to hear from you.
At The Tate Britain
Jonathan Jones’ review of the William Blake exhibition at The Fitzwilliam Museum, headlined ‘Polymath’s Paintings are Outclassed by The Germans’ was only the second most embarrassing piece he filed last week. This ridiculous ‘pan’ of the Sargeant show, in which the beautiful clothes that Sargeant painted are shown along the paintings themselves, is part of an exhibition that is quite literally called ‘Sargeant and Fashion’.
Yet to Jones, whose only interaction with fashion seems to be wearing unsightly floral Paul Smith shirts, these amazing vintage clothes are ‘props’ that ‘belong in an attic’.You could say that the Guardian is the in-house journal of the London art world. It might help them – in quite a few ways – if they employed a critic who understood the basic precepts of visual culture.
The Catman Of Greenock
Everyone’s got a soft spot for a Scottish myth. Brownies, bugles, kelpies, the possibility of a prehistoric dinosaur somehow still living undetected in a Highland loch. But not everyone will know the tale of the Russian sailor who supposedly lived by the docks of an economically depressed port town near Glasgow, subsisting on rats.
Yes, he was known locally as the ‘Catman’ – a nickname you might expect. Robbie Armstrong went to Greenock, to see if he could tease out the truth of the story. You can read his excellent dispatch here.
Have You Seen Albert Reynolds?
We were a bit too young to really ‘get’ The Great Train Robbery, only catching the last vapours of the crazy trail that enraptured Britain for a good 40-50 years, as a senile Ronnie Biggs jetted back to Britain, to a cell at HMP Belmarsh and a series of exclusive interviews with The Sun newspaper. There are quite a few cracking shorts of ‘Biggsy’ – perhaps the platonic ideal of the likeable rogue – on the lam in Brazil. This excerpt finds him dancing to the samba in a bar in an England football shirt is, objectively, very pleasing:
But this documentary from 1966, just three years after the robbery itself, is an exemplar of the BBC at its best. From the landmark ‘Man Alive’ series, the stylishness of the camerawork adds to the excellence of the journalism on hand, as we learn how many of the coppers on the case cashed in on their fame.It ends with a very moving interview with Mrs Ethel Clark, who helped catch two of the train robbers, and who, having received her reward from the government, started a friendship with the tragic Jack Mills, the train driver who never recovered from a cosh to the head on 8 August 1963. As you might expect, it’s a peerless snapshot of a Britain changing in the white heat of the sixties revolution:
In Case You Missed It
It's been two years since Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine, and every major publication is pondering what the future holds for Zelesnsky and his compatriots. James Meek’s long-read is perhaps the best one we’ve read so far.
How a Kerryman called O’Shea Salazar left sleepy Killorgin for the highest echelons of the Sinaloa cartel.
A scintillating excerpt from Tom Burgis’ upcoming book, detailing in extraordinary detail how Mohamed Amersi bought his way into the heart of the Tory party. Enraging stuff.
Our erstwhile Fiction editor puzzles over the Tolkien obsession that lurks beneath Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia.
Ryan Broderick calls it: AI Search is a Doomsday Cult.
And Finally
The superb Train Robber vid that we feature above comes from a YouTube channel called ‘Fanedit’, who seems to be collating documentaries with the conclusive section of this newsletter firmly in mind. We were tempted to portion them out over the weeks, but we decided to treat you instead. This eight-part series from 1980 takes a year-long look at life in HMP Strangeways, with a level of access that would be simply impossible now (specifically the sixth episode, documenting days on the ‘beast wing’).
Needless to say, it’s not the cheeriest watch, but it’s totally gripping, all the way through.
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All the best,
TF
so who IS the worst columnist