Madeleine Brettingham

Mar 13, 2024 | the-fence.com | Eve Webster |Jimmy McIntosh |Louis Elton |Madeleine Brettingham

Helping people find their place in the sun. It was my first day at my first job after leaving university, and my new manager gave me some advice. ‘You won’t make any money working in telly, ’ he told me, hands flounced apart (as if I needed any reminder of how little I was earning) ‘unless you come up with an idea and sell it to a channel.’ He took a drag of his cigarette. I had found myself working for the production company that makes the daytime television programme A Place in the Sun.

Mar 11, 2024 | the-fence.com | Jimmy McIntosh |Louis Elton |Madeleine Brettingham |Robbie Armstrong

In search of Betjeman’s arcadia In 1973, Sir John Betjeman produced a memorable BBC documentary, entitled Metro-Land. The concept of Metro-land was concocted in 1915 by the advertising poindexters at the Metropolitan Railway Country Estates, as a means to both promote their train line out into The Chilterns and entice potential homeowners to the developments that were springing up around it.

Mar 6, 2024 | the-fence.com | Louis Elton |Madeleine Brettingham |Robbie Armstrong |Harvey James

The world’s first vibes-based personality taxonomy system. SOME BACKGROUNDFor millennia, we have categorized people into taxonomies to explain who they really are. Efforts to understand personality have always appealed to external standards of Truth. Astrology and the enneagram find insight in the divine. The Myers-Briggs Test and Big Five Personality Traits claim to harness the science of who we are. Yet, the old systems are collapsing. Rigour and standards do not matter anymore.

Mar 4, 2024 | the-fence.com | Madeleine Brettingham |Robbie Armstrong |Harvey James |Fiona Mozley

A short story about a couple navigating life in their forties. When the nurse removes your bandages, she asks if you’re planning on doing anything with them, sorting them out, making them more presentable. She doesn’t say: you look like a burns victim, like you’ve been attacked by a bulldog, like you’ve been struck by lightning, reassembled, like a lunar crater, the surface of the moon. In truth you would have liked massive tits.