Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Dedication

Introduction

1 The Beginning of Things

2 The Gosforth

3 Ghost Town

4 Celibacy and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll

5 Lunch in the Penthouse Suite

6 Four-Letter Comic on Public Cash

7 Onward Virgin Soldiers

8 The Fizzing of the Blue Touch Paper

9 A Ton of Money

10 An Inspector Calls

11 The TV Comedy of the Nineties

12 Chocolates? Maltesers

13 A Night at the Welsh BAFTAs

14 If It Ain’t Broke. . .

15 Pftt! Pftt! Pftt!

16 The Rabbit Hunter

17 Honk if You’ve Shagged Catherine Zeta-Jones

18 A Tale of Two Parties

19 A Minor Problem with Our Reservations

20 Me 1, Martin Peters 0

21 You Can’t Tie an Ice Cube to Your Beard

22 Funnier than Petrol

23 The Case of the Flying Bin Liner

24 The Leaving of Fulchester

25 The End

Appendix of Viz Cartoons

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Praise

‘Chris Donald has written a brilliant book . . . an enthralling story . . . and as you’d expect from the creator of Billy the Fish and Roger Mellie, it’s also extremely funny.’

The Guardian – The Guide

‘If you haven’t read Chris Donald’s excellent book about that excellent magazine, get your copy now while stocks last.’

Evening Standard

‘Donald is lucid and engaging, and he’s affably disrespectful to the celebrities he meets when his life turns (relatively) showbiz.’

Q Magazine

‘The inside track on the why, who, how and what for of Britain’s greatest publishing phenomenon’

Loaded

‘a very good read’

New Statesman

‘Clunky’

Time Out

Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of my mum, Kay, who would not have approved.

Also to my dad, Jimmy, and my wife, Dolores.

Oh, and ‘hi’ to my kids. Hi kids.

Introduction

Way back in 1992 Viz publisher John Brown suggested I write a blockbuster book telling the story of our magazine. And what a remarkable story it would be. In the space of a few years the tatty rag I’d started from my Newcastle bedroom, with a print run of 150, had grown to become the third best-selling magazine in Britain, with an astonishing circulation of 1.2 million, outselling Woman’s Own, Cosmopolitan and Hello! Only the Radio Times and TV Times sold more copies. Viz was a publishing phenomenon, revolutionizing the magazine market and making household names of Biffa Bacon, Johnny Fartpants and Buster Gonad. Its social effects had been dramatic too, launching words like ‘oo-er!’ ‘hatstand’ and ‘hairy pie’ into the national vocabulary, and paving the way for the great 1990s chauvinism revival through politically incorrect stereotypes like Sid the Sexist and the Fat Slags. Viz had even pre-empted the chronic decline of TV broadcasting standards through the creation of Roger Mellie the Man on the Telly.

As the founder and editor of Viz I had enjoyed a remarkable, rags-to-riches, roller-coaster ride of against-all-odds achievement and outrageous controversy. I’d won publishing awards, offended gypsies, been invited to tea by Prince Charles, and been taken in for questioning by officers of New Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch. Along the way I’d gained incredible insights into the world of light entertainment as I launched, almost single-handed, the hugely successful showbusiness careers of Harry Enfield and Caroline Aherne, to name but two. I’d caught my wife up to no good with Keith Richards in Peter Cook’s attic, I’d wined and dined the delightful Catherine Zeta-Jones, and I’d seen John Leslie’s cock in the showers at a celebrity football match. By any standards the book would have been a sensation – a bean-spilling, blockbusting, number-one best-seller.

But I turned to John and I said, ‘No’. I didn’t want to write a book at that stage. I didn’t need money – I was already a millionaire. I drove a BMW, holidayed at Sandy Lane, and bought ridiculous children’s bedroom furniture from Harrods. And I didn’t want to write a book that would crassly hit the shelves while Viz was at the peak of its popularity. Unlike Geri Halliwell and England rugby skipper Martin Johnson, for example, I don’t believe in the opportunist, cash-in autobiography. I prefer to see a fuller picture, a retrospective view. For me the most interesting part of Brian Clough’s autobiography would not be the glory days, the championship victories and European Cup success. I’d want to read the bit where he ended up asleep in a neighbour’s hedge, pissed as a fart. And if I was reading Rod Hull’s autobiography I wouldn’t want to hear him brag about knocking Michael Parkinson off his chair in the 1970s. I’d want to know what the fuck he thought he was doing up on that roof.

Unfortunately Rod Hull’s book can never be published, but I’m hopeful this one will. Because now that Viz has reached its twenty-fifth anniversary, and Roger Mellie has had a few problems with his own TV aerial, this seemed like a perfect time to write it.

Chris Donald

January 2004

CHAPTER ONE
The Beginning of Things

We were not rude kids to begin with. When I was ten my family moved to a nice terraced house in Jesmond, a leafy suburb of Newcastle. At the bottom of our new garden was a quiet road where we could play football relatively undisturbed by passing cars, and just across the road was a railway line. On the first day in our new home I joined in a game of football with some of my new neighbours. We’d not been playing for very long when the game suddenly stopped and everyone leapt up onto the fence alongside the railway. Not wishing to be the odd one out I joined in. Suddenly there was a loud throbbing sound from behind the trees and bushes to our left where the railway emerged from a cutting, and a filthy diesel engine crawled slowly into view, a hazy plume of black fumes rising above it. The iron railings in my hands vibrated as the train struggled up the bank, and as it passed us everyone shouted out the number written on the side of the driver’s cab. ‘8592!’ they all said. Naturally I joined in. ‘8592,’ I said, although I didn’t know quite why. From that moment on I was a train-spotter.

Coincidentally this was 1970, the year that The Railway Children movie was released. But there was no old gentleman waving at us from the last carriage – ours was a filthy goods train heading for the Rowntree’s sweet factory at Fawdon – and life for the railway children of Lily Crescent wasn’t quite as exciting as it was in the movie. There were no landslides or disasters to be averted. Instead we passed the time putting coins on the track and watching them get squashed, or smoking cigarettes in an old platelayers’ hut up the line. And rather than steal coal from the station yard and give it to my poverty-stricken mother, I stole Coke bottles from the back of the off-licence adjoining the railway and returned them the next day to collect a sixpence deposit.

The Bobbi figure of our gang was Justin, the eldest and by far the most sensible train-spotter in our street. Alas, he looked nothing like Jenny Agutter. He was snotty-nosed, bespectacled, and had rather greasy hair. Needless to say he wore an anorak, a blue one with toggles, hood and an array of commodious pockets. Justin liked all sorts of numbers, not just train numbers. When we played cricket in the street he kept score, worked out the batting averages, bowling figures and run rates. He administered our local Subbuteo football league, all three divisions of it. He also organized weekly visits to Newcastle Central station and Gateshead engine sheds, as well as outings to more exotic locations, like Cambois.

Train-spotters have always had a bad press and I don’t want to add to that here. Most of the criticism is born of ignorance. Think of train-spotting like fishing. You sit and you wait, often for hours on end, for something to happen. Yes, it’s boring, but as with fishing that’s the whole point. When a train finally appears, one you haven’t seen before, it’s every bit as exciting and fulfilling as catching a fish, but with the obvious advantage that no fish are harmed in the process. It’s a perfectly healthy and harmless pursuit.

Train-spotting also provided me with an escape from home life, which could be a little tiresome at times. My dad wasn’t wrongly imprisoned for spying, but my mum had suffered an equally cruel injustice. In 1963 she was diagnosed with the incurable disease of the nervous system, multiple sclerosis. Her condition was gradually deteriorating and we’d moved to our new house by the railway in anticipation of her becoming totally wheelchair-bound. The plan was that Mum and Dad would live entirely on the ground floor, which left me and my two brothers with the upstairs to ourselves.

My big brother Steve was a bookworm, an eccentric, and led an isolated, antisocial life in his bedroom, building robots and reading vast quantities of science fiction books. Steve was a bit like a robot himself, entirely logical in his thinking, and with no apparent emotions other than anger. When I first watched Star Trek it was a revelation. ‘That explains it,’ I thought. ‘My big brother is a Vulcan.’ Steve had a logical, emotionless take on everything, and a total disregard for other people’s feelings. He got into enormous rows with my dad over tiny little things, like milk jugs. Steve believed that at breakfast time the milk should be poured directly from the bottle onto the cereal. My mum and dad liked it to be served from a Cornishware jug. ‘Clearly it is more efficient to pour the milk directly onto the cereal from the bottle thereby negating the need to use, and subsequently wash, a second vessel,’ Steve would say, deliberately flaunting his intellect and vocabulary in order to bait my dad. Dad’s argument would be less cogent but more forcefully put. ‘Listen, you clever bugger, it’s my bloody milk, it’s my bloody jug, and it’s my bloody house! So I’ll do what the hell I like.’ These pointless rows would kick off once or twice a day and would often spiral out of control. Sometimes crockery would be thrown and furniture broken, and Steve, who simply could not let it lie, would end up having to be physically restrained. He was like a Dalek spinning out of control. Meanwhile my dad was like a desperate Frankenstein, wondering what sort of monster he had created.

Dad often bluffed that he was going to call the police to ‘sort Stephen out’, and during one particularly violent argument he actually kept his promise. I’d gone outside to get away from it all and was playing football when a police car screeched to a halt outside our house and two burly police officers hurried up the path. ‘Look! They’re going to your house,’ said Tinhead, Justin’s excitable little brother. ‘Oh, it’s probably nothing,’ I mumbled, and urged him to carry on with the game.

My younger brother Simon sat that particular argument out inside the airing cupboard and was able to give me a detailed report on the police raid later that day. Simon had no interest in train-spotting, or in picking pointless arguments with my dad. He was a big fan of Dr Who and American comics, and was also involved in a local theatre group. I got on reasonably well with both my brothers when we were alone together. We all shared a similar sense of humour; an ironic appreciation of Peter Glaze off Crackerjack, for example. I think that came from my dad’s side. My dad Jimmy was always a joker and he constantly used humour to cope with Mum’s illness. He introduced us to Laurel and Hardy and the Goons, and before we had our own telly he’d take us to a friend’s house once a week to watch The Morecambe and Wise Show. Dad also found George Bailey very funny. Bailey was a local TV sports reporter who wore false teeth and Dad would fall about laughing as he read the football results. He was forever laughing at people. Jesmond was a trendy, middle-class suburb, full of CND-supporting, Citroën-2CV-driving families, and Dad took great delight in poking fun and laughing at our ‘lefty’ neighbours. He was always giving people funny names too. A long-haired art lecturer who lived along the street was ‘Buffalo Bill’. Then there was ‘Mrs Eating Rolands’, one of our larger neighbours. And for some reason Dr Ian Paisley, the Northern Ireland Unionist politician, was always referred to as Ian ‘Have a Banana’ Paisley when he appeared on TV. Dad’s parents were from Shieldfield, the neighbouring working-class suburb, and from what little I remember of them they had the same sense of humour. Nana Donald took to calling my uncle Jack ‘Lord Shite’ after he got himself a job as chauffeur for the Lord Mayor and started dressing in fancy suits.

From my mum’s side all three brothers inherited an ability to draw. My mum Kay was an artist who had worked as a window dresser in Fenwick’s department store during the 1950s. After giving up her job to start the family she set up her own business, Kaycrafts, making children’s toys. But the MS stopped her from sewing and stitching so she had to give up the business. Instead she buried herself in voluntary work, becoming an active campaigner for disabled people’s rights. As co-founder and secretary of the local branch of DIG, the Disablement Income Group, she fought long, hard and successfully to get state benefits paid to disabled people.

Home life settled down a little when Steve, or the ‘Queer Fella’ as my dad had taken to calling him, left home and went to art college in Bournemouth. At the time Steve was more renowned for his drawing ability than either me or Simon. He’d been given a set of Rotring pens one Christmas and specialized in drawing humorous, slightly smart-arsed cartoons. The only one I vaguely remember involved a Roman soldier, a man holding a gun and a punch-line featuring the word ‘anachronism’. I didn’t get it. Simon and I were more into sound comedy than drawing. Around 1975 Dad got us a music centre for Christmas and we recorded our own comedy radio versions of Doctor Who, Grandstand and Farming Outlook. We would have tried others but these were the only programmes we had the theme tunes for in our record collection. Dad didn’t let any of us read comics. The Beano and the Dandy – along with ITV and any kind of sweets – were deemed to be ‘rubbish’. As a treat Dad would take us to the local health food shop, to buy peanuts, and to the library where he encouraged us to borrow books. I loved books, me. I didn’t read them, I just loved them. I judged books purely by their covers. I’d often take out Heidi, in German, because I liked the cover. The only books I actually read were Tintin books. The drawings were beautiful, colourful, detailed and yet so simple. Equally important, the covers had a uniformity in their design. On the back of the Tintin books there was a list of all the other books in the series, and that appealed to the train-spotter in me. I liked things to be uniform, ordered, numbered and in series.

In November 1975 I launched volume one, issue one, of my very first magazine. It was called the Lily Crescent Locomotive Times and was targeted specifically at train-spotters living in Lily Crescent. I typed it – very hard – on my mum’s typewriter using multiple layers of carbon paper to replicate it. Features included a list of engines recently spotted in our street (for three years I kept a log of every locomotive that went past), a report on a recent trip to Chesterfield and a column from my ‘Heaton Carriage Sidings Correspondent’, a friend called Jim Brownlow.

Jim Brownlow’s family moved from Blackburn to Newcastle around 1973 and Jim was deposited into my class at Heaton Comprehensive School. On his first day I managed to strike up an awkward conversation with him about Preben Arentoft, a Danish footballer who had recently been transferred from Newcastle to Blackburn. We were both football fans and Jim and I quickly became friends. A few weeks later, when I felt I’d got to know him well enough, I let Jim in on my dark secret – that I was a train-spotter. Being a train-spotter wasn’t something you talked about in a large, inner-city state comprehensive like Heaton. Jim came along on our train-spotting outings but he was never totally committed to the hobby. I think he was more interested in the social benefits of train-spotting. Yes. Train-spotting is a very sociable hobby. Sitting with a group of mates at the end of a railway platform for eight hours at a time – with no TV, no radio, no computers – does wonders for the art of conversation. Trains didn’t really enter into it that much. We would just sit there, huddled together at the end of a platform, or on wasteland in Gateshead overlooking the engine sheds, philosophizing, making jokes and talking absolute nonsense.

Jim and I were a bit more socially aware than the other train-spotters around us. We spent as much time observing our neighbours as we did looking at the trains. Obese couples in their thirties or forties with massive lunch boxes would sit and train-spot together. There were veteran former steam-spotters in their fifties, their anoraks covered in dozens of train badges, every one worn with pride, like a medal. Then there were the next generation, high-tech train-spotters, platform yuppies who yelled numbers into Dictaphones instead of writing them down. Audio-enthusiasts with tape recorders who’d stand alongside the locomotives recording the sounds they made. And of course there were the dodgy-looking train-spotters whose attentions seemed to waver between the trains and the nearby gentlemen’s lavatories. You had to watch out for those ones. All of them seemed oblivious to the reactions they got from the general public, blissfully unaware of the disdainful looks being aimed at them from inside passing trains. Jim and I had an overview of it all. When a crowded train went past we’d always hide our notebooks and sidle a discreet distance away from the hard-line anoraks.

At school Jim and I tended to be loners, slightly too weird to fit into the social mainstream. We hung around with other misfits too. One was Paul, a goose-stepping Hitler fan with a swoop of black hair and, for a very short time, a swastika painted on his school bag. Another was John, a child actor whose life had become a living hell since he’d appeared in a Sugar Puffs advert. And a third was a strange boy called Chris Scott-Dixon. Scottie was short, plump, freckled and wore Michael Caine glasses. On his first day at Heaton he was the only boy in a school of 1,400 who turned up wearing short trousers, and he staggered home that lunchtime his legs beetroot red from slapping. On the face of it he was the dullest, most grown-up and sensible child you could meet – like a little chartered accountant trapped inside a child’s body. But beneath his dour façade he had a bizarre and often comic imagination. Jim, Scottie and myself once had a private competition to see who could write the highest number of deaths into their English essay homework. This ran for several weeks and reached its climax when we were set the innocuous title, ‘A Visit to the Theatre’, for our homework. In my story a bus full of theatregoers got stuck beneath electric wires on a level crossing. The occupants were all burnt alive and then a crowded passenger train slammed into the wreckage at high speed. With a body count of over 300 I thought I’d won at a canter, but I was wrong. Scottie had engineered a calamitous Ronan Point-style gas explosion into his essay. Careless theatregoers had left the gas on in their high-rise apartment and in the resulting explosion an entire block of flats collapsed and over 600 people perished in the rubble. By now our English teacher, Mrs MacKenzie, had noticed the increasing death tolls in our work and rightly guessed that we were having a competition. One at a time she took us aside, complimented us on our imaginative work, but warned us that the examination boards would view anything more than one or two deaths per essay as excessive.

As well as sharing a rum sense of humour Jim and I also shared an ability to draw cartoons. Over the years I’d become the unofficial class cartoonist and often had unwanted commissions thrust upon me. The closest thing to a bully we had in our class was a big lad called Jeff, and Jeff was very proud of his Doctor Marten boots. Jeff’s desk was right alongside mine and every morning he’d hitch up his trouser leg with theatrical style and proudly reveal a highly polished knee-length Doc Marten. Then he’d say, ‘Draw me boot!’ I’d routinely draw a flattering picture of his boot on a scrap of paper, hand it to him, and he would sit and titter at it for a moment or two before discarding it. One day Jeff told me to draw Mr Hesketh on the blackboard. Mr Hesketh was our French teacher, and very easy to draw. He had a flobby, jowlish, slightly over-inflated sort of head with a funny little wiggish haircut perched precariously on top of it, and an extremely big and pointy nose. It was most unfortunate that Mr Hesketh’s career as a French teacher coincided with the advent of the Anglo-French supersonic aviation programme. The tip of Concorde Hesketh’s conk was due to appear through the classroom door at any minute, followed not long afterwards by the rest of him, so I did a hurried sketch on the board. ‘Divvn’t forget his nurz hair,’ said Jeff, casting a critical eye from behind me. Mr Hesketh had long, bushy, black hair billowing from his massive nostrils like inverted smoke clouds, and from my seat near the front of the class I would watch these hairs gradually turning grey due to the amount of chalk dust his frantic blackboard-wiping technique generated. I quickly added a big clump of nasal hair to my drawing then turned to go back to my desk, but my path was blocked by Jeff, smiling menacingly and brandishing a compass point in my direction. At that moment in walked Mr Hesketh, and there was I, chalk in hand, dithering about in front of my portrait. ‘Mr Hesketh,’ said Jeff with a glib smile. ‘Donald’s done a picktcha of ya.’

Jeff wasn’t a real bully, he was a hilarious parody of one. A comic actor. He dressed like a bovver boy in his Crombie coat, sharply creased two-tone trousers and blood-red knee-length boots with bright yellow laces. But he wasn’t violent. The closest to fighting Jeff ever got was tripping up first years at break time. There he was, all six foot of him, flicking his toes gracefully to unbalance these tiny little children who were running around his feet. It was cruel but it was hilarious because he did it with such style and panache. There were plenty of real bullies at Heaton, or ‘hards’ as they preferred to be known. Each had their own hardness rating. The system was a bit like conkers, but instead of smashing someone’s conker to improve your own conker’s rating, you had to ‘kick someone’s fucking heed in’ in order to acquire their points. Hard kids would swagger around the school like gunfighters in a Spaghetti Western, constantly in search of a showdown. The toilet was their saloon where they all hung out, smoking tabs, gambling and discussing the latest hardness rankings. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen I developed phenomenal bladder control, but it wasn’t always possible to avoid trouble. Sometimes if you strayed too far from your pack of friends you’d be picked off by a stray bully and a confrontation would ensue. One second-division hard case called Brian had a very original technique of picking a fight. He’d stand in front of you and block your path by doing an impression of Alvin Stardust singing ‘My Coo-Ca-Choo’. This would involve twisting and turning his fist slowly, right under your nose, in an Alvin Stardust leather glove style, which was strangely hypnotic as his arm looked a bit like a snake slowly rising from a basket. Then at various points in the song – on the words ‘Coo’ and ‘Choo’ I seem to recall – he would punch you lightly on the chin, hoping you would retaliate. He tried it once on me after cornering me above the bicycle sheds, but after a few moments it must have dawned on him how ridiculous he looked, so he made some mumbled excuse and left.

A far more conventional way to start a fight was for a bully to say, ‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ But this gradually became less effective as victims developed clever responses, like ‘No’. You had to watch your eye-line very carefully if you were in the presence of potential aggressors. Any look adjudged to be ‘funny’ could be punishable by a severe kicking. You also had to make sure there was nothing the matter with you. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ they’d ask aggressively. ‘Nothing,’ you’d assure them. Occasionally they’d up the ante by asking the rather ridiculous question, ‘Are you calling me a puff?’ despite the fact you hadn’t said a word. ‘No,’ you’d say. This inane line of questioning would go on and on until your interrogator finally felt he’d received sufficient provocation to hit you, or got bored and let you off with a warning. Over the years the nature of bullying changed as the hard kids developed more sophisticated opening gambits. ‘Do you fancy wor lass?’ for example. This was check, in one move, as the answer ‘Yes’ would be clear justification to hit you, while the answer ‘No’ could be followed up with, ‘Why not like? Is there something the matter with her?’ Checkmate.

My dad worked as an oil salesman and brought home piles of Esso Blue calling cards and invoice pads which I’d turn over and use as drawing material. In the privacy of my bedroom I did a series of pictures featuring ugly monsters – globular piles of fat with tiny arms and big faces – being chopped up on bacon slicers and mutilated in similarly macabre ways. I amassed dozens of these drawings, called them my ‘mut cartoons’, and kept them neatly filed away in a drawer in my bedroom. I never showed them to anyone but Jim. ‘What if somebody saw them?’ he once asked. It was a worrying thought.

Jim studied art O-level at school but I dropped the subject as fast as I possibly could. The art teachers, who both had beards and suede shoes, would scribble a title for a painting on the blackboard and then fuck off out of the room. You wouldn’t see them again until the end of the lesson. In their absence the art class would deteriorate into a massive paint fight and I’d usually spend the last ten minutes or so crouched under my desk sheltering from flying paint. The following week you’d turn up and the title for the painting would still be the same. The idle bastards hadn’t even bothered to think up a new one. It was strange to think that at the same school twenty-five years earlier my mum had produced the most wonderful watercolours, but in her day Heaton had been a grammar school where teachers followed antiquated teaching practices, like wearing capes and mortar boards, caning pupils for misbehaviour, and remaining in the classroom during lessons. I used my other lessons for art practice, scribbling away in the back of my exercise books instead of paying attention to teachers. By 1976 my ‘mut’ drawings had evolved into something that I deemed suitable for a wider audience. Using my dad’s invoice pads, ballpoint pens and coloured pencils, I put together a series of comic books which began circulating around the classroom at school. These starred my old friend Scottie as a dour and boring schoolboy who could transform himself into a caped superhero. Whenever his pals were being bullied the Fat Crusader would appear on the scene, rounding up the troublemakers, cutting them up on bacon slicers or sharpening their heads with giant pencil sharpeners. It was still a tad on the morbid side, but the Fat Crusader books became very popular at school. Each little booklet would first circulate around my classroom and then around neighbouring classes. As soon as I finished one, people would start asking for another, and I got requests from people wanting to appear in the stories. I did thirteen Fat Crusader books in all, each one numbered of course, with titles like The Fat Crusader Takes the Sunderland, The Teds Are in Town and, as a Christmas Special, The Fat Crusader versus the Staff Aggro. That one got as far as the staffroom and was never seen again.

The Fat Crusader

While I was drawing the Fat Crusader Jim was leaving school, aged sixteen, and getting himself a ‘scheme’ job in an architect’s drawing office. I stayed on into the sixth form studying Geography, Biology and Woodwork A-levels. The people around me wanted to be mountaineers, caterers, doctors, dentists, nurses and quantity surveyors, but I hadn’t got a fucking clue what I wanted to do. At my first careers interview I said I wanted to be a train driver. The careers adviser didn’t look too happy and came up with a story about needing three A-levels, including Maths and Physics, and a degree in Engineering, to drive trains. I’d seen plenty of train drivers in my time, and none of them looked like engineering graduates to me. After that I lowered my sights a little. In fact I lowered them about as far as they would go and said I wanted to be a geography teacher. The reasoning behind this hugely important career decision was quite simple. I like drawing maps. Unfortunately I’d never heard of cartography at the time, and neither had my careers adviser, so I was duly lined up to go to Aston or Loughborough University and do a degree in Geography. Fortunately my A-level results weren’t good enough. I hadn’t understood a single word in Biology from day one, and although Woodwork was my best subject I failed the exam on a technicality (using panel pins to hold a panel in place). So I left school in 1978, aged eighteen, with six O-levels, a Geography A-level and a perfectly good but technically incorrect panel desk.

Jim’s work experience job had run out by now so we were both on the dole and spent the summer of 1978 hanging out, playing pool and drawing cartoons. By now I’d got a set of Rotring pens for Christmas and my drawing had been transformed. I undertook my first commercial venture, doing line drawings of local tourist attractions such as Bamburgh Castle and the Tyne Bridge, and selling framed prints to tourists. A sixth-form colleague called Baz was now working behind the bar in a city centre hotel and we’d developed a neat little scam. I drew the pictures and got them printed and framed, and Baz talked drunken Norwegians into buying them for £15 each as he plied them with alcohol. It all went well until Baz left the hotel and a drunken Scottish night porter fucked off with all my money.

Having left school I no longer had an audience for my cartoons, so in July 1978 I suggested Jim and I print a few cartoons in a magazine and sell it to people we knew in the pub. I say ‘magazine’. . . The Daily Pie was actually a single sheet of paper, photocopied on one side only. The miniature cartoons included Tommy’s Birthday, a five-frame strip in which a young boy tries to blow out the candles on his birthday cake, and his head falls off. There was a brief horoscope – Your Stars by Gypsy Bag – that read, ‘Today you made a bad decision and bought something crappy.’ And there was Jim’s first ever Rude Kid cartoon, a single frame in which a beaming, wide-eyed mother drags a reluctant child by the hand. ‘Come to the shops, dear,’ she says. ‘Fuck off!’ says the child. Despite its flimsiness I managed to sell most of the Daily Pies in our local pub, The Brandling, by offering substantial discounts on the strategically high cover price of 90p. I printed twenty copies, at a cost of £1.13, and I sold sixteen of them for a total of £1.43, giving me a profit of 30p. By this time I’d more or less kicked my train-spotting habit but I was still very much anally retentive, so I kept a detailed record of every Daily Pie sale. Its significance was then, and remains now, a mystery. But here it is anyway (with the amount paid in brackets): Nicholas Clark (10p), Simon Donald (10p), Phil Ramsey (10p), Peter Chamley (10p), Fenella Storm (10p), Vaughan Humble (10p), Jeremy McDermott (10p), John Reid (10p), Bobby van Emenis (4p), Janice Nicholson and Lyn Briton (10p), Christine Hopper (10p), Kerry Hastings (9p), Dave Hall (10p), Pam Lawrence (10p), Marcus Partington (10p), Claire Beesley and Janet Davison (still owe me 10p). The Daily Pie was well received, so the following month I printed a hurriedly produced follow-up, this time calling it Arnold the Magazine. Mercifully I didn’t keep a detailed record of sales.

If nothing else, peddling these papers in the pub gave me an excuse to talk to girls like Claire Beesley. She was the sizzling school sex siren, and when Claire was in fourth year and I was in the lower sixth we exchanged notes through my brother Simon who acted as a messenger. Claire would write telling me what music she was listening to – Lou Reed’s Transformer I seem to recall – and how hot and sticky she got when she thought about me. Everyday teenage stuff like that. We’d never actually spoken, Claire and I, but she occasionally smiled at me as we passed in the corridor. One day I plucked up the courage to call her only for the phone to be answered by Mark Barnes. It turned out that Barnes, leader of the local chapter of 50cc Hell’s Angels, was her new boyfriend. I felt humiliated, but not nearly as humiliated as I was the following weekend when Barnes swaggered past me in the Brandling pub armed with a note I’d written to her weeks earlier and read it out loud to all his hairdryer-riding motorcycle mates. Now at last I had a new opportunity to impress Claire and the other girls with my cartoons . . . although why girls should be impressed by cartoons about a young boy whose head falls off, and a drawing of a dog shitting on a dinner table, I hadn’t really stopped to consider.

As the summer of 1978 drew to a close I started looking for a job. I had no career ambitions but fancied working for a year, then perhaps going to college. I applied for twenty-seven vacancies in all, but my solitary A-level meant I was ‘over-qualified’ for most of them. I went for one interview at a bus depot in Gateshead, hoping to get the job of clerk. An oily foreman in overalls interviewed me. ‘You’d have to make the tea, you know,’ he said, as if such a menial task was below someone with a Geography A-level. He was clearly looking for someone with fewer qualifications and bigger tits. But I persevered and thought I was still in with a chance until the final question, ‘Why do you want to work in a bus depot?’ I thought about it for a second. ‘Because I like buses,’ I said, with a hint of rising intonation. I didn’t get the job.

By the time my interview for Clerical Officer in the DHSS came around I’d given a lot of thought to the ‘Why do you want to . . .’ question. It seemed to crop up at every interview. This time I was ready with an answer. ‘And finally, why do you want to work in the civil service?’ asked the chairman of the panel. ‘I don’t particularly,’ I said. ‘I’m just looking for a steady job that pays well in order to fund my hobby, which is railway modelling,’ I told him, trying to look as nerdy as possible. It worked an absolute treat. All four members of the panel smiled simultaneously and I was told there and then that I’d got the job. You had to be pretty fucking thick not to get a job at the Ministry. Even Mark Barnes had got in the year before me. In those days the Ministry was a safety net for school leavers who couldn’t get anything better. The Department of Health and Social Security Central Office Longbenton, to give it its official title, was a massive complex of huts and office blocks spread over several acres, housing upwards of 10,000 clerical staff. It had its own banks, post offices, at least five canteens, a hairdresser’s, and running through the middle of it was the longest corridor in Europe. I spent the first few weeks in a classroom learning about the history of National Insurance, which I found quite interesting, then I was posted to Unit 4, Overseas Branch D1, Room A1301. This was a huge open-plan office, about the size of a five-a-side football pitch, where over 100 people sat stooped over desks, writing letters and filling in forms. My specific area of responsibility was dealing with people whose National Insurance numbers ended in 42 (C or D), 43 or 44.

I loved having my own desk, my own ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays and my own stationery items, but what I liked most was all the forms there were to fill in. In the DHSS you had to fill in a form before you could go to the loo, and if you were having a shit you’d have to send a requisition slip to Bumwipe Supplies Branch at least three days in advance. I liked filling in forms and I enjoyed the daily routine too, although it wasn’t particularly healthy. Stodgy fried food was available in the canteens all day long, and there was a tea trolley serving hot drinks and Empire biscuits. These consisted of two big, sugary rounds of shortbread stuck together with jam, covered in icing and with half a cherry on the top. The tea trolley came every day, morning and afternoon, and with almost the same frequency someone in the office would have a heart attack and fall backwards off their chair. From our window we could see the main gate and the constant flow of ambulances going in and out, carting heart attack victims off to hospital. Life expectancy wasn’t high in the Ministry, and neither were the levels of job satisfaction. You were in big trouble if you stopped to think about what you were actually doing. The majority of the work was putting right other people’s mistakes. For example, an oil worker would write in from Saudi Arabia with an enquiry and some daft sod would send him a leaflet which clearly didn’t provide the information he wanted. So he’d write back, repeating his query. This time he’d get a stock reply asking what his National Insurance number was. So he’d write back a third time telling us what his National Insurance number was. But in the meantime we’d have lost his file, so the person who received his third letter wouldn’t have a clue why he was writing in and telling us what his National Insurance number was. So we’d write to him a third time, this time asking why he was sending us his National Insurance number. And so on. Mix-ups like this occurred every day, in their thousands, because all the filing systems were kept manually by people, the vast majority of whom didn’t give a toss. So the whole place was in effect a self-perpetuating human error factory.

If you could take your mind off the work, and say no to an Empire biscuit, the Ministry was a great place to be. The social life was brilliant and there was a wonderful mix of characters, from Joe the Trotskyite union rep to John the racist nutcase who refused to urinate in pub toilets on the grounds that he’d paid good money for the drink and he’d be damned if he was going to piss it straight back into their toilets. One of my favourite characters was a bloke called Dave who sat at a desk behind me. Dave was the best swearer I have ever known. For some reason only working-class people can swear properly, and Dave was a master of the art. His swearing was never aggressive, it was always done for emphasis and comic effect, and when he swore I found it pant-pissingly funny. Every day I’d find myself scribbling down little things he’d said and expressions he’d used. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, I just felt an instinctive urge to record them for posterity.

I put my name down for the office football team, but unfortunately the manager was an early pioneer of the squad rotation system, and he tended to rotate me from one end of the substitutes’ bench to the other. I couldn’t get a game, so to pass the time I started writing reports on our matches which I then typed up at home and took in to work the following day. Like my Fat Crusader books these match reports caught on, circulating around the office and causing much sniggering and laughter. But the office audience contained a broader spectrum of public taste than I’d previously been used to, and it wasn’t long before one miserable old bat took offence at some of the language. I’d faithfully quoted our captain telling our centre forward, ‘You couldn’t score in a brothel with a ten pound note tied round your chopper.’ Pretty harmless, you’d think, but this was the civil service and a complaint was made to the Higher Executive Officer. Sending non-official circulars around the office was an offence in itself, but including the word ‘chopper’ was a definite breach of civil service protocol. I was summoned to HEO Frank Redd’s office and was still cobbling together a garbled excuse involving helicopters as I opened the door. Fortunately he didn’t give me a chance to use it. Mr Redd said my football reports showed imagination and initiative, but he felt my journalistic skills could be put to far better use. He wondered, in no uncertain terms, whether I’d like to apply for the voluntary, unpaid job of assistant editor at The Bulletin, the monthly magazine of the DHSS Central Office Sports and Social Club. The job had been vacant for some time, and he said he would use his considerable influence to make sure I got it. At last! I had my first break in journalism.

The next few months were a whirlwind of excitement as I dashed about the DHSS, notebook in hand, reporting on the thrilling activities of the Horticultural Club, the Carpet Bowls League, the Philatelic Society and the Wine Making Circle.

CHAPTER TWO
The Gosforth

From the age of sixteen or seventeen Jim and I began to rendezvous in pubs instead of railway stations. We were still loners to a large degree. We’d sit in the corners watching people and pass cynical remarks on their behaviour and appearance. The fact that good-looking girls were going out with other blokes and not us gave us a shared, nerdy sense of injustice. In terms of cultural identity Jim and I were hovering somewhere between being hippies and punks. We both had long hair and wore denims, and sometimes we’d go to the Mayfair Ballroom for the legendary Friday Rock Nights. But neither of us played air guitar. We were only there to gawp at the hippy chicks with their tight jeans, cheesecloth blouses and supposedly liberal attitudes towards sex.

In our schooldays Jim had displayed a fondness for Steve Hillage, which I could never quite understand, and he once went to Knebworth to see Rush. I was a bit of a Seekers fan myself. Them, the Beatles and Abba. But if anyone asked me I always said I liked Thin Lizzy. I tried to broaden my tastes but most contemporary music didn’t grab me. A friend once suggested I try lying down on the floor, in the dark, and listening to a Pink Floyd album. I did, but it still sounded shit to me. Punk, when it came, was an absolute godsend. The fashion was a trifle severe, but I loved the spirit of it and particularly the fact that Radio 1’s Mike Read didn’t like it. Jim was more a connoisseur of music than I was. He introduced me to The Buzzcocks and The Stranglers and we started going to see New Wave bands. We were still dithering, going to see Judas Priest one week and The Jam the next, until one night our loyalties were put to the test. It was a Friday at the Mayfair and we’d gone to see a mod-revival package tour, Secret Affair and The Purple Hearts. A battle broke out between the Mayfair’s native rock fans and the visiting mods and punks. As chairs started to rain down from the balcony Jim and I instinctively found ourselves running towards the mod end of the room for shelter. It was a defining moment.

The Two-Tone Ska revival was happening at the time and in Newcastle a new record label had been set up, clearly inspired by Coventry’s porkpie hat-wearing fraternity. The name of the Newcastle outfit was Anti-Pop, and on Monday evenings they promoted bands at a pub called the Gosforth Hotel. Jim discovered the place and suggested I come along the following week. Jim’s musical tastes were still a lot broader than mine so I didn’t hold out much hope for the entertainment, but he’d also mentioned that there’d be girls from Gosforth High School there, and to a couple of likely lads from Heaton Comprehensive the prospect of a room full of high-class teenage totty from Gosforth High was a major attraction.

The Gosforth was a typical two-storey, brick-built Victorian pub, situated next to a busy road junction in a fairly well-to-do suburb. There was a traditional old codgers’ bar downstairs plus a lounge, and upstairs there was a very small function room where the bands played. The function room was dark, with blacked-out windows, a corner bar that looked as if hadn’t been used since the 1950s, a big round mirror on the wall above a fireplace, and beneath that the band’s equipment taking up about half of the overall floor space. Most of the crowd who squeezed into the other half of the room – and some of the musicians – were under-age, so they’d sneak in the side door, dash upstairs and dart into the function room before the red-faced ogre of a landlord could catch them. He was an obnoxious, drunken git who didn’t approve of loud music and alternative fashion, or under-age drinking on his premises. Every now and then he’d storm up the stairs in search of under-age drinkers, threatening to set his dogs loose in the function room if he found any kids inside.

Anti-Pop admission stamp

Admission to the function room was 50p, payable at the top of the stairs. As proof of payment you got your hand stamped ‘anti-pop entertainmenterama’. Sitting on the door counting the money was a scruffy bloke who looked as if he’d just spent a night on a park bench, and then walked through a particularly severe sandstorm. His name was Andy Pop and he always looked like that due to a combination of Brillo pad hair and bad eczema. Andy was the business brains behind the Anti-Pop organization. Sitting alongside him was his partner, the creative guru, a tall, thin man called Arthur 2 Stroke. Arthur 2 Stroke’s eponymous three-piece band were playing that night, and Jim had recommended them highly. 2 Stroke cut a bizarre figure on stage. He was an awkward, gangly sort of bloke, dressed in a dandy, second-hand, sixties’ style. He wore a powder blue mod suit that was far too small for him and a comically extreme pair of winkle-picker boots, and he had an unmistakable Mr Spock haircut. He was a bit like a cross between Paul Weller and Jason King. He couldn’t sing very well, or play the guitar, but he had a wonderful comic aura about him. Next to him was an upright, smiling, red-haired guitarist who went by the name of WM7, and in the background there was an almost unseen drummer whose name was Naughty Norman. Their manic set included a half-decent cover of ‘The Letter’ and a plucky tribute to the well-known 1970s French TV marine biologist, ‘The Wundersea World of Jacques Cousteau’. Also on the bill that night were the Noise Toys, a power-packed post-punk four-piece who bounced around in oversized baggy suits and raincoats, shaking the ceiling of the old codgers’ bar below. Singer Martin Stevens was a timid, slightly built, shaven-headed bloke – a more energetic, better-looking, heterosexual version of Michael Stipe. In total contrast his sidekick, the trilby-hatted guitarist Rupert Oliver, was a bullish, ugly, bad-tempered prima donna, prone to lashing out at the audience with his microphone stand. The rhythm section were the industrious but less noteworthy Mike and Brian, and the highlights of their set were their own song ‘Pocket Money’ and memorable covers of ‘Rescue Me’ and ‘King of the Road’. As well as the Noise Toys and Arthur 2 Stroke there’d be anything up to three or four other bands on the bill, and a lot of them would be playing their first ever gig. Anti-Pop’s policy was to encourage kids to come along and have a go. You didn’t need fancy equipment, or talent. Anyone could ring them up and book a support slot. This was the punk ethic being put into practice, and it attracted quite a few weirdos. But it was always entertaining, intimate and exciting – the very opposite of going to Knebworth to see Rush or lying on the floor and listening to Pink Floyd. At the Gosforth Hotel I felt like I’d found my spiritual home.

Arthur 2 Stroke

Another positive effect of punk was the emergence of fanzines, small DIY music magazines – usually the work of one obsessive individual – that were hawked at gigs or sold through independent record shops. My brother Steve had put me and Jim in touch with a new Newcastle fanzine that was looking for cartoonists. When we met the editors at the Market Lane pub in town we were dismayed to find they were all hairies, and their new magazine – Bad Breath – was going to be a ‘rock’ fanzine. I drew a cartoon about a punk band called Angelo’s Nonstarts for their first issue, but when I saw the finished magazine I wished I hadn’t bothered. It was a feeble orange pamphlet with very little content, badly designed too, but the worst thing about it was the tone of the editorial. It took itself so fucking seriously. There was an article about Lou Reed, and an earnest review of a pub gig by The Weights. It was all such a load of wank. Jim and I had been toying with the idea of producing our own magazine, a proper one this time with more than one page, and Bad Breath was so bloody awful it inspired us. We wanted to produce a comic that was also a fanzine, and the only artists we wanted to write about were Arthur 2 Stroke and the Noise Toys. The Gosforth Hotel would also be the ideal outlet for selling this magazine – and it would give us an excuse to talk to Gosforth High School girls – so we decided to take our idea to Anti-Pop. Whether we were looking for advice and encouragement, or merely an excuse to visit their office, I can’t quite recall.

The Anti-Pop office was in the Bigg Market, in a run-down building full of small rooms with glass-panel doors – the kind of office suites where private detectives sit drinking whisky and waiting for their next mysterious client to walk through the door. Their room was up on the third floor, wedged between a hairdressing salon and a derelict former pools collecting agency. We knocked and nervously entered. The room was tiny, like a short corridor with the door at one end and a sash window at the other. Already it was full of people. There was a solitary desk, a chair, and a built-in cupboard running along one wall which was being used by half a dozen or so people as a communal seat. All of the Noise Toys seemed to be there, plus their slightly dim roadie Davey Fuckwit. Arthur 2 Stroke himself was perched on the windowsill, gazing at a shit-covered shoe lying on the ledge outside and repeating the word ‘guano’ to himself over and over again. It looked like a form of meditation. ‘He’s thinking of ideas,’ someone explained. Jim and I were a little intimidated finding ourselves in the presence of so many pop idols, but we somehow managed to blurt a few words out about our proposed magazine and I held out a folder of our cartoons as a sort of peace offering. These were passed around the room and met with grins of approval. Turning to Andy Pop I asked if they would allow us to sell the magazine at their gigs in return for a free advertisement on the back cover. This was immediately agreed. Then came an unexpected bonus. Martin, the singer with the Noise Toys, said that he was a cartoonist and offered to contribute to the new magazine.

Andy Pop

Our project had got the green light – the only problem now was that we didn’t have a clue how to put a magazine together. Someone at Anti-Pop suggested approaching the Free Press for help. The Tyneside Free Press described themselves as a ‘non-profit-making community print co-operative’, whatever one of those was, and Jim and I went to see them at their print works in Charlotte Square. I explained to the man on the front desk that we wanted to produce a magazine but had no idea how to put it together, technically speaking. He was most helpful and began by explaining a few of the basics. For important technical reasons we couldn’t have ten pages as I’d suggested, we’d have to have eight or twelve. And if we had twelve pages they would be printed in pairs, page 12 alongside page 1, and page 2 alongside page 11, etc. This was called page fall. I was fascinated. Then he talked about the artwork, explaining how the ink is always black and how greys are made out of lots of little black dots. Finally, he produced an estimate for printing 100 twelve-page magazines. This came to a staggering £38.88, in other words almost 40p per copy. He must have noticed my face drop and quickly pointed out that the more we printed, the cheaper it would become per copy. He mentioned that a T Rex fanzine they’d printed recently had sold out of 100 copies in a week and had since been back for a reprint. Encouraged by this I asked him to price for 150 copies, and this came to £42.35. It was four quid more, but it brought the cost of each comic down to 28p each. It still seemed a lot of money so I shopped around for some other prices. The Co-operative Printers in Rutherford Street quoted me £153, and Prontaprint on Collingwood Street said they’d do the job for £156. I decided to stick with the Free Press.

Jim and I had quite a collection of old cartoons in hand, but all of our work was small and I needed a lot more material to fill twelve pages. Martin’s contribution was more of a collage than a cartoon, a three-dimensional conglomeration of paint, glue, print and paper featuring an angry metal bloke in a hat, called the Steel Skull. Jim wrote a tabloid-style exposé about the Anti-Pop movement, and I received another written contribution from a newspaper reporter in Kingston upon Thames called Tim Harrison. Shortly after leaving school I’d got bored and put a pen friend advert in Private Eye. The first person who replied was Tim Harrison, and I’d been corresponding with him ever since. But when Tim’s contribution for my new magazine arrived – a girly piece of grown-up satire suggesting that Prince Charles was gay – it was totally out of keeping with everything else I’d gathered. I didn’t want to hurt Tim Harrison’s feelings – at least not until now – so I decided to use it anyway.

We still had to choose a name for the new magazine. At one point Jim’s favoured title had been Hip because he liked the slogan, ‘Get Hip!’ Another proposal was Lump It, as in ‘If you don’t like it (and you won’t like it) you can Lump It’. But in the end I went for the catchier and much more concise The Bumper Monster Christmas Special, which just seemed to roll off the tongue. Viz was an afterthought and sprang from an experiment I’d been doing with lino cuttings. My dad had some spare lino tiles left over after tiling our living room floor and I’d been carving bits of them with chisels, rolling them with ink and then pressing them onto paper in a vice. While playing around I came up with the word VIZ, which was easy to carve, consisting only of straight lines and no curved letters. That’s what I always tell people anyway. Unfortunately the lino blocks, which I still have today, don’t say VIZ, they say Viz Comics, with several curvy letters. So fuck knows where the name came from. I can’t remember.

I assembled the artwork on a card table in my bedroom. It was a bit like doing a jigsaw, trying to slot everything together neatly. There were still a few gaps to fill, so I asked my brother Simon if he fancied doing a cartoon. Simon had recently formed his own noisy youth club band, Johnny Shiloe’s Movement Machine, but he took time out from his budding acting and pop career to do a three-frame cartoon containing sex, cake and vomiting. It was a terrific combination. Eventually all the gaps were filled and on Wednesday 28 November 1979 I took a half-day off work to deliver the artwork to the Free Press. They said it would be ready on Friday the following week.

The original Viz Comics lino print

A bit like those twats out of Spandau Ballet, me and Jim made a big song and dance about Viz before the first issue had even been published. Pre-launch publicity included sticking posters up around Newcastle Polytechnic Students’ Union and lino-printing Viz Comics logos onto a roll of typewriter address labels. These were stuck randomly on windows, contraceptive machines, lamp-posts and bus stops around the Gosforth Hotel and Newcastle Polytechnic areas, and we somehow managed to stick one high on the façade of the Listen Ear record shop on Ridley Place. That one was still visible from the top deck of the 33 bus for several years afterwards. Unlike those twats out of Spandau Ballet, we weren’t students, and so we weren’t allowed inside the Students’ Union buildings. The Poly Students’ Union entertainments officer was a horrible bloke called Paul something-or-other who wore fashionable knitwear and had blond, swept-back hair. We called him Mr Fucking McGregor because every time he caught us fly-posting he’d chase us out of the building muttering various garbled threats about putting us in a pie. But every time he chased us out we’d come back even more determined. Eventually the object of the exercise wasn’t to promote the comic, it was purely to antagonize that daft bastard. This spell of aggravated promotional activity earned us a rather ironic reputation as an ‘anti-student’ magazine which lasted some time. Jim and I hated students. If townies like us wanted to get into either the University or the Polytechnic to see a band we had to stand at the door looking humble and beg passing students to sign us in. We were envious of their cushy, low-price accommodation, their cheap booze, cheap food, cheap and exclusive live entertainment, and the fact that they were surrounded by young women. It was the male students we hated, not the girls.

I took Friday 7 December off work and went with Jim to collect the finished comic from the Free Press. When we got there, the first thing that struck me was how small the box was. I was expecting a stack of cartons, not one flat box. But 150 very thin comics didn’t take up much room. It was raining as we carried them the short distance from the Free Press to the Anti-Pop office. There was nobody there so we retired to a nearby café, Country Fare, where, over a cup of tea and some cheese scones, we sat and read our very own comic. The ink was blacker than black and the paper was creamy and smooth. It made the cartoons look different, more clean and deliberate, almost as if someone else had drawn them. The spines of the comics were neatly folded, and the staples were shiny and new. We sat and admired them for ages. For some reason I’d decided to give away a ‘free ice cream’ with every issue and this meant taking the comics home and spending the best part of the weekend lino printing pictures of ice creams and then stapling them onto the back pages. I’d taken a few advance orders from friends, and the first person to pay for a copy of Viz was a Gosforth High girl called Karen Seery. But it was on Monday 10 December at the Gosforth Hotel that Viz was officially launched.

Myself, Jim and Simon all went along, although Simon was only fifteen and risked being fed to the landlord’s dogs if he was caught on the premises. I decided to take thirty copies of the magazine as I couldn’t imagine selling any more than that in one night. Early in the evening we positioned ourselves on the landing outside the function room door and started offering them to passers-by. None of us were natural salesmen and a typical pitch would be, ‘Funny magazine. Very wacky. Twenty pence.’ People weren’t interested. 20p was a bit steep for a twelve-page black-and-white comic. The Beano was twice as thick, colour, and half the price in those days. There were no takers. One passing Gosforth High girl called Ruth snarled and called me a capitalist. That hurt. I’d paid the print bill out of my own pocket with no prospect of getting my money back. Even if I sold out I was losing 8 pence on every copy. It was hardly capitalism at that stage, love. Things weren’t looking too good until a little man with a gingerish beard and a scarf, more of a social worker than a student or punk, came skipping up the stairs. He looked a bit right-on, the kind of guy who’d give some kids doing their own thing a break. ‘What’s this?’ he said with exaggerated enthusiasm. He had a quick look, smiled, bought one and disappeared into the function room. Not long afterwards people started coming out and buying copies. Once they’d seen someone else reading it and laughing, suddenly they all wanted one. It was the first sales phenomenon I’d ever witnessed, and it was a phenomenal one. Soon we were running out of comics and a friend called Paul, who had a car, offered Simon a lift back home to pick up some more copies.

Skinheed Poster

As well as the Gosforth I also sold copies at a Dickies gig at the Mayfair later that week, and the following weekend at a Damned gig in Middlesbrough. There was only one shop that stocked the first comic, Listen Ear on the corner of Ridley Place and John Dobson Street in Newcastle. The little man behind the counter, who was short and far too old for his comical punk attire, seemed rather non-plussed at the idea of stocking yet another fanzine, but reluctantly agreed to take ten copies on sale or return. He placed them inside the glass counter and under the till, where nobody could see or reach them. ‘If I leave them on the counter they’ll be nicked,’ he said. As well as hawking the comic around pubs and student discos in Newcastle I made a couple of futile efforts to reach a wider audience. In February 1980 I invested £3.25 in a classified ad in Private Eye:

Viz Comics. Very hilarious indeed.

20p plus SAE to 16 Lily Cres, Newcastle/Tyne.

At about the same time I wrote a hopelessly optimistic letter to a magazine distribution company called Surridge Dawson Ltd. and received my first rejection letter:

Dear Mr Donald

Thank you for your letter of 1st February in connection with the distribution of your comics. Firstly, as you are most probably aware, the comic market in the United Kingdom is very competitive indeed, and would be difficult to break into without reasonable financial backing.

From our point of view as national distributors, we would require a regular publishing date and also need to be selling about 10,000 copies per issue to make it a viable operation. To be quite frank, at present I do not think you are in a position to consider distribution on a national scale, but nevertheless we will give the matter further thought on sight of a complete copy of your magazine.

Yours sincerely

T. H. Marshall

General Manager Publishing Department

I hadn’t dared send them a complete copy, just a few selected highlights, because I knew full well that if I’d sent the whole comic it would have gone straight in the bin.

With the benefit of hindsight it was probably a wee bit early to be thinking of a commercial deal, but I was getting some grassroots distribution thanks to a few enthusiastic individuals each taking a handful of copies here and there. A Newcastle University student called Jane Hodgson took twenty copies to sell to her mates and my pen friend Tim Harrison also took ten copies. Then at the end of February I got my first big break. Derek Gritten, a bookseller in Bournemouth, had spotted my ad in Private Eye and wanted to see a sample of the comic. If he liked it he said he would order twenty-five copies, my biggest order so far! My £3.25 investment looked to be paying off, and I rushed Mr Gritten a copy of the comic by return . . . but he didn’t reply.

Never mind. The first comic had been surprisingly well received by the public and I knew that the next one could be much better. By now a second issue was underway on the card table, but this time I was taking care to plan it better, make it look neater and more attractive. Jim had drawn a couple of new cartoons, Simon had done another cartoon with vomiting in it, and Martin Stevens had come up with a brilliant new character called Tubby Round. For music content I’d interviewed a fellow DHSS employee called Dave Maughan about his very serious prog rock band Low Profile – and then written an entirely different story in which they became a disco band. And Jim had written about a new Anti-Pop artist who was rapidly becoming a legend.

Anti-Pop’s first record release, a double A-sided single by the Noise Toys and Arthur 2 Stroke (‘Pocket Money’/‘The Wundersea World of Jacques Cousteau’) had been getting air play on John Peel’s show, but a new Anti-Pop album called Anna Ford’s Bum by Wavis O’Shave was causing a bigger stir both on radio and in the music press. Wavis O’Shave wasn’t a comedian and he wasn’t a singer. He definitely wasn’t a musician either. He was a sort of cross between Howard Hughes, Tiny Tim and David Icke. He was never seen at the Gosforth Hotel and I’d only ever caught a glimpse of him once in the Anti-Pop office, when he didn’t speak at all. To promote the album he only played one gig – at the Music Machine, Camden, in March 1980 – and he didn’t even turn up for that. A heavily disguised Arthur 2 Stroke went on in his place. None of his fans knew what Wavis looked like, so there were no complaints. (Wavis would become better known in later years as The Hard, a bizarre character who made brief appearances on The Tube, hitting his hand with a hammer and saying ‘I felt nowt’.)

Viz comic No. 2 went on sale in April 1980. This time I really pushed the boat out and printed 500, and gave away a free balloon with every copy . . . stapled to the inside back cover. The print bill was £66.67, plus another £4.91 for balloons purchased from fancy goods specialists John B. Bowes Limited, late of Low Friar Street, just round the corner from the Free Press. In those days you never had to walk more than 100 yards to buy a bag of 500 balloons. Viz wasn’t going down too well in Surrey. Having struggled to shift ten copies of issue 1 in Kingston-upon-Thames, Tim Harrison cut his order down to six. But sales were up elsewhere. The Listen Ear record shop took an astounding seventy-five copies, Jane Hodgson took thirty, and Jim’s dad Jack Brownlow, a progressive school teacher and a thoroughly nice bloke, bought twenty-five. My dad didn’t buy any though, largely because he didn’t know Viz existed. By now he was out of work and spending all his time looking after my mum. Both of my parents were blissfully unaware of the comic’s existence, and I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could.

Issue 2 was clearly a big improvement on issue 1 so I sent an unsolicited copy to Derek Gritten, the bookseller in Bournemouth who’d gone very quiet since receiving issue 1. He wrote back confirming that he hadn’t liked the first one, but the good news was that he did like issue 2 and he promptly ordered twenty-five copies. Despite this promising progress the vast majority of the 500 comics had to be sold in Newcastle by hand, and at nights I’d walk from pub to pub in Jesmond selling comics on my own. I didn’t like going into pubs alone, and I hated cold selling. It was totally against my nature. But something drove me to do it. I did it obsessively, a bit like train-spotting, going from room to room asking every single person if they wanted to buy a comic. The aim wasn’t to sell comics, it was simply to ask everyone. Once I’d asked everyone then I could go home happy, even if I’d sold none. On one of these fleeting runs, through the Cradlewell pub, I inadvertently offered a comic to the new Entertainments Officer from the Polytechnic; a big, bald bloke called Steve Cheney. ‘So . . .’, he said, standing up and turning round to face me, ‘this is the new anti-student magazine I’ve been hearing about, is it?’ His predecessor, Mr Fucking McGregor, had obviously briefed him on our activities. ‘It’s not anti-student at all,’ I told him with a convincing smile. It wasn’t actually, only me and Jim were. ‘Here, have a read and see for yourself.’ I gave the big, baldy twat a free copy and he smiled, said thank you and sat down to read it while I made my escape.

I preferred selling comics when there were two of us. Jim didn’t actually do much selling – he preferred drinking and watching the bands, and the women – but he provided physical and moral support. That could come in handy in the Students’ Union bars where every cluster of students contained at least one gormless twat just waiting for an opportunity to show off to his mates. Occasionally things turned nasty, like the time I foolishly walked into the ‘Agrics” bar at the University and some stumpy, little fat-necked student grabbed about a dozen comics out of my hand, tore them in half and threw them all up in the air above my head. Then he just glared at me as if to say, ‘What are you going do about it?’ I looked at him as if to say ‘Erm. . . nothing, I suppose,’ then sidled away like a coward.

I hadn’t shown the comic to anybody at work. They were all regular, working-class sorts of people. They liked drinking in the Bigg Market and disco dancing, so I thought it might be a little left-of-field for their tastes. But gradually they began to find out about what I was doing and started asking for copies of the comic. When I eventually took some in, to my surprise and delight they all liked it too. All except the old ladies, that is. People laughed out loud, passed them around, and asked for copies of the next issue. This was a revelation to me. Ordinary people found it funny as well as rebellious youths and student types.

As well as crossing socio-economic divides, the geographical spread of sales was also expanding. So far Viz was strictly a Newcastle, Bournemouth and ever-so-slightly Kingston-upon-Thames publishing phenomenon. There was a conspicuous lack of outlets in the capital. Luckily Arthur 2 Stroke had a brother called Tim who lived in South London and Tim volunteered to do some footwork, taking the comic to Rough Trade records and Better Badges. Both shops agreed to stock it. I’d also placed two more ads in Private Eye, one in ‘Articles for sale’, advertising issue 2 for 32p including postage, and the other in the ‘Wanted’ column, offering £1000 for a copy of the first issue. Eager to spread the message I’d also sent copies of issues 1 and 2 to the local newspaper, and this resulted in our first ever press cutting. On 10 April 1980, beneath the headline, ‘A comical look at Newcastle social problems’, the Newcastle Evening Chronicle described Viz as ‘a new comic which is not the usual light revelry, but more a social commentary’. According to their reporter Viz was ‘taking a wry look at society in the form of cartoon strips’, and he summed up by describing it as ‘Sparky for grown-ups’. It was all strangely flattering. They didn’t mention the shit drawings, the foul language or the violent and unimaginative cartoon endings. This was my first ever dealing with the tabloid press, and I’d soon discover how flexible their approach to a subject could be.

Celebrated television producer Malcolm Gerrie, who would later launch The Tube, was in those days producing a dreadful ‘yoof’ show on Tyne-Tees TV called Check It Out. Getting on ‘Checkidoot’, as it was known locally, was the height of ambition for many local bands who assumed that stardom would quickly follow. In reality it didn’t work like that. If they’d looked at the statistics they’d have realized that an appearance on this cheesiest of yoof shows would virtually guarantee them obscurity for the rest of their careers. But Check It Out seemed like an ideal place to publicize Viz, so I bombarded Malcolm Gerrie with copies of the comic and accompanying begging letters. Eventually he invited Jim and myself to his office at the City Road TV studios. Gerrie was a surprisingly geeky-looking bloke with buck teeth, fancy geps, wild eyes, a pointy hooter and ridiculous corkscrew haircut. As if one such face wasn’t bad enough, the wall behind him was plastered with photographs of himself grinning at the camera while clinging to the shoulders of various pop luminaries. Could this be Michael Winner’s illegitimate son I wondered. Jim and I were disappointed by what Gerrie had to say. He explained that he liked the comic very much but he couldn’t possibly consider it for his TV show because of the expletive nature of some of the contents.

By the summer of 1980 changes had taken place at Anti-Pop. Arthur 2 Stroke’s three-piece band had evolved into the eight-piece Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos. Around the same time the Noise Toys had folded and Martin Stevens had gone home to Coventry, promising to keep sending me cartoons. I felt like it was time for a change too. At one of the Noise Toys’ final gigs I’d been chatting to a friend called Stephanie and she asked me how my job was going. I told her about all the money I was earning, the tea trolley and the Empire biscuits. ‘You should get out of there,’ she said, ‘before you get addicted.’ She meant to the money, not the biscuits. And she was right. I was getting too comfortable. My dad had told me that if I played my cards right the civil service would be a job for life, but that prospect appalled me. I still had no idea what I did want to do, but I decided to quit anyway and turn my back on the Empire biscuits and £170 cash every month. I handed in my notice and tempered the news by telling dad not to worry, I’d be going back to college soon. But my only real plan at the time was to sign on the dole and produce the next issue of Viz.

CHAPTER THREE
Ghost Town

In the summer of 1980 Newcastle’s Quayside wasn’t the glitzy playground for footballers and fat slags that it is today. On the corner of Quayside and Broad Chare there now stands an estate agent’s office where river view apartmentettes are advertised for £250,000 and penthouse suites overlooking the Baltic Art Gallery and the landmark Egg-slicer Bridge sell for a million plus. On the same corner site twenty-four years ago Anti-Pop rented a derelict rehearsal room for £7 a week. Nobody wanted to live or work on the Quayside back then, largely because the river stank of shit. As you walked beneath the railway viaduct, along The Side and into what was once the thriving commercial heart of the city, it was like entering a ghost town. Beneath the north pier of the Tyne Bridge buildings stood empty, their stonework blackened with a century of soot. On the river front itself the Port Authority and a solitary advertising agency seemed to be the only buildings in use. The city’s party epicentre was much further north, and at night you could walk from The Side to the Baltic Tavern in Broad Chare without passing a single under-dressed, drunken woman staggering about in high heels.

The Baltic was a rough-and-ready pub with a reputation for violence dating back to an unfortunate shotgun and testicles incident that had taken place a year or two earlier. But there was cheap rehearsal space in the run-down buildings that surrounded it and the Live Theatre group had established themselves just up the road, so the pub had a pretty bohemian clientele. It was still a sailors’ pub too, with the odd naval vessel mooring nearby, and on Sundays it filled up with dodgy market traders. The Baltic was decorated in a half-hearted nautical theme with fishing nets and orange buoys draped above the bar, and there were a couple of token lifebelts hanging on the wall next to the tab machine. But this was no theme pub. It was a good old-fashioned boozer. The jukebox featured an eclectic mix of disco, soul and early Adam Ant records, and the wall behind it was a sea of posters advertising gigs, plays and exhibitions. In front of the jukebox was a pool table, and it was here I whiled away most of my free time after packing in my job.

Pathetic Sharks

By now Jim Brownlow had got himself a girlfriend. Fenella was a petite and pretty brunette whom I’d known at school, but since we’d left school Jim had got to know her considerably better than me and they now shared a flat. Fenella was a revelation when it came to selling comics. She worked in a clothes boutique by day and by night she’d accompany us on our rounds of pubs and Students’ Union bars. With her looks, patter and personality, Fenella could sell a dozen or more comics where I would have struggled to sell two or three, blokes literally queuing up to hand her their money. Armed with this new sales weapon, in July of 1980 I ordered an ambitious 1000 copies of the third issue. The bill came to £126.57. I hadn’t minded losing money on the first two comics but now I was living on £14 a week state benefit and if Viz was going to continue it would have to start paying for itself. Editorially one of the highlights of the new comic was the début of the Pathetic Sharks. This was a fairly crude half-page strip which had started out as a Jaws spoof before I abandoned it halfway through. Shortly afterwards Jim had picked it up and added a speech balloon, something to the effect that my sharks looked crap. And thus the Pathetic Sharks were born.

During the summer of 1980 I got a message that Brian Sandells wanted to see me. Brian owned the near-legendary Kard Bar tat emporium in what was then the Handyside’s Arcade. This run-down Victorian shopping arcade stood in Percy Street, on the site of what is now ‘Eldon Garden’, a notably plant-free, glass and tiles shopping mall. Today the place buzzes with footballers’ wives spending their husbands’ cash on fancy knickers and designer jewellery, but in the early 1980s it was at the opposite end of the commercial property scale. In the sixties the Handyside had been home to the famous Club A-Go-Go where The Animals had been the resident band. Twenty years on the club was now a grotty carpet warehouse, better known for the historic hole in the ceiling where Jimi Hendrix had once carelessly thrust his guitar, than for its carpets. Most of the low-rent shops in the arcade below sold second-hand kaftans, incense or punk clobber. The Kard Bar was the biggest of these and sold every shade of shit imaginable, from pop posters to dope pipes, via Japanese death stars. The shop was compact and packed, a maze of shelves and racks displaying any manner of tasteless tat. Marilyn Monroe pillow cases, Steve McQueen cigarette lighters, Jim Morrison bath salts. You name it. Brian, the owner, was a smartly dressed, grey-haired man in his late forties who would have looked more at home working in an old-fashioned bank. Standing behind his unusually high counter he looked a bit like a glove puppet operator without a puppet. Brian told me he’d seen copies of Viz and been impressed. A lot of it was rubbish, he added quickly to counteract the praise, but he thought it was well produced. He ordered a modest ten copies of issue 3 to begin with, but paid me £1.50, cash up front, and immediately put them on sale right next to his till.

By now my nationwide distribution network included top retailers like the Moonraker science-fiction bookshop in Brighton and the Freewheel Community Bookshop in Norwich. I got in touch with these unlikely places by scouring the national Yellow Pages archive in the Central Library and sending off unsolicited samples by post. Meanwhile the south coast retirement resort of Bournemouth was becoming an unlikely sales hot spot thanks to the efforts of Derek Gritten. He had even approached the local branch of WHSmith with issue 2. They’d told him where to go, of course, but Derek was still confident enough to order a staggering eighty copies of No. 3. I had distribution north of the border too, a Stirling student called Bill Gordon having forked out £15 for 100 copies to sell among his friends. But selling 1000 copies was proving to be difficult, and after five months I still had a couple of hundred left and not enough money to pay the next print bill. Brian Sandells got me out of a scrape, buying the lot off me and paying cash up front.

Sales hadn’t been helped by our second press review, this time in the local morning paper. I’d sent offbeat columnist Tony Jones at the Newcastle Journal copies of the first three comics and he invited myself and Jim in to meet him and to pose for our first ever press picture on the roof of the local newspaper offices. His review was a bit more objective than the Evening Chronicle’s. Under the headline ‘Comic is a five letter word’ he said that most of the magazine was ‘cheap, nasty and misdirected’. But he wasn’t entirely negative. His concluding words were, ‘If they clean up their act, this enterprising duo could yet find Viz has a future.’

Despite struggling to shift issue 3, I printed another 1000 copies of issue 4 in October 1980. This comic featured the first ever letters page, a combination of genuine letters I’d received (such as the stock letter from the dole office that accompanied my weekly giro) and letters that I’d made up to mimic the vacuous style of the tabloid letters pages. As more and more of my time got taken up by selling – posting off parcels and chasing up payments – the interval between comics was increasing. The next comic didn’t appear until March 1981, but No. 5 was worth waiting for as it marked a watershed. We had our first full-page cartoons, with Jim’s brilliant Paul Whicker the Tall Vicar instantly becoming our most popular character to date. There was also Simon’s SWANT, parodying the American TV series SWAT, and for my money a strip called Ciggies and Beer was Martin Stevens’s best ever contribution. I’d also made my first crude attempt to mimic the teenage photo-romance stories I’d read in girls’ comics like Jackie, taking the pictures at home on my dad’s old camera and using our neighbours as actors. Issue 5 also included the first genuine commercial advert. Brian Sandells asked if he could advertise the Kard Bar and I agreed, on condition that the advert was in keeping with the editorial style of the magazine. This set a famous trend of amusing adverts that was to last for several years. I charged Brian £11 for his half-page advert, and he gave me £15. Brian could be very generous – a little too generous at times when it came to offering advice. On every visit to his shop I’d receive a lengthy lecture on business or graphic design and I’d be stuck there for up to an hour smiling and nodding my head. He was also a real stickler when it came to proofreading his adverts. He always insisted I got the spelling right, for example. He was a real nit-picker, Brian.

When issue 5 was printed the Free Press invited us to come in and do some ‘self work’ finishing which meant that they printed the pages and we put the comics together ourselves. This cut the production costs considerably and was also an important gesture of compliance with the Free Press’s socialist principles. They were, after all, a bunch of commies, not a commercial printer, and for them the object of the exercise was to give us a share in the means of production. Jim, Simon and myself spent many a happy day at Charlotte Square collating, folding and then stapling comics together on a Dickensian saddle-stitching machine. Eventually they let us use the guillotine too, and finally the ‘Hobson’, a fully automated and highly temperamental page collating, folding and shredding machine.

The Free Press was a fascinating environment to work in, with a wonderful mix of characters present. For me that place encapsulated the comical conflict between trendy, right-on socialists and down-to-earth, working-class people that was central to some of my favourite cartoons at the time. Cartoons like Woolly Wilfy Wichardson who orders weal ale in a working-class boozer, and Community Shop where a bloke in a vest goes into a community wholefood collective and tries to buy twenty Embassy Regal. The Free Press was a co-operative where all the workers were equal, but there was an obvious divide between the middle-class political ideologists whose idea it had been to set it up, and the working-class printers who’d been drafted in to work there. Printers like Jimmy, a fat Geordie bloke from Scotswood. He may not have had the intellect of colleagues like Howard, the idealistic hippy, and Andy, the hardcore socialist Scouser, but Jimmy could debunk the lot of them with his blunt wit and choice turn of phrase.

Despite having been fobbed off by Malcolm Gerrie I kept on bombarding Check It Out with copies of Viz and eventually a researcher called Alfie Fox got in touch and invited myself and Simon to a meeting. It turned out Fox was new to the show and didn’t realize Viz was off limits. But our meeting wasn’t a complete waste of time. Alfie Fox took us to the canteen at Tyne-Tees Television for a chat, but I spent the entire meeting listening to someone talking on an adjoining table. A local TV newsreader and continuity announcer by the name of Rod Griffiths was holding court with a group of colleagues, and he was swearing like a trooper. It was astounding to hear such a familiar voice coming out with such unfamiliar language, and I was mesmerized. When we left the meeting we were no closer to getting Viz on TV, but the seeds for a new cartoon character had just been sown.

Bizarrely, after trying for over a year to get Viz onto a shoddy local yoof programme, a slot on national TV fell into our lap. In June 1981 a hand-written note addressed to ‘Anyone from Viz Comics’ was left at the Kard Bar. It came from Jane Oliver and Gavin Dutton, producers of a BBC2 yoof show called Something Else. They were planning to make an alternative programme about Newcastle and were in town looking for suitably disaffected young people to take part. Something Else was a product of the BBC’s Community Programme Unit, and the idea of the show was to give ‘the kids’ access to television.

When we met the two producers they explained that we, the kids, were going to make the programme, not them, the boring grown-ups. They were just going to help us a little. They hand-picked a panel of five appropriately discontented youths from the area, all of whom had got ‘something to say’. As well as myself, representing the comic, there were four others. A motorcyclist called Mick wanted to draw attention to the plight of motorcyclists who are occasionally barred from pubs just because they wear leather clothing. Mick was a fireman, and it occurred to him that if the pubs from which he was barred caught fire, it would be him the landlord would turn to to put the fire out. The irony and injustice of this situation clearly rankled with Mick, and the idea of filming people riding around on bikes clearly appealed to producer Gavin Dutton, who was himself a bit of a biker. Then there was Mark, a chubby, monotone mod who wanted to moan about local bands not getting a ‘fair deal’ from London record companies. There was also Tracey, an actress who I suspected was on the other bus, and had some sort of gripe about the stereotyping of women. And there was Stephen, a long-haired hippy who didn’t like being stereotyped as a long-haired hippy just because he was a long-haired hippy. This was going to be some show.

As with all yoof shows there were a couple of live music slots in the programme to try and entice people to watch it, and because it was our programme the producers said it was up to us to choose the bands. I realized this was a golden opportunity for Arthur 2 Stroke and The Chart Commandos so I got to work lobbying the other panel members. The Chart Commandos were just about the biggest band in Newcastle at the time and their recent single, a dub version of the theme from Hawaii Five-0, had recently stormed in at number 175 in the charts. After a lot of arm-twisting all five of us eventually agreed that Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, and notorious South Shields punk outfit the Angelic Upstarts, would provide the music for our show. With this settled I ran all the way from the BBC studios in Newbridge Street to the Anti-Pop rehearsal room on the Quayside to break the good news.

The next day producer Gavin Dutton rang me. He said he’d been thinking. Because the North-East had such a reputation for heavy metal music, would it not be a good idea to have a heavy metal band on the programme? ‘Not all Geordies are air guitarists,’ I told him. ‘You’d just be reinforcing another stereotype. Can’t we just stick with the bands we chose?’ No, we couldn’t. It turned out that Dutton, himself a bit of a heavy metal fan, had already twisted the arms of the other panel members and the decision had been made to replace Arthur 2 Stroke with a bunch of tight-trousered, cock-thrusting Charlie’s Angels lookalikes, the Tygers of Pan fucking Tang.

My next contribution to the programme was to draw cartoons of a few other North-East stereotypes, such as a man with a flat cap and whippet and a woman chained to the kitchen sink. These were to be included in the show in the hope that the use of such stereotypes on national television would in some way help put a stop to the use of such stereotypes in the media. I seem to recall that was one of the producers’ ideas too. Jim, Simon and I were also going to be interviewed about Viz by another member of the panel. On the day of our interview the film crew were scheduled to arrive at my house at 2.00 p.m. We’d never been on telly before so the three of us decided to pop out to a local pub beforehand in order to calm our nerves. By the time the TV crew arrived we were fucking rat-arsed, Simon especially so, and for some reason we’d dressed up in a selection of silly wigs and false moustaches. Mark, the monotone mod interviewer, read out his questions with some difficulty, and a total lack of enthusiasm, while we gave a giggling performance of Ozzy Osbourne-esque incoherence. When filming was complete all three of us were invited down to London to make a trailer for the show. As a special treat they let us write out the programme credits by hand, in white paint on a very long roll of blue paper. It took us most of the night to do it, and we later learned this had saved them £125 in production costs. The tight bastards didn’t give us a penny. But the benefits of our TV exposure were apparent even before the programme had been finished. In July 1981 I got a letter from TV presenter Tony Bilbow saying he’d seen a copy of Viz at the Community Programme Unit offices and wanted to subscribe to future issues. He generously enclosed £10 and in doing so became our first ever celebrity reader. ‘Something Else Newcastle’ was broadcast on BBC2 at 6.55 p.m. on Friday 25 September 1981. In those days there were only three TV channels, and being on telly was a real event. Everyone either saw us or heard about it, and the programme resulted in a massive upsurge of interest in the magazine, from my parents in particular.

Up till this point they’d been unaware that Viz existed, but keeping it a secret had been getting harder by the day. I knew full well that a BBC film crew arriving at the door might need some form of explanation, but before I’d had a chance to say anything my dad had invited them into the living room for a cup of tea and casually enquired about what they were filming upstairs. The cat was finally out of the bag and a few days later my mum broached the subject of this ‘comic’ on one of my brief visits to the kitchen. ‘Can I see one of these comics of yours?’ she asked. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Actually . . . I’ve not got any at the moment. They’re all sold out. But I’ll get one for you as soon as I can.’ I kept stalling her for days and then weeks, but the pressure to produce a comic became unbearable once the Something Else programme had been broadcast. To make matters worse my streetwise Auntie Thea had heard about Viz by now and had started mentioning it to Mum. Ashamed to show her the real thing I took an old back issue and used Tippex to obscure every swear word in the comic. I seem to recall making twenty-seven alterations before I had the nerve to show it to her. I went into the living room, handed it over unceremoniously then darted back upstairs before she’d found her reading glasses.

Despite our big break on TV I didn’t see Viz as anything other than a slightly shameful hobby. In the year since I’d left the Ministry I’d been supplementing my dole money by dabbling in design work. I’d started off doing a few posters for Anti-Pop, but one job led to another and before long I was producing designs for all sorts of people. I was totally untrained but I particularly enjoyed the design side of the comic and I’d managed to glean the basics of typography by hanging around the Free Press’s design studio and looking over people’s shoulders. I enjoyed the whole creative process of graphic design – from ripping off someone else’s idea, all the way through to cobbling together some makeshift artwork and forging a union stamp on the back. This seemed to be the direction my career was heading in so I decided it was time I went to college and trained to become a proper, professional graphic designer. One that charges £30 an hour instead of just a couple of quid.

No art qualifications were necessary to enrol on the Art Foundation course at Bath Lane College in Newcastle. I found this a little bit disturbing but as I didn’t have a single art qualification myself I couldn’t really grumble. The one-year course was designed to give would-be art students a basic grounding in graphics, ceramics, sculpture, fine art, fashion and eccentric behaviour. For my interview I packed together a few of my early works: a pencil portrait of my late grandfather on my mum’s side, a caricature of Jimmy Hill and my line drawings of castles tailored towards the drunken Norwegian market. I’d been warned by my brother Steve, an art college veteran, that conventional pictures with discernible subject matter – like castles and grandparents – were frowned upon in the academic art world. And a couple of years earlier a friend of Steve’s, an artist called John Boyd, had warned me specifically about drawings of Jimmy Hill. ‘It might look like Jimmy Hill,’ he said, ‘but is there a market for that type of thing?’ John Boyd’s paintings would later sell for tens of thousands of pounds, and sure enough none of them would be of Jimmy Hill. But I left Jimmy in. The only concession I made was to leave my watercolours of diesel trains in the drawer at home. I also decided not to include any copies of Viz in case the bad language counted against me.

The interviewer, who wore suede shoes, whipped through my portfolio like a customs officer searching for duty-free cigarettes. He didn’t seem interested in anything he found, tugging the corner of each drawing then quickly pushing it back into place. Jimmy Hill got nothing more than a cursory glance, as did Granddad and Bamburgh Castle. He seemed so unenthusiastic about my work it came as quite a surprise when he told me I’d been accepted.

The moment I arrived at art college I knew I’d made a mistake. In my first week one of the lecturers, a man called Charlie, was suspended for dancing naked around his studio and trying to stab female pupils in the bottom with a compass point. I sensed I wasn’t going to fit in. I was old, twenty-one by now, and the rest of the students were young, kids of eighteen who all dreamed of being either Vivienne Westwood or David Hockney when they grew up. As the course progressed their dress sense became more extravagant and their hair dye more colourful. Free at last from the social restrictions of their comprehensives and surrounded by like-minded, creative spirits, one by one they were coming out of the closet and declaring themselves Marc Almond fans. All I wanted was for some fucker to teach me how to draw hands properly and explain typography and print, but I’d arrived at art college thirty years too late for that. We rotated subjects every couple of weeks. All I learnt from my brief spell in Graphics was not to call the lecturer ‘Sir’. Everyone laughed when I did that. The correct form of address was ‘Les’. The Photography module was probably the most useful. They didn’t teach you anything about composition or lighting or how to take a decent picture, but they couldn’t avoid showing you how to develop and print a film. What I dreaded most was my two weeks in Fashion and I got through it by keeping my head down and making a 15-inch-high, soft-toy version of a Pathetic Shark. The worst experience turned out to be Fine Art. That did my fucking head in.

At Heaton school my Woodwork teacher, Mr Venmore, spent his spare time working in a small room at the top of the class making himself a beautiful solid ash dining table and a set of matching chairs. At art college the Fine Art lecturer, Brian Ord, spent his spare time in an almost identical room at the top of the class, sawing up tables and chairs and sticking them back together in ridiculous, silly shapes. This was sculpture, apparently.

Over a year the Foundation course sorted the wheat from the chaff. By the end of it the wankers had become hardened art students, destined to have failed pop careers and eventually work in advertising, while dismayed and disillusioned individuals like myself, who were happy with their natural hair colour and preferred Gloria Jones’s version of ‘Tainted Love’, found ourselves back at square one. My parting advice from the senior graphics lecturer, Dave, was that I should get away from this dirty old town, quit Newcastle and head for the bright lights and the big opportunities. He said I should go to Exeter. Apparently Exeter University had an illustration course where I could hone my cartooning talents and qualify to become a greetings card illustrator. If there was one thing I hated it was ‘humorous’ greetings cards. If anyone ever sent me one it went straight in the fucking bin. So I ignored Dave’s advice and decided that my next career move would be to sign on the dole again. Throughout my spell at college I’d continued to publish Viz, but my graphic design work had really started to take off. I’d had one major job to do, designing a clothing catalogue, and this meant working late at night, often all night, trying to cram in other jobs for my regular customers too, then going to college the next day feeling like shit. One morning I actually went to bed for ten minutes thinking it would make me feel a bit brighter when I got up, but it didn’t. Viz No. 6 came out just before I started college, in July 1981, and featured my new creation, Roger Mellie the Man on the Telly. I based his director Tom, the straight man, on my recollection of Something Else producer Gavin Dutton. But a far more popular character launched in the same issue was Billy Britain, a patriotic, right-wing racist who had the catchphrase, ‘What a glorious nation’. The sort of person I’d imagine subscribes to This England magazine. Initially Billy Britain was a much bigger hit with readers than Roger Mellie, but a fatal design flaw would limit his long-term potential. His face was too complicated. I just got lucky the first time I drew it, in the title frame, but subsequent attempts to reproduce the same face weren’t so good. I could only draw him from one angle and with one facial expression, which drastically limited the scope for character development. Roger Mellie, on the other hand, and Norman the Doorman who also made his debut in issue No. 6, were much better thought out. Their simple designs took into account the fact that I was, at very best, a rather mediocre cartoonist. Norman the Doorman was based on the gorillas whose job it was to uphold the ridiculous dress codes imposed by licensees in Newcastle city centre. No white socks, for example. It was also one of those strips where the name came first. You’d think of a name and it sounded so good you simply had to follow it through and come up with a cartoon to match.

Billy Britain

When issue No. 7 appeared in December 1981 it featured the first appearance of Biffa Bacon. Biffa’s name, kneecaps and elbows were undeniably inspired by the Dandy’s Bully Beef, but his character and relationship with his parents, Mutha and Fatha Bacon, were inspired by an incident I witnessed on a Metro train in Newcastle. Two young kids, aged seven or eight, had started squabbling in the aisle of a crowded train and were pushing and shoving each other. Their respective fathers were sitting on opposite sides of the carriage and you’d have expected them to intervene. But instead of reining his son in and telling him to behave, the heavily tattooed father sitting closest to me leaned forward and whispered in his son’s ear, ‘Go on, son, I’m right behind you.’ From that sprang the simple idea of a bully whose father eggs him on rather than spanking him with a slipper. In fact his parents are more violent than he is. Issue 7 also featured a significant strip by Simon called the Lager Lads. This was inspired by a series of what seemed to us unlikely TV commercials for McEwan’s lager in which three young lads went into pubs – laughing, smiling and drinking McEwan’s lager – and never once got pissed or glassed anyone. The Lager Lads was the forerunner of Sid the Sexist.

Biffa, Mutha and Fatha Bacon

With a TV appearance in the pipeline I’d boldly ordered 2000 copies of No. 6, double the previous print run, at a unit cost of just over 11p, and I stuck with 2000 for issue No. 7. By 1981 the comic was reaching cult status among the student population of Newcastle, and sales in city centre shops were taking off. Brian at the Kard Bar was ordering an initial 500 copies of each issue, on condition that he had the comic at least a week before any other shops. By now I’d talked Virgin Records into stocking Viz, and HMV followed suit not long afterwards. Volume (formerly Listen Ear), Virgin and HMV were now all ordering fifty copies on an almost weekly basis. On the one hand this meant I could now retire from hawking the comic around the pubs, but it also posed one or two logistical problems. I couldn’t drive and I had no car, so all the deliveries had to be done on foot and by bus. On at least one occasion Simon and I pressed two of my granny’s ‘Mrs Brady’ style shopping trolleys into service to deliver comics to town on the 33 bus.

Getting HMV on Northumberland Street to stock Viz was a huge boost. The manager, Keith Armstrong, approached me in the pub and asked how it was that his shop was the only record shop in town that didn’t sell Viz. Frankly I’d never asked because I didn’t think there was a cat in hell’s chance of a mainstream music store like HMV touching it. Keith immediately started stocking it, right alongside his tills for maximum exposure. This put Viz under the noses of ordinary people who went to HMV to buy their Rod Stewart and Phil Collins records, and almost inevitably Viz wasn’t to every Phil Collins fan’s taste. One miserable old cow – probably the same woman who reported me to the boss at the DHSS – complained to the HMV head office about the contents of the comic and Viz was immediately banned from the shop. But that didn’t stop Keith from selling it. He simply ignored the ban, kept on stocking it by the till, and told his staff to whip the comics out of sight if they saw anyone from head office entering the store.

Big Vern

The HMV shop had also joined the growing list of advertisers in the magazine. Keeping the adverts funny depended entirely on the cooperation and understanding of the client. Some people just couldn’t get their head round self-parody. Sometimes if a client turned down what I thought was a really funny advert, I’d put the ad in anyway and simply not charge them. But Keith was game for anything and as a result HMV’s ads tended to be among the funnier ones.

Issue 8 came out in May 1982 with a print run of 3000, and as sales rose so the new characters kept on coming. This one saw the birth of two familiar faces, Big Vern and Mr Logic. Big Vern was my tribute to The Sweeney. Like most of my cartoons it was intended as a one-off, a manic précis of the entire 1970s Euston Films genre, all compressed into a silly half-page throwaway strip. A straight man, Ernie, and a funny man, Vern. The same thin joke – that Vern is paranoid about the police – is repeated a few times, and at the end Big Vern kills himself. That was it. Artistically speaking there was nowhere else for Big Vern to go, besides which, from a continuity point of view, he’d already blown his brains out. But people liked it, so Big Vern was duly resurrected and the fact that he always killed himself at the end of the strip became part of the joke.

Mr Logic

Mr Logic was different. He was based very much on real life. The product of a rare collaboration between myself and Simon, Mr Logic – an extreme social misfit – was unashamedly based on our big brother Steve and his hilarious Mr Spock behaviour. It wasn’t until years later we discovered the real name for it was Asperger’s Syndrome.

CHAPTER FOUR
Celibacy and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll

One underlying reason for Viz’s growing success was probably the fact that I wasn’t getting my end away. I had none of the distractions of a serious relationship, or indeed any relationship at all. I was a bit of a detached, emotionally independent sort of teenager myself. I’d only had one real girlfriend who I’d ditched when she declared herself a Saturday Night Fever fan in 1977. She was the type of girl who expected you to open doors, brush your hair and take regular baths, and I found all that a bit restrictive.

With a CV that featured train-spotting and a record collection that featured the Seekers, my prospects with the girls had never been good. And from a practical point of view living at home had also become a handicap. By now my bedroom, overlooking the railway in Lily Crescent, had almost totally metamorphosed into a design studio. It was a big room, about 20 feet wide by 14 deep, but I’d managed to fill almost every square inch of it with furniture. I had my drawing board, shelves cluttered with ink, pens and drawing materials, a wardrobe full of back issues, my record collection and hi-fi system crammed into a corner, a filthy old settee, the card table for a drawing board, a plan chest, a wooden writing desk, a small set of drawers for my clothes, and finally, amidst all this mess, a very untidy single bed. To add to the romantic atmosphere there was always a whiff of Cow Gum in the air, and what little carpet remained visible wasn’t, due to the amount of litter on the floor. The walls were painted in dismal two-tone green bands – based on the British Railways class 47 diesel locomotive livery of the early 1960s – and there was a large paint stain on one of the curtains where I’d managed to knock a two-and-a-half litre tin of paint off a stepladder. The place hadn’t been properly cleaned or dusted since 1970. It was just about functional as a workspace, but far from the ideal bachelor pad.

I led a solitary existence at home, rarely exchanging more than few pleasantries with Mum and Dad. My social life centred entirely around the pub, and even there I preferred playing pool to talking. I could get on the pool table at 6.30 p.m. and still be winning by closing time. That, and two pints of Whitbread Trophy Bitter, made for the perfect night out. Then, in 1982, my late-running sexual awakening finally arrived.

Karen

Karen was an eighteen-year-old history student at Newcastle University. Andy Pop had told me that a group of girls were interested in starting an Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos Fan Club and asked if I’d liaise with them. The girls in question all lived together in an attic flat not far from me. It was at the top of a huge, double-fronted Victorian house belonging to the University, and as I clumped up the communal stairwell I realized that all four levels of the house were completely full of teenage girls. I felt a bit uncomfortable. I found my way up to the top-floor flat and was introduced to three of the occupants. Then the fourth appeared from her bedroom. Her hair was dark and so were her eyes. She seemed quiet and shy but when she smiled her timid little smile, her teeth lit the room and her sparkling eyes gave off the same sexual charge as 10,000 Kylie Minogue’s arses. I was smitten.

That night I tossed – in a purely restless sense – and turned, endlessly thinking about her. Over the next few weeks I made silly excuses to visit the flat but never summoned up the courage to ask her out. I knew I had to so I hit on an idea. Near the Free Press in the centre of town was a little-known medieval monastery called Blackfriars which contained a little-known craft centre and even littler-known restaurant. The perfect way to proposition her would be to ring her and hit her with the killer line, ‘Do you fancy going out to a monastery for a cup of tea?’ There was no way I could have simply asked her out for a drink.

I waited till the coast was clear so I could use the telephone without Mum and Dad overhearing the conversation. Eventually my chance came and I nervously dialled her number. There was a communal phone on a lower landing of the house and my heart pounded as the girl who answered it clattered away up the stairs to find her. When I heard Karen’s voice on the end of the line I babbled my cheesy line out breathlessly and then continued wittering nervously until I eventually ran out of breath. Then there was a short silence after which she said, ‘Yeah . . . okay.’ She’d actually said ‘Yes’! I was in a state of shock and jubilation. We had a date, although I don’t remember much about it. We met at lunchtime, in between her lectures, but I think she declined the offer of food. I might have had a cheese scone, but I couldn’t say for sure. We drank tea and talked for a while. At one point I think she mentioned that her mum worked for the Halifax Building Society . . . or maybe it was the Woolwich. When I’d finished my cheese scone we walked back up towards the University and I vividly remember a group of workmen wolf-whistling at her as we passed St Andrew’s church. Karen had a short skirt on at the time, and very nice legs. Unfortunately our relationship budded for some considerable time without blossoming. Then one day we met up in town and she seemed excited. She had some great news. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend,’ she told me. I was over the fucking moon.

She said his name was Graham and he was studying Naval Architecture, whatever the fuck that was. She’d danced with him at the Student Union disco that weekend and then kissed him goodnight. He made his way home to Fenham, in the west end of town, and she’d gone home to Jesmond, which is just north of the city centre. ‘And do you know what he did?’ she asked me. I was all ears. ‘He couldn’t stop thinking about me, so he walked all the way from Fenham to Jesmond in the middle of the night just to see me again,’ she said with genuine, bubbly excitement. ‘Isn’t that romantic!’ Romantic? Fucking hell. I’d have walked to the end of the Earth just to see her smile, and this randy student git walks two fucking miles and gets a shag. There’s no bloody justice.

I eventually got over Karen and we remained ‘good friends’ for some time after that. In fact she appeared in the photo-story ‘Prisoner of Love’ in Viz issue 8 where she spent the entire story locked in the lavatory. Our good friendship was so strong Karen knitted me a bright red jumper as a birthday present, with the word ‘VIZ’ on the front in great big letters. I couldn’t possibly have worn it but it was a lovely gesture. Mind you, I’d have still preferred a shag.

I hadn’t been entirely celibate all this time. There had been a drunken one-night stand with a platonic, pool-playing friend whose fondness for Stella Artois had possibly affected her judgement on the night in question. She’d invited me back to her flat for the night and mercifully I can remember very little of the event, other than her using the phrase, ‘Hey, what’s the hurry?’ rather often.

In the summer of 1982 I had a fling with a girl called Sally. I’d known Sally since our schooldays and I’d always fancied her, as had every other boy in the school, and most of the male teachers (I remember one teacher in particular loosening his collar, wiping his brow and mouthing the word ‘Phewf!’ after she’d walked past the classroom window). But Sally was unobtainable, way out of my league. She was the stuff of legend. She spent the night in hotel bedrooms with bass players from top punk/mod revivalist three-piece bands (two words, both one syllable), not nerds like me. So imagine my surprise when Sally rang me up one day completely out of the blue and asked whether I fancied meeting up for a drink

Sally was small and stunning with reddish brown hair, and eyes that had always reminded me of Angharad Rees out of Poldark. She was also extremely intelligent, and fluent in Russian which she’d been studying at University for the last three years. We went out a few times to pubs and to the local art house cinema to see Macbeth, but nothing remotely sexual happened in the back row. In fact I fell asleep halfway through the film, which was in Russian, and I missed the last two hours. I guessed she just wanted me for my intellect. Then one evening I walked her to the bus stop and instead of saying goodnight as she usually did, she kissed me . . . and we boarded the bus together. I boarded that bus – a Leyland Atlantean, I seem to recall – a boy. But when the sun rose the next morning, I was a man.

I was also struggling to get my trousers on in a hurry. Like me, Sally was living with her parents at the time and had been a little tipsy when she invited me back. When we woke up she was a different person. ‘Quick, get out before my dad finds you!’ she whispered loudly. I could hear that her father was already well advanced with his morning ablutions in the bathroom next door so I unscrambled my clothes and threw them on as fast as I could, then tiptoed down the stairs and dashed out the front door, fastening buttons as I went. Once I got round the corner and out of sight I slowed down to a cocky stroll and started to smile. Not only had I shagged the best-looking girl in our school, but I’d also gained valuable anecdotal material by having to flee from her father in Robin Askwith style. What a result.

My sexual dalliance with Sally may have put a spring in my step but, together with my burgeoning design workload, it seriously affected production of the magazine. Our summer romance ended in the autumn, rather appropriately, and had it lasted any longer there may never have been an issue No. 9. The new comic finally emerged in November 1982 and new cartoons included the debuts of two Tyneside-based characters, Simon’s Sid the Sexist and my own Brown Bottle. The Brown Bottle was a variation on the traditional superhero theme whereby Barry Brown, a quiet newspaper reporter, transformed himself into an incoherent, foul-mouthed, alcoholic tramp whenever he drank a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. That character was partly inspired by Davey Bruce, the drummer with the Chart Commandos. Davey was a Geordie ex-council workman, not the college type like most of the musicians I knew. He was the only person in the Baltic who drank ‘Dog’, as Newcastle Brown is known locally. It took more than one bottle for Davey to make his transformation, but once it happened, by hell, what a transformation it was. The inspiration for Simon’s Sid the Sexist was another friend of ours, Graham Lines. In fairness to Graham he was nothing like Sid, but he provided the spark for the idea with his hilarious sexual bravado and endless chat-up lines, none of which he ever appeared to use on girls. Graham was always inviting you out ‘on the tap’, to ‘pull a bit of blart’ and to ‘get a bit lash on’. If you took him up on the offer you invariably ended up having a few quiet beers, sausage and chips from the Barbecue Express, and then it would be back to his flat to get stoned and watch Laurel and Hardy videos into the early hours of the morning. No girls were ever involved.

Getting stoned was something I rarely got the opportunity to do following an unfortunate experience in the Anti-Pop office. I’d been up all night working on a poster for Andy Pop and hadn’t had a thing to eat by the time I arrived at the office. The minute I walked in the door someone offered me a joint. I took a quick drag, just to be polite, and the next thing I knew my head was spinning, there was a noise in my ears like the start of the music at the cliff-hanging end of a Dr Who episode, and all the voices in the room were suddenly distant echoes. I blacked out and smacked my head on a bench as I went down. When I came to I was lying on the floor with someone frantically loosening my collar. ‘I think he’s dead,’ said one voice. ‘Quick, call an ambulance,’ said another. ‘Nah, don’t be silly. He’ll be fine,’ said Andy. My dramatic collapse became the stuff of legend, and from that point onwards whenever there were drugs about people made a point of not offering them to me, so drugs played no part whatsoever in my creative processes. People often asked whether cartoons were drug inspired, but I didn’t even use alcohol for inspiration. Occasionally I might scribble down an idea while I was drunk, but you could bet your arse once I was sober that a good ninety per cent of what I’d written would be absolute shit.

The Brown Bottle

I never tried any hard drugs. Apart from dope the only thing I was ever offered was a little blue tablet which someone once suggested I take to help me stay up all night and finish their poster by the following morning. I believe Andy referred to it as an ‘upper’. The very sight of this tablet scared me stiff and I imagined swallowing it and being found dead in my swimming pool the next day, even though I didn’t have one. I wasn’t brave enough to say ‘No’, so instead I accepted the tablet and then threw it away.

Drugs may have been off the menu but rock ‘n’ roll was still an important ingredient in the comic. Another highlight of issue No. 9 was a Dexy’s Midnight Runners exclusive. Kevin Rowland and Dexy’s were due to open a wine bar in Newcastle and I’d been recruited to orchestrate the event. I sub-contracted my brother Steve to make a wax champagne bottle for use in the ceremony. Following spells at art college and film school Steve was now hoping to get into the special effects industry. On the day of the grand opening a large crowd was in attendance. Posing at the door of the wine bar, Kevin Rowland said a few words then turned and smashed the bottle of champagne over the head of drummer Seb Shelton. The crowd gasped before realizing the bottle was made of wax. I’d explained the stunt to Shelton in some detail, but being a drummer he hadn’t fully understood and didn’t seem to have any idea what was happening. I used a photo of the incident in Viz but made up my own story to go with it. Dexy’s were famously teetotal under Rowland’s strict fitness regime, so our scoop was that he’d caught his drummer drinking a glass of wine and reacted by smashing him over the head with the bottle.

Anti-Pop were now promoting touring bands in Newcastle in an attempt to subsidize the activities of their only remaining act, Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos. As a result I got unrestricted press access to various popular artists of the day. One of my first interviewees was Clare Grogan out of Altered Images, whom Simon and I visited backstage at a club called Tiffanys. For me ‘interviewing’ someone simply meant getting some sort of evidence that we’d spoken to them, usually a photograph, then I’d go away and make the words up later. I wasn’t at all comfortable asking questions, but as you were entering the dressing room on the pretext of being a journalist saying something was pretty much unavoidable. Our pop coverage was supposed to be ironic, which is easy to do in print, but trying to be ironic in the flesh is a lot harder, especially if you’re talking to Clare Grogan and you fancy the wee Scottish minx something rotten. We asked her: What’s your favourite colour? Your star sign? Your favourite cheese? That sort of thing. Clare cottoned on immediately and answered every question with a smile, but the band’s lanky guitarist wasn’t getting the joke. He was expecting an earnest interview with a hip fanzine and got more annoyed with each question. ‘What sort of a stupid question is that?’ he snarled when we asked about the band’s favourite biscuits. We persisted, and so did he. Eventually it got a bit embarrassing so I took my obligatory photograph, then we made our excuses and left.

Another act Andy brought to Newcastle was a group of comedians called the Comic Strip. I’d never heard of them until I saw Andy putting up a poster in the Baltic one lunchtime around 1981. ‘They’re fucking brilliant,’ he assured me. He’d assured me A Flock of Seagulls would be fucking brilliant too, so that meant nowt. But the Comic Strip sounded promising so Jim, Simon and myself went along to see them, and thank God we did. Never in my life have I laughed so much and I doubt I’ll ever get close to it again. I was rocking in my seat, aching in the ribs and on the verge of wetting myself. Jesmond was full of social workers in Citroën 2CVs yet I’d never heard anyone (with the possible exception of my dad) make jokes about them. Alexei Sayle and 20th Century Coyote (Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson) were the highlights. I didn’t know people could be so relentlessly, pant-pissingly funny. After the show we hung around the stage door and I pressed a copy of two Viz back issues into what looked like the hand of Jennifer Saunders. It was a very chaotic doorway.

Joe Robertson-Crusoe, from Viz issue 65, 1994

By now the idealistic Anti-Pop organization that had been such an inspiration for me and Jim was effectively no more. They’d lost a lot of steam with the departure of the Noise Toys, and now the label’s last remnants, Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, were also heading for obscurity. They were brilliant live and won support slots with touring acts like Ian Dury and the Blockheads and The Q Tips, but it was impossible to keep an eight-piece band on the road playing pubs and college gigs. Eventually they pawned their ambition on the local working men’s club circuit, and never got it back.

Changes were ringing down on the Quayside too. A man called Joe Robertson was in the process of transforming Newcastle nightlife with the introduction of wine bars such as Legends. Robertson had once been a swinging sixties’ DJ at the Club A-Go-Go. Now he was a successful businessman who, despite dressing like a Miami Vice drugs baron, was receiving plaudits from the police for ‘cleaning up’ the city centre. Heavy drinking and violence in and around the Bigg Market had been a huge problem in the 1970s, but now pubs and bars were going out of fashion and were being replaced by Robertson’s pseudo-sophisticated drinkeries. He’d buy a run-down pub, like the Midland Hotel for example, refit it with lots of fancy chrome and expensive lighting, and change the name to anything ending with an ‘s’. Berlins in this case. The bar would then reopen, and hundreds of young people dressed in skimpy frocks and no white socks would queue to get in and pay through the nose for fancy cocktails and bottled lagers. Robertson was shrewd, if not a slightly cheesy dresser. His genius was realizing that Geordies loved to flaunt their money. If there was a lass watching, then a bloke would much rather pay £2 for a bottle of lager than £1.20. So Joe provided £2 bottles of lager, and even costlier cocktails for the ladies. The punters lapped it up, Robertson became a millionaire and developed an accent to match the superficial refinement of his ‘hay clarse’ drinking establishments. Newcastle’s transformation into a party city had begun. By 1982 the first signs of the Quayside redevelopment were beginning to show, and it was announced that the Baltic was closing down for redevelopment. On the final night we all got pissed and drank Mackeson stout, because everything else had run out. It was the end of an era.

CHAPTER FIVE
Lunch in the Penthouse Suite

Viz’s reputation continued to spread, largely through word of mouth but also through the music press. We’d had entirely positive reviews in Zig Zag, Sounds and the NME, not to mention a two-page spread in the Loughborough Student. Jamming, a short-lived music magazine of the day, described the comic as ‘a fantastically irreverent load of shit’. In the twenty-two years since then I don’t think anyone has described it more succinctly than that.

Fanzines also provided an important method of spreading the word. By 1982 my untidy bedroom was linked to a dozen or so other untidy bedrooms across the land via a national network of fanzine editors. Many of them would ask if they could reproduce Viz cartoons in their own magazines and I’d always agree on condition that they gave the comic a plug. One such editor – a teenager in Leeds called James Brown – used a couple of Viz cartoons without permission in his magazine, Attack On Bzag. I granted him retrospective permission and in return he agreed to distribute Viz for me in Leeds. The editor of Real Shocks fanzine in Kent, a bloke called Roger Radio, also produced a comic called Cosmic Cuts. That was about the closest thing to Viz anyone else seemed to be doing, and Roger soon became a regular contributor to Viz, specializing in lazily drawn, poor-quality, one-frame jokes. Pilot: ‘Enemy plane at one o’clock!’ Gunner: ‘That’s good. We’ve got half an hour to spare then,’ for example.

By now the appearance of a new issue was so rare the event would be celebrated with a party. These ‘Viz Receptions’ began with an afternoon soirée at a hotel in Jesmond to celebrate the launch of No. 5. By the time issue 10 was published in May 1983 the venue had switched to Dingwalls, a nightclub in Waterloo Street where I’d previously had the pleasure of watching exotic dancers from Nottingham perform during a Friday lunchtime outing from the DHSS. I’d been having trouble shifting issue 9, and with 10 being a summer issue – the students were away on holiday – only 2,500 were printed. The most notable cartoon début was perhaps Billy the Fish, albeit on a rather small scale. His first strip took up only two lines at the foot of the second last page. I loved football adventure strips like Roy of the Rovers, particularly the disparity in time that always seemed to exist between the players on the field and the spectators off it. Time seemed to freeze as a shot was taken and members of the crowd would carry out lengthy conversations in the time between the ball being kicked and arriving at the goal line. The name Billy the Fish came first, a take on the Dandy’s Billy the Cat. It then occurred to me that if somebody was born half-man, half-fish, they would most likely be able to swim through the air and would therefore make a very good goalkeeper. There was a bit of a football theme to issue 10. Chris Waddle, a gangling youngster who had just broken into the Newcastle team, was a big fan of Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, and in order to promote their final record, a live LP, Waddle agreed to meet the band for a photo session at a pub in Gateshead. A few other players, including Terry McDermott, also turned up. I was the official photographer and took a couple of extra pictures, later making up my own story about Arthur 2 Stroke winning a music industry award after a penalty shoot-out.

Billy the Fish

Wavis O’Shave as The Hard

On the back cover there was a poster of former Anti-Pop artiste Wavis O’Shave posing as The Hard, his Tube TV character. To get the photo Simon and I visited Wavis’s house in South Shields where he lived with his mother. This was the first time I’d met him and he turned out to be a highly intelligent and articulate individual. Then he started telling us about the trouble he was having with the Greek god Pan, who had recently trotted into his living room (Pan was half-man, half-goat) through the wall next to the bay window. As Wavis explained this to us his mother came into the room with a tray of tea and biscuits. ‘Mutha. Tell them aboot Pan, how he come through that waaaall,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right, he did,’ said his mother, who then gave us her own description of the event, followed by the question, ‘Do either of you take sugar?’

Following Anna Ford’s Bum, Wavis recorded a second album under the name Foffo Spearjig and a single from that was released on Eccentric Records, ‘Tie Your Laces Tight’, with the brilliant B-side ‘You Won’t Catch Me on the 503’. I spent weeks designing a cover for the album, which would have been called Texican Raveloni, had it ever been released. The last time I saw Wavis was in the mid-nineties. I was sitting watching TV and suddenly there he was on Stars In Their Eyes, calling himself Callum Jensen and doing a terrific impression of Steve Harley. Unfortunately Mario Lanza won it.

The cost of printing 2,500 copies of issue 10 was £393, or around 16p each. I could sell these to shops for around 20p, making a theoretical profit of about 4p on a cover price of 30p, but it wasn’t a very healthy profit margin. Despite the fact I’d never taken a penny out of the proceeds, or paid any of the cartoonists, the comic was barely breaking even. In the autumn of 1983 my mentor, Brian from the Kard Bar, told me it was essential that I get a new issue out in time for Christmas. Realistically there was no way I could do it. I had my hands full with design work and at the rate new cartoons were being drawn a single issue was now taking six months to assemble. So Brian suggested reprinting some early back issues to satisfy growing demand and hit the Christmas market. I hastily threw together a ‘best of’ compilation of the first four issues and called it No. 10½. In order to beef it up a little, Brian had another idea. Why didn’t we give away a free pop poster with it? He had rooms full of unsold posters dating back to the early 1970s if I was interested. Brian led me through the confusing warren of dark, dusty storerooms behind and above his shop like the Phantom of the Opera leading a captive performer to his lair. We eventually arrived in a small room full of unsold Osmond posters, crates of David Cassidy key rings and sacks of Bay City Roller scarves. Fashions were short lived in the pop world and Brian had clearly had his fingers burnt on more than one occasion. He pointed out a stack of boxes which he said were T-shirts for the hugely popular ET movie. Anticipating the huge demand he’d ordered them all well in advance, before the film had been released in the UK. Unfortunately he ordered all of them in medium and large sizes, not realizing ET was going to be a strictly under-twelves phenomenon. In another corner of the room were parcels of wall posters, some of them still unopened, featuring David Cassidy, the Bay City Rollers and the Osmonds. ‘Unfortunately most of them are too big to fit inside the comic,’ said Brian, ‘unless you folded them somehow.’ ‘That’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘We can chop them into quarters.’ Quarter of a picture of the Bay City Rollers would be much funnier than the whole thing, I reckoned. So we carted the posters off to the Free Press, guillotined them, and inserted the severed remains of the seventies’ pop icons into the middle of the comics.

By 1983 I was working virtually full-time as a graphic designer. I wasn’t earning enough to make a living, but I was earning more than enough to get done for social security fraud. I wanted to go legitimate but couldn’t see how I was going to do it. Then a customer of mine, Walter, mentioned the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Apparently the Government paid budding entrepreneurs £40 a week, for a year, to get them off the dole and into business. Walter managed a band called The Hostages and was trying to get them signed up to the scheme as well. I looked into it and discovered that I wouldn’t qualify for two reasons. Firstly, your business had to be brand new, not an existing enterprise. Secondly, your business couldn’t involve anything immoral or controversial. But what the fuck. I decided to apply anyway.

At the interview I told them I was starting up a brand new graphic design business. They didn’t seem in the least bit interested. In fact they didn’t even ask to see the documents they’d told me to bring along, one of which was a bank statement proving that I had £1000 capital to start my business with. This was the money that had gradually been accumulating from comic sales over the years, which came to around £960, topped up with a few quid from my Post Office Savings Account. I was in and out the door in a matter of seconds. They simply rubber-stamped my application, wished me good luck and called in the next budding entrepreneur. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was often ridiculed for being a political scam to cut the dole figures, and I suppose it was. But it did actually work, albeit on the ‘throw enough shit at a wall’ principle. Fortunately I was one of the shits that stuck.

So I finally signed off the dole and became self-employed in November 1983. Two months earlier I’d written to another BBC yoof programme in response to an ad I’d seen on TV. The producers of a show called Sparks said they wanted to hear from any ‘bright young sparks’ who were involved in setting up their own small enterprises. Viz seemed like an ideal candidate for the show and a couple of weeks later a producer called Tony Matthews came up to Newcastle and met myself, Jim and Simon. He liked what he saw and the following week he wrote offering us a slot on the show. Tony said he was keen to bring some of the characters to life on TV, either by animation or using actors. He was also keen for us to have a big input into the programme. We weren’t supposed to be making the programme this time, but what Tony did was effectively give us a free hand to make our own TV commercial. Under the directorship of a girl called Alex Laird, who I think had a slightly bent nose, our little film was shot on location in Newcastle in late 1983. Jim, Simon and I were filmed drawing cartoons, talking about the characters and working at the Free Press. Simon’s acting talents came to the fore as he posed as Charlie Pontoon, our right-wing newspaper columnist, and the BBC even allowed us to hire a proper actor to play Roger Mellie. We picked a bloke called Charles Pemberton out of an actors’ sample book and the BBC Costume Department knocked up a black-and-white stripy jacket for him to wear. Sparks was a BBC Education programme, so our film had to be educational in some way, so I wrote a set of accompanying notes giving advice to any viewers who wanted to set up their own magazine.

Sparks was broadcast on 3 April 1984 at 7.05 p.m. on BBC2, and our little piece came across very well. Great credit must go to Tony Matthews and Alex Laird for capturing the spirit of the comic so well on the TV screen. Not everyone approved of the programme though. The following written complaint was received by the BBC the day after Sparks was broadcast.

Tonbridge,

Kent

3rd April 1984

Sirs

BBC2 programme at 7.05pm today (Sparks) I switched on to BBC2 just after 7 p.m. this evening to be greeted with absolute filth. What made me livid was that I could well have had my two grandchildren with me and they could easily have been tuned-in to that farrago of gutter language, etc. That apart, I myself have no wish whatsoever to see or hear such muck, and for the life of me cannot understand what sort of people now run the BBC. I noted who directed and produced this programme and that three females were also concerned with it as Production Assistants or similar. What delightful people they must all be . . .

Neither I, nor my wife, nor many of our friends, have any wish to see the sort of filth that Sparks was full of, and it’s high time your organization cleansed itself of them. No wonder our times are what they are; you bear a heavy burden of guilt, but I suppose it doesn’t really bother you.

R. H. Underwood

The programme made a more positive impression elsewhere, and while the BBC were fielding complaints I was taking a call from Bob Paynter of IPC Magazines. IPC were Britain’s biggest and best-known magazine publisher. Paynter said he’d watched the Sparks programme the night before and was intrigued. He wondered if he might see some samples of our magazine. I posted off copies of issues 9 and 10 and was on tenterhooks for the next few days wondering what his reactions would be. Eventually he rang back. How did the three of us fancy coming down to London to have lunch with his board of directors?

Paynter sent me a cheque for £276. At first I thought he wanted me to buy a car and drive down, but when I rang him he explained that this money was to cover the cost of three first-class rail fares. ‘There’s plenty more where that came from,’ he said in all seriousness. When the cheque arrived I sat and admired it for some time, then I used it to buy three saver return tickets. We pocketed the change, which came to about £60 each – the first money any of us had ever made out of Viz. We went down to London on 26 April 1984. At the time the Sun was serializing the kiss-and-tell memoirs of snooker player Tony ‘the Lancashire hot-pot’ Knowles. Jim, Simon and I rarely wrote anything together but I vividly recall writing a spoof of that on the train journey down. When we got to London we caught a tube to somewhere near the river and then walked the rest of the way, across a bridge, with me plotting our route on an A to Z. You couldn’t miss King’s Reach Tower. It was, and hopefully still is, a massive building dominating the south side of the Thames. This was the prestigious headquarters of the International Publishing Corporation. We announced our arrival at reception and a few moments later Bob Paynter came down to greet us. His overall attire – his smart green blazer in particular – made him look as if he’d just broken off from an important lawn bowls match to meet us. Paynter was in his fifties, with a greying, bouffant hairdo, and he bore an uncanny resemblance to Danny La Rue. He ushered us into a lift and told us we were going up to the Penthouse Suite to meet ‘the board’.

When the doors opened we stepped cautiously out into a vast dining suite where a host of men in suits were mingling and sipping drinks. It was like walking into a dinner party. We all looked a right state in our jeans, trainers and T-shirts. A particularly well-dressed man came towards me smiling and I went to shake his hand. He was the waiter. I ordered a glass of orange. Then I was introduced to our host, John Sanders, the Managing Director of IPC’s Youth Group. Sanders was a funny-looking bloke, a cross between Walter Matthau and Wilfrid Brambell, with what appeared to be a very expensive old lady’s wig and a facial expression that made him look like he was permanently tasting soy sauce for the very first time.

The view from the top of King’s Reach Tower was pretty impressive, due largely to the height of the building and the size of the windows. Sanders took me to one side and pointed out a selection of tiny little buildings below – London Weekend Television, the National Theatre, Waterloo Station and, finally, the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund. ‘Do you know much about the IMF?’ he asked with the enthusiasm of a man who clearly did and wanted desperately to tell someone about it. A few moments later I was saved from our one-way conversation about international monetary policy by a call to the dinner table. The table itself must have been at least six feet wide and three times as long. On one side, with our backs to the window, sat the three of us. Lined up all the way along the other side were ‘the board’, about eight of them in all. At this point Sanders, who sat in the centre facing me, formally introduced his colleagues. I can’t remember any of their names but for each one he gave a boastful, and to me entirely baffling, summary of their CV, punctuated by poignant pauses during which he smiled and we were clearly supposed to look impressed.

For lunch we had shepherd’s pie and a barrage of questions. Sanders was feeling us out, gauging our responses to various probes. ‘I don’t like the name Viz,’ he said at one point, wiping mince from the side of his mouth with a serviette. He may only have been in his fifties, but he ate like a ninety-four-year-old. I didn’t rise to the bait. After the main course Sanders got down to business. IPC were interested in the idea of a comedy magazine for students – a younger version of Private Eye, as he described it. They hadn’t got very far with the idea themselves and when they saw Viz on the telly they wondered whether we might be the people to produce it for them. They were proposing a fortnightly publication date and a twenty-four-page magazine, produced by us from a studio in Newcastle. But first of all they wanted to put us to the test. Sanders offered to pay £1,500 for a dummy issue that would have to be ready by 31 May. We agreed. Once they saw the dummy they would then decide whether or not to proceed with the plan.

After the meeting Bob Paynter gave us a brief tour of the Buster comic studio where we marvelled at some of the artwork. We asked whether it was true that they regularly reused old artwork and simply updated the wording. Our evidence for this was that we often spotted ancient vehicles in Buster cartoons – vintage lorries, cars and motorbikes. Bob told us they didn’t, all their cartoons were new, and the antique vehicles were the work of an eighty-year-old comic artist who still worked for them and didn’t get out the house very much these days. After our tour we headed out into the fresh air and back across the river. It was all a bit much to take in and we wandered across Waterloo Bridge, through Trafalgar Square and along the Mall in virtual silence before stopping for a rest in St James’s Park. I sensed a tiny bit of tension in the air and eventually Jim broke a longish silence with a question. ‘What are we going to do with the £1,500?’ Simon seconded it. I remember being furious and trying not to show it. There was me thinking, ‘How the fuck am I going to produce a twenty-four-page magazine in just one month when it currently takes six months to produce a single issue of Viz?’, and all they were thinking about was divvying up the money. I said I would use the £1,500 to finance production of the dummy, paying for materials, proper typesetting and darkroom work. Then whatever was left over we could split equally between the three of us. I could quite reasonably have demanded more as I’d be the one putting the dummy together and providing most of the cartoons, but a three-way split kept everyone happy. And, besides, I didn’t give a shit about the money. It was the daunting prospect of the dummy proving successful that was worrying me. Doing one comic by 31 May was going to require a miracle. Repeating the trick every fortnight from then on would be absolutely impossible.

Jim Brownlow

I didn’t much trust IPC, so when I got home I wrote to John Sanders asking him to confirm his offer in writing. Then I wrote again asking specifically about the copyright situation. I wanted his assurance that £1,500 was only paying for an option to buy this comic, and if they turned it down they’d have no rights to keep or use any of the material. The dummy I put together was a hotchpotch of the best of Viz to date, including a lot of material from issue 11 which had just gone to press. I redesigned old news features, had them properly typeset (in the comic I just typed the text columns on a typewriter) and obtained proper photographs to go with them from IPC’s photo library. I put in what I thought were the best of our cartoons, like Mr Logic, Big Vern and Paul Whicker, and I redrew the first episode of Billy the Fish and stretched it out to cover two pages instead of two lines. I realized I would have to spread material pretty bloody thin if Viz was ever going to be a fortnightly. At our meeting John Sanders had hinted that the political content would need to be increased so I made up a new story about a lorry driver who’d lost a consignment of cruise missiles as a token gesture not quite in that direction. I also commissioned a strip from Mick Kidd of Biff, later of Guardian fame, who had been a Viz distributor, as opposed to contributor, in London at the time.

After sending the dummy off on time I was expecting a prompt, definitive response from IPC, but weeks passed and I heard nothing. We got our money, but no news. Then Bob Paynter rang up and asked for some additional material. He was making a few slight changes and wondered if he could have something a wee bit more political perhaps. Then in late July I got a shock when he sent me a copy of what he called ‘the actual dummy’. This was what he proposed to put before the board of directors. I was flabbergasted. The comic had been so much altered it was barely recognizable as our work. They’d truncated most of our cartoons, altered titles, changed punchlines and replaced entire chunks of the magazine with crap they’d written themselves. Some of the alterations were ridiculous. They’d changed the name Viz Comic to Viz Funnies. A cartoon called Frank the Princess had been altered to make the subject, Frank, gay. With a few subtle changes they’d turned it from a surreal fairy story into homophobic garbage. Sid the Sexist’s name had been changed to Sid the Smooth-talker. And in Mr Logic the word ‘penis’ had been replaced by ‘donger’. For fuck’s sake! They’d missed the entire point. Mr Logic wouldn’t say donger. He would say penis.

I wrote to John Sanders and highlighted thirty or so similar instances of them ruining jokes. I also pointed out that their treatment had robbed the magazine of an important but difficult to define quality, the fact that the joke was on us. In our hopeless prizes, botched competitions, rubbish letters and pitiful news features, Viz was taking the piss out of itself more than other people. In their treatment of the dummy IPC had done away with this entirely.

For the next few months we continued to send additional material to London for a new and definitive version of the dummy, but I was getting more and more frustrated at their inability to know a good thing when they saw it and their insistence on tinkering about with everything. It gradually dawned on me that I could never work with these people. While a final decision was being awaited I had to go to London again. The Hostages, the band that my mate Walter had got onto the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, had just been signed up by EMI. They’d been underpaying me for posters for ages and now they wanted to make it up by asking me to design the sleeve for their first hit single. Walter took me to EMI’s head offices in Manchester Square to be given a design brief by the executive in charge. His brief was very simple – I wasn’t doing the sleeve. Instead he wanted me to fuck off, and some mate of his with an airbrush would be doing the sleeve instead. It wasn’t the most positive outcome I’d ever had from a meeting, but my visit to Manchester Square did prove useful for another reason. On our way into the EMI offices we witnessed a remarkable scene as the band Tight Fit tried unsuccessfully to gain admission at the front door. They’d had a couple of hits a few years earlier, but apparently their credit was no longer good. There they were, dressed in exotic black leather outfits, screaming at the doorman. ‘Don’t you know who we are? We’re Tight Fit!’ But he wouldn’t let them in. I was able to use this story as an amusing music industry anecdote for several years to come . . . until the day I met Pete Waterman. But more of that later.

By October 1984 I still hadn’t been given a decision by IPC so I wrote to John Sanders with an ultimatum. They could either accept the dummy or give us our artwork back. On 22 November he replied:

Dear Chris

I am sorry I have not been in touch. This is not waywardness; I have been giving a great deal of thought to Viz and discussing it here with many people.

Very sadly, and somewhat against my own judgement, I have to tell you that we cannot publish Viz. It is thought that when it is toned-down sufficiently to satisfy IPC, what’s left would not be successful enough for the kind of profit-making that we need. This is because we are a big company in the mass circulation market and, put basically, Viz is not sufficiently mass circulation.

I still think it has possibilities and I hope you make a go of it yourselves. I believe it has great potential and you should not regard this letter as the end of the road. Bob Paynter feels he has called upon your services to a greater degree than the value of the cheque we have already sent you, and he will therefore be sending you an additional cheque for £500.

I am sorry about this decision, and I wish you lots of luck in the future.

Kind regards

John R. Sanders

Managing Director

IPC Youth Group

In one sense he was perfectly right. When Viz was toned down to suit suit Sanders’s superiors on the IPC board it wasn’t funny. But in another sense he was spectacularly wrong. Viz could be mass circulation. It was just a question of finding a publisher with the bottle to take it on.

CHAPTER SIX
Four-Letter Comic on Public Cash

After the IPC rejection Bob Paynter called me up to say goodbye and good luck. ‘I hear Virgin are in the market for a comedy magazine,’ he said. ‘Why not send a copy to Richard Branson?’ After the trials and disappointments of the last six months I wasn’t in any hurry to contact another publisher. In any case, my first year of self-employment was now up and I was doing very nicely on my own. My accountant announced that I’d made a net profit of £4,448 for the year ending 31 November 1984. He didn’t seem impressed at all but I was positively delighted.

Issue 12 finally emerged just in time for Christmas 1984. Inside was a new strip called Johnny Fartpants that had originally been intended for IPC. There was also a début for Felix and his Amazing Underpants, and another newcomer called Victor and his Boa Constrictor. This brand-new cartoon was the work of a brand-new contributor, Graham Dury.

Graham hailed from Nottingham but was working as a postgraduate botanical research scientist at Leicester University. As far as I could gather his work involved messing about with the genetics of potted plants to make them look more attractive on shop shelves. He’d found out about Viz via his girlfriend Karen, a student at Newcastle Polytechnic. As well as a scientist meddling with things I didn’t understand, Graham was a keen cartoonist, and he rang me, offering to come up to Newcastle and show me some of his drawings. Terrified at the prospect of having to pass judgement on someone else’s work I made sure Simon was in the bedroom to give me moral support when Graham called. Graham arrived wearing a South American poncho, a large sombrero hat and cowboy boots. His clothes, together with waist-length brown hair and an overly generous moustache, made him look a bit like a young Gerry Garcia. The portfolio he brought with him displayed his considerable talents as a cartoonist – and also a fondness for drawing cowboy boots – but contained no cartoon strips. Just doodles. We suggested he go away and try drawing some finished strips and as he left we gave him one valuable piece of advice. If at all possible the names of the cartoon characters should rhyme. We were both impressed with Graham. Not by his drawings, or his Mexican attire, but by his personality. He seemed a really nice bloke and we’d got on with him easily. A short while later, sticking rigidly to our advice, Graham came up with Victor and his Boa Constrictor. I was a little concerned about the size of Victor’s nose and the appearance of cowboy boots in the strip, but I used it anyway. But as I was gaining one contributor I was gradually losing another. By now I was seeing very little of Jim. He was moving in different social circles and had started working for a friend as a builder. His contributions had always been a bit sporadic but now the supply had virtually dried up. Issue 12 was the first comic not to feature any of Jim’s material.

The print run was now up to 5000 and sales in Newcastle were going berserk thanks partly to a useful piece of publicity in the local press. I’d recently designed a poster for a Red Cross charity event and mentioned to the customer, a John Dougray, that I’d been on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. ‘Really? How’s business?’ he asked enthusiastically. It turned out Mr Dougray worked for the Central Office of Information, the Government’s PR agency, and his eyes lit up when he heard that my business was still solvent at the end of the year. He asked if I’d mind doing a few press interviews to give the scheme a bit of positive publicity. ‘We’re always on the lookout for success stories,’ he said. Alas, this wasn’t going to be quite the success story he’d envisaged. I agreed to the interviews and all the local papers sent reporters round to talk to me. It wasn’t long till one of the hacks got a whiff of a bigger bone than the one he’d been thrown. He twigged that I’d been publishing Viz, a scandalous magazine, while on the Government scheme. The following day the Newcastle Evening Chronicle exposed this shocking state of affairs under the banner headline ‘FOUR-LETTER COMIC ON PUBLIC CASH’. The story snowballed from there, with an avalanche of press enquiries the following day and stories on the local TV news. All this bad publicity did me no harm whatsoever. In fact I received orders for 960 comics the day after the story broke. Unfortunately the outcome wasn’t so cheery for Mr Dougray. Not only did the COI end up with egg on their faces, but his Red Cross fund-raising event was cancelled due to a lack of ticket sales.

By now the distribution side of the magazine was becoming too much for me to handle on my own. The Kard Bar were ordering 1000 copies of every issue, and selling them. Virgin Records sold over 1000 copies of issue 11. HMV were selling over 500 copies, and a tiny little comic collectors’ shop in Newcastle called Timeslip was selling 200. Pubs where I knew the landlords had started stocking it too: the Trent House, the Strawberry, the Egypt Cottage and the Barley Mow. Simon occasionally helped out with deliveries but he’d moved out of Lily Crescent by now and wasn’t around most of the time. Around Christmas 1985 I went into Virgin Records in Eldon Square to collect money from comic sales, and left with a bag containing £400 in cash. I remember thinking to myself, if one Virgin shop can sell this many comics, imagine what it would be like if every Virgin shop stocked it! There must be thirty or forty of them around the country. So on 7 January 1985 I took Bob Paynter’s advice and wrote a letter to Richard Branson.

I knew that Branson must get shedloads of letters every day, each one of them trying to flog him some half-baked business idea or another. I’d be lucky if he got to the end of my first paragraph without throwing it in the bin. So I gave the letter my very best shot, and started by getting the date wrong:

4th January 1984

Dear Mr Branson

I am 24 and I make a living publishing a magazine called Viz. The magazine has been around since 1979 and the circulation is at present 7,100 copies. Most copies sell in Newcastle as I have not been able to devote much time to getting distribution elsewhere. However several hundred copies go to London, Edinburgh and other cities where the comic is becoming popular, slowly but surely. Part of the reason I am writing to you is that Virgin Records store in Eldon Square, Newcastle, regularly sells over 1000 copies of each issue at a rate of over 30 copies per day.

Viz has received very good reviews in the national music press and elsewhere (see enclosed cuttings) and we have featured on national TV programmes twice. ‘We’ being myself, my brother Simon, a contributor and helper, and a handful of other contributors.

As a result of one of our TV appearances we were contacted by IPC magazines, the international publishing company of some repute. They displayed an interest in publishing Viz fortnightly and were confident, as we were, that we could achieve a mass circulation. We spent several months producing prototypes and dummy magazines for them. They eventually concluded that our original dummy, a slight variation on our existing product, was funny enough, but they dare not publish it. They also found that, once toned down, it was no longer as funny. So in December they finally decided not to publish Viz. IPC have for some time been aiming to fill a perceived gap in the market by publishing a humour magazine for 16 year olds and upwards. While dealing with them I was shown their efforts to date. I am confident that, with their reluctance to publish anything they consider slightly risqué, they will never be able to win that market. However I am now more confident than ever that Viz could, in some form, be a success nationally.

To date every issue has sold out completely, and the circulation has increased with every issue. However, there is a limit to how far we can take it ourselves. Your reputation as an imaginative businessperson goes before you, and I hope you don’t mind me writing this letter, if only to let you know Viz exists. Someone close to IPC suggested that you may be considering the idea of publishing a national magazine with the same audience as ours. If this is the case, and you think we may be of any help to you, we would be only too willing to discuss the matter, at a length of your choice.

If the subject of Viz inspires you in any way we would be glad to hear from you. I am convinced that the comic has a great deal of potential. I hope I haven’t wasted too much of your time with this unsolicited blast on our own trumpet, and I trust that the enclosed copies of our magazine may be of interest.

All the best

Chris Donald

I needn’t have worried how Branson would react. He never even saw the letter or the comics that I’d enclosed. The package was redirected to Virgin Books, the publishing arm of Branson’s empire, where it landed on the desk of a man called John Brown.

As their name suggested, Virgin Books were in the business of publishing books, not magazines. Shitty books to be precise. They specialized in mass-market paperbacks about pop stars, books by chubby, camp TV astrologers and stocking-filler comedy books like How to Be a Complete Bastard. An awful lot of shit must have rained down on John Brown’s desk too, so grabbing his attention wasn’t going to be much easier.

As fate would have it John Brown had been ill on 20 May 1984. Instead of going to work as usual, he’d stayed at home and watched TV. At 1.25 p.m. on BBC2 he had stumbled upon a repeat of our Sparks programme. Like Bob Paynter at IPC, John Brown had been impressed by what he saw and had made a mental note to investigate further. Unlike Bob Paynter at IPC, by the following day John had forgotten the name of the magazine and so he never got round to doing anything about it. But he remembered the name, and the TV programme, when my letter came to the top of his in-tray.

John rang me straight away and arranged to come and see me. He said he’d be flying up on Wednesday 30 January and I should expect him at about 1.00 p.m. At about 1.00 p.m. I got a phone call from his secretary in London saying John would be slightly late. Being a southern media type he’d assumed that Teesside airport must be somewhere near Newcastle, as both were in ‘the North’, so he’d got off his plane, hopped into a taxi and asked to be taken to Lily Crescent, Newcastle. The taxi driver had to explain that Newcastle was forty miles away and took John to Middlesbrough railway station for an onward train to Newcastle, followed by another taxi ride to our door.

I watched with interest as John Brown got out of his taxi and strolled up the path. He looked nothing like the people we’d met at IPC. He was youngish, with a slightly flouncy haircut, and dressed in toff/casual, with jeans, expensive-looking brown leather shoes and a slightly crumpled Black Watch tartan jacket. He was carrying a very trendy-looking aluminium briefcase. Simon and I took John to lunch at Willow Teas, a small café nearby, where he launched into a barrage of questions. Often surprisingly forward and impertinent with his enquiries, he’d ask you one thing and as you started to reply he’d interrupt you by asking something else. It was relentless. I later learned that this was a tactic he regularly employed to prevent you from asking him anything. Another thing I noticed at our first meeting was that John tends to spit when he’s eating and I made a mental note that day never to sit directly in front of him in a restaurant again.

After lunch we went back to the bedroom where John bombarded me with more questions about the magazine. Not about the contents, which he clearly liked, but about the business side. How much did it cost to print? How many pages? How much did it sell for? What was the wholesale price? What were the production costs of each issue? He seemed surprised by my answer to this last question. I said the production costs were nothing. It was true. I’d never balanced any production costs against sales. And none of the contributors had ever been paid a penny. If they had been the comic wouldn’t have been viable. John seemed particularly excited by the fact that everything had been done on a shoestring. He kept on asking more questions, and with each answer I gave he began tapping away on a tiny Virgin-branded pocket calculator. Eventually he left, saying he’d have to discuss Viz with his co-director, and he’d be back in touch as soon as possible. He left his little calculator behind.

While I was waiting to hear back from John Brown I got a phone call from Mark Radcliffe, a young producer at BBC Radio 1. Viz’s reputation had by now permeated the walls of Broadcasting House and he wondered if we were available to be interviewed on their Saturday Live programme on 26 January. Jim, Simon and myself travelled down by train and on arrival at Broadcasting House found ourselves sitting in the company of Robert Plant. Plant got up at one point and asked directions to the lavatory. ‘Off to drop a Big Log are you, Robert?’ shouted Simon, a trifle too loud. After our interview we got a train straight back to Newcastle and I was in the pub playing pool by 8.30 p.m.

The Trent House was now my regular, and it was here late in 1984 that I met an Irish girl called Dolores. We were introduced by an old friend of mine from the Baltic days, an actress, artist and sometime singer called Soo Sidall. Dolores had recently come over from Ireland to work as a nanny and she’d met Soo, a single parent, at a local playgroup. Soo took Dolores under her wing and offered to show her around the town and introduce her to a few friends. She didn’t specifically offer to find her a husband, but in the event she did.

Dolores

My opening line to Dolores was, ‘I bet you were born in the same street as Alex Higgins.’ I reckoned their accents were exactly the same. ‘Alex Higgins is from Northern Ireland,’ she said. ‘I’m from Galway, in the Republic.’ I was only 150 miles out. I met Dolores again at a New Year’s Eve house party at the end of 1984. She was sitting on the stairs dressed in a flouncy, 1950s party dress, her eyes sparkling like Christmas tree lights. She seemed to be the only person in the house who’d made an effort to dress up for the occasion. We sat and talked all night. After that she started coming to the Trent House and often ended up having to watch me play pool all evening. She must have had some riveting nights. Then at Easter 1985 Dolores and matchmaker Soo persuaded me to take a week off work and we booked a small holiday cottage in a village called Allendale in south Northumberland. I had a lot of work to finish first so I arrived a couple of days late, and Soo had to leave early for some reason. That left me and Dolores alone together in a cosy country cottage. On that, our first night together, I cooked a romantic meal of Bird’s Eye chicken pie and Smash mashed potato. And then, after a couple of bottles of wine and a comprehensive crawl around the village’s five pubs, we staggered up the stairs to bed. I staggered up the stairs of that cottage a boy, but when I awoke with a headache the next morning, I was a man. Again.

My other new relationship, with John Brown from Virgin Books, was looking equally promising. He eventually got back to me on the evening of 18 February with the good news that Virgin wanted to publish Viz. John outlined his proposed deal over the phone. I would put the comic together as usual and deliver the artwork to the printer. Virgin would handle all the printing, sales and distribution, and pay a royalty for every comic sold. I scribbled down the bones of the offer and sat up for most of that night trying to work out whether or not it would be viable. At the time Viz was selling over 5000 copies. If all went well perhaps we could sell 40,000 eventually, 1000 for every Virgin store. Then just for a laugh I did another calculation based on the NME’s sales figure of around 100,000. That was the dream scenario.

I told John to make the contract out in mine and Simon’s names jointly, and when it arrived in the post we both took it to a solicitor to get his comments. Richard Hart-Jackson had been recommended to me because he specialized in publishing. Music publishing as it happened, not comics, but it seemed close enough. In the event his advice proved invaluable. One crucial suggestion he made was that royalties should be paid on every comic that Virgin printed, not every comic they sold. This ‘mechanical’ royalty was much easier to account for, and of course it meant that we’d get more money. But the single most important piece of advice he gave me was this: ‘If you sign this contract you and the publisher are entering a three-legged race,’ he said. ‘You cannot afford to fall out.’ Negotiations with Virgin dragged on for a little while. One problem was the frequency. They wanted Viz to be monthly, and I didn’t think I could achieve that. Certainly not to begin with. We eventually agreed on bi-monthly, once every two months, with the aim of increasing this to monthly as soon as possible. Before signing the contract I asked John if we could come down and take a look around the Virgin Books offices.

Virgin’s squat, bunker-like single-storey building at Portobello Dock, alongside the Paddington branch of the Grand Union Canal, was in complete contrast to IPC’s sky-scraping headquarters overlooking the Thames. It felt as if we were going to meet a lock-keeper, not a publisher, as Simon and I negotiated the tricky path to the front door. John was in a meeting so we waited patiently outside his office. When the door opened John briefly introduced us to his previous visitor, Tony Parsons, who was just leaving. Then John showed us around and introduced us to Bev, his secretary, and Mike, his young production manager. We looked around the studio where all Virgin’s books were produced and I couldn’t help noticing how tidy it was. There didn’t seem to be a scrap of litter anywhere. It was as if these people never did any work.

We signed the contract in July 1985 and it was agreed that the first Virgin comic, issue 13, would be published in August. To meet the deadlines I knew I’d have to be a full-time magazine editor from now on, so I had the pleasant task of going round all my graphic design customers and telling them to stick their last-minute, penny-pinching jobs up their arses. During negotiations with Virgin I’d published one last comic myself, to plug the gap between issue 12 in November 1984 and 13 in August 1985. This was issue 12a, another compilation featuring edited highlights of issues 5 and 6. In order to save time I gave the job to a commercial printer, Wards of Gateshead. Sadly the Free Press had printed their last comic.

Virgin’s attempts to find a new printer suffered an early setback. One large company in Birmingham flatly refused to handle it, describing the contents as immoral. If and when they did find a printer Virgin were planning to distribute the comic through the Virgin Records chain, and to the news trade via an independent distributor called Charles Harness. Getting a magazine published by Virgin into Virgin Records shops wasn’t going to be too difficult, but getting a new title onto the news stands would be more of a challenge. Charlie Harness was just the man for the job, having played a pivotal role in the success of Private Eye. Harness had been working as a newspaper delivery van driver in the early 1960s when he’d volunteered to deliver bundles of the early Private Eye to shops around London. Now Charlie was about to repeat the trick with Viz. Not wishing to alienate the smaller shops and pubs that I’d been supplying over the years I asked John if I could continue distributing Viz in Newcastle, and he agreed.

Eric Daft

Working arrangements in my bedroom underwent a few changes. Simon had recently decided to follow in my footsteps, and my mum’s, by applying to join the Enterprise Allowance Scheme as a toy-maker. Toy sales appeared to be a little sluggish so I suggested he run the distribution business in Newcastle while I continued to edit and design the magazine. Simon was ideally qualified to handle the distribution, because he had a car. I knew I could rely on Simon for perhaps two or three cartoons per issue but I was going to need a lot more contributors to fill thirty-two pages every eight weeks. Graham Dury looked a good prospect, and I enlisted the help of Mick Kidd who promised me one page of Biff cartoons per issue. Then I rather hopefully returned to the classified section of Private Eye

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