Extract #3 From Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’

Him Off The Viz

Extract From ‘Mags To Riches.’

It was a very exciting day when Chris told me that he and his friend Jim were going to produce a ‘proper’ comic, and they wanted me to do some work for it. Between the ages of about nine and thirteen I’d been obsessed with the idea of being a comic artist. My interests had moved on slightly by the time I reached fourteen or so, and although still an avid comic collector, I was now more interested in listening to loud music and trying to get my tops and fingers.

Chris had been very keen on making magazines since an early age. His first effort had been the Lily Crescent Locomotive Times, a magazine with a rather limited target readership, specifically the children living in Lily Crescent, more specifically the children living in Lily Crescent who were interested in trainspotting. Readership totalled about six, including Chris himself. The limited print run was in truth a good thing, as the reproduction method used to create the entire run was carbon paper. (For those of you too young to know what carbon paper was, it was a very primitive method of reproducing documents written using a typewriter. Carbon paper, of a very flimsy dark blue material, was slipped in between the document you were typing and another piece of plain paper. As you typed, the ink was transferred from the carbon paper to the paper underneath.)

This rather brutal method meant that the magazine’s entire contents had to be typed and there could be no photographs or illustrations. By using additional sheets of carbon paper in the typewriter you could only get a maximum of three copies of a reasonable standard, so Chris had to type the whole magazine out twice without error in order to produce six copies.

The Lily Crescent Locomotive Times did have one contributor other than Chris, and remarkably this reporter wasn’t even a resident of Lily Crescent. Jim Brownlow was the paper’s Heaton Sidings Correspondent. He had grown up in Lancashire, moving to Newcastle at the age of eleven, becoming Chris’s classmate at Heaton School. Their friendship and love of bizarre and extreme humour would bring about the birth of Viz.

In about 1975 Dad took me to the Central Library in Newcastle to show me one of the wonders of the space age: the photocopier. He told me to go off and find a book with a nice picture in that I would like to keep. I didn’t understand – I couldn’t tear a page out of the book, and even if I borrowed it I wouldn’t be able to keep the picture. I selected a line drawing of a flying dragon, Dad put it on the copier and he told me to wait by the tray to the side. I couldn’t believe my eyes when an exact copy of the picture appeared. It was more amazing than the pocket calculator he had brought home weeks before. The photocopy cost 10p, about 50p today. The photocopier would also play a pivotal role in the origins of Viz.

Chris had produced a number of comic strips at school called the Fat Crusader books. These were passed around his friends and featured many of them in cameo roles, the hero himself being the alter ego of one of his classmates, the extremely mild-mannered Chris Scott-Dixon. The strips usually involved some trouble beginning with one teenage social group or other turning up (skinheads, bikers, teds etc.). In graphic, gory detail the Fat Crusader would despatch them by varied and most imaginative means, a bit like one of those predictable horror films popular at the time. These comic books weren’t publications as such; they were one-off pieces of artwork that weren’t reproduced. Chris’s next publishing venture would up the stakes in distribution by utilising the magic of ‘the Xerox machine’.

In 1978 Chris and Jim compiled a single page of cartoons with the intention of photocopying it and selling it at cost around friends. This first comedy collaboration between them was called The Daily Pie.

The Daily Pie was a pretty good production, considering it was a first attempt by teenage boys. Many of the cartoons and features on its one A4 page were later reproduced in the first Viz comic, including ‘Tommy’s Birthday’, ‘Colin the Amiable Crocodile’, ‘Your Stars with Gypsy Bag’, and, most significantly, ‘Rude Kid’.

The single page of artwork was reproduced on the photocopier at Jesmond’s Prontaprint, a high-street print franchise, at a cost of 10p a sheet, and priced to sell for the same. Chris and Jim then took it around the pubs of Jesmond and sold it to their friends who drank there.

My first contribution to Viz’s beginnings happened at this time, although not in the pubs, but at St George’s Youth Club. I got permission from Dave Hall for The Daily Pie to be sold there, so one weekend Chris and Jim came down and we went around the club together, pushing our filthy wares on unsuspecting youths. We tried to persuade them that their pocket money and paper-round wages would be better spent on a sheet of puerile humour than on Hubba Bubba or Curly Wurlys from the tuck shop. The problem we faced trying to sell The Daily Pie was its price. For a single sheet, 10p was a lot of money at the time, and certainly put people off.

This problem was solved soon afterward as the photocopier became less of an exciting gimmick, which led to the price of copying going down dramatically. Its unstoppable march led to Chris and Jim’s next venture being far more saleable. Arnold the Magazine, another single-page photocopied publication, was priced once again at cost, but at a much more affordable 2p. Combined sales can’t have been more than a few dozen, but the seed had been sown. The desire and means were in place to put together, and reproduce for sale, a publication based around a shared love of extreme and surreal humour.

My parents had introduced my brothers and me to the comedy of Spike Milligan when we were just children. Dad also drove us all to see The Morecambe and Wise Show every week at the Carmichaels’, television-owning family friends in High West Jesmond. Goons and Stan Freberg records were never off Mum’s Dansette. Comedy was something to which we seemed to be naturally drawn. As a family we loved to watch the films of Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Laurel and Hardy, TV shows such as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s, The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Two Ronnies and the great sitcoms like Dad’s Army, The Good Life, Porridge, Fawlty Towers and the wonderful Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, surely one of the most poignant chronicles of twentieth-century life committed to any medium. But for young lads in the 1970s it was really Monty Python that was our comedy god. It was a love of Monty Python that drew together Chris and Jim, and I too have loved it from the moment I first cast my very young eyes on it.

At primary school the only other person who had ever seen Monty Python was Julian Flear. Julian’s parents (the ones who went swimming at five in the morning) were very liberal. His father was a doctor and had long hair, and their house was full of amazing furniture, Corbusier chairs, beanbags and a colour TV set. I would often go there for tea after school where I would be fed strange and wonderful foods like knotted bread with poppy seeds on top, which wasn’t cut into slices but was torn at the table. This was an outlandish and eccentric household in which Julian was allowed to stay up to watch Monty Python.

My parents, like those of every other child at school, thought the show was on far too late and always sent me off to bed long before it started. Of course, I would never go to bed. I was terrified of going to bed alone. I would sit on top of the stairs, listening, and would sneak down a stair at a time, retreating in haste into the darkness if necessary. If my parents stayed in the room we called to the living room, I would be able to sneak into the sitting room, where the telly was. This took some bravery, and I would occasionally get caught. However, one time, on hearing one of my parents approaching, I hid at the end of the sofa in the gap between it and the wall. I had a perfect view of the telly, whilst remaining hidden. The downside was I had to wait until Mum and Dad either left the room or had fallen asleep before I could make good my escape.

This became my regular hiding place until, for reasons lost to history, Chris decided to grass me up. Not long after this I was allowed special permission to stay up late to watch the show, provided I had my pyjamas on and was ready for bed. Monty Python was then moved to an earlier slot and would no longer be the exclusive preserve of the children of West Jesmond’s most eccentric families.

My love of Monty Python was such that I named my first pet Monty. He was a brown mouse and was very small and cute. One day he was dead. I cried. I got another one, a white one. He was called Monty the Second. He stank and so I had to keep him in the spare bedroom, which meant I would forget to feed him. Dad found a new home for him through his work, with a teenager in Sunderland, the son of one of his clients. Dad was most entertained as the woman reported her son was a ‘punk rocket’.

The best way to get your Monty Python fix when it wasn’t on telly was to listen to the LPs (that’s ‘long playing’ vinyl records to you youngsters). Chris and I were both members of Conway’s record library on Holly Avenue. Dad had bought Chris, Steve and me cassette recorders for Christmas and we used them to listen to copies of LPs borrowed from this very strange emporium. It was an almost Dickensian library, its window filled with ancient cobwebbed displays, long since sun-bleached of all but the tiniest hint of their original colours. It had dark, dusty shelves and a polite-to-the-point-of-never-speaking owner, Mr Conway. His very frail and elderly wife sat silently in a corner behind the counter, like some dusty spinster straight from the pages of Great Expectations.

I used the library to record all of The Beatles’ albums, for which I made my own cassette inserts and labels. Chris was into heavy rock for a short time and borrowed Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin LPs from Conway’s, but it was the Monty Python albums that saw us through all short-lived trends and teenage musical whims. Whatever else was going on, there was always Monty Python. At weekends Jim would often come round and we would listen endlessly to the albums. The team put so much effort into their records. They weren’t just the soundtracks of something previously released on film. The Holy Grail album, for instance, is an almost entirely new piece of writing. These records were very special to us.

Chris came back one day with something that would push completely new boundaries: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Derek and Clive. It was by no means as cleverly put together as Monty Python, but the outrage caused by the use of constant expletives and dark, explicit sexual subject matter is difficult to explain in this day and age. It’s almost impossible to bring home to people how much of a shock it was to our world when nowadays anal sex is fair game for jovial conversation, providing it’s after the watershed.

Chris and I had already been involved in creating some comedy together. Using our cassette recorders, we had made several audio versions of TV shows, most commonly Dr Who, as I had a 45 rpm single of the theme tune. Rather like Chris’s Fat Crusader books, these would inevitably end in extreme violence, a trait of our writing that would continue through the early years of Viz. I also recorded a stand-up comedy show based on The Comedians, a popular TV show at the time. My ‘Funny Joke Show’ featured comedians whose jokes were all terrible. There was a Cockney who made useless jokes about his wife being so fat that she couldn’t even get through doors and a racist South African whose preoccupation was how black people were. Even though I wrote these jokes when I was twelve or so I still use some of the ideas in my stand-up today.

Simon Donald’s autobiography ‘Him Off The Viz’ will be released on October 7th and is available from Amazon, Tonto Books and all good book stores. Simon will also be performing tonight at the Three Tuns in Gateshead alongside Steffen Peddie, Nick Cranston and Dan Willis. More information is available here.