Extract #4 From Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’

Him Off The Viz

Extract From ‘Mags To Riches.’

The Daily Pie and Arnold the Magazine had given Chris the taste for production of something bigger, with a number of pages and the exciting addition of staples. The means to produce a comedy magazine were almost in place.

Chris and Jim had taken me to see bands play at The Gosforth Hotel on Monday nights since the summer of that year, 1979. I was only fifteen, but the function room where the bands played was upstairs, accessed from the street. It was easy for me to sneak in. Looking underage was never a problem for me really, as I’ve been almost five foot ten since I was thirteen and I was never refused service in a pub. Many people thought I was older than Chris, which always annoyed him.

Viz, at its birth, was to be something in between an underground comic and local music fanzine. Anti-Pop was a post-punk music cooperative responsible for putting on gigs at The Gosforth Hotel. This was a vibrant scene and all of Newcastle’s movers and shakers were to be seen in there on sweaty and noisy Monday nights. The Gosforth had previously been home to resident band Last Exit, featuring the one and only Mr Sting out of The Police. Mr Sting had upped sticks and moved to London before Anti-Pop moved in.

In the months leading up to Viz’s launch I began to perform comedy poetry on stage with Pig Sani, a band made up of lads from school. Poady, who I’d written comedy sketches with at school, and who was also my good friend at the People’s Theatre, was the singer. My job was to go on stage while the musicians set up and to read some comedy poems. I would then introduce the band and they’d start their set.

The poems I used on stage were written by Chris and Jim. They had originally been part of a fictitious poetry competition they’d posted on the school’s sixth-form centre notice board, another stage in their burgeoning comedy writing partnership. (I also used a number of these poems as lyrics to songs when I formed my own comedy band a couple of years later.)

Chris was forever looking for new mediums for his comedy writings and his obsession with stationery and form filling led to the creation of The Bumph Club, a letter-writing club inspired by my copy of The Book of the Goons, featuring hilarious letters that Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers sent to each other from fictitious people and companies. Chris had a vision that we could do something similar, but his trainspotter’s brain would insist on it being formalised and categorised with membership cards and numbers and a rule insisting that a letter didn’t count as a piece of ‘bumph’ if it hadn’t been sent through the Royal Mail. Bumph Club membership was to peak at three: Chris, Jim and me. I had to apply in writing, via the Royal Mail, to The Bumph Club’s office, which was Chris’s bedroom, across the landing. I received my membership card by return of post. Chris had made a lino-print to create the membership cards, and his use of this basic print medium, one up from potato printing, would soon play its part in the creation of the Viz brand.

Anyway, the day I received my Bumph Club letter of acceptance and membership card, in September 1979, I was appearing at The Gosforth with Pig Sani, reading some of Chris and Jim’s poems. Before I went on stage I wrote a joke about Poady having done a course in apathy but he didn’t turn up for the exam. I wrote it on the back of The Bumph Club acceptance letter, which I had in my pocket at the time.

Once again, this thirty-year-old joke, written by me as a teenager, appears in my stand-up act today: it’s part of the set of my humourless comedian character Jeremy Jitler.

Chris had insisted, typically enough, on further rules and regulations in The Bumph Club. One of these was that no member was permitted to use a real name in any correspondence connected to the club. In the early years of Viz this was a tradition that was upheld, with Chris, Jim and I never using our real names in the credits. One reason for this was the fun we had making up names for ourselves, but it also had the additional benefit of disguising our real identities from the DHSS.

The false identity I chose for myself when joining The Bumph Club was to stick with me for some time. I took the name from an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney that I watched in horror one Saturday teatime. It was the most syrupy piece of American sentimentality and stomach-churning child acting I’d ever seen. It was set in the American Civil War, and was the story of Johnny Shiloh the Lovable Little Yankee Drummer Boy. Johnny was remarkably brave and cute in equal measures, and the entire debacle was finished off with a cheerful musical number singing his praises as Johnny marched bravely onward with his comrades being blown limb from limb all around him (in a sanitised Disney fashion, obviously). As I’d watched this on the day that Chris asked me to join The Bumph Club under a false name, Johnny Shiloh came straight to mind. As these were the days before Sky Plus, domestic video recorders or even Ceefax, I was unable to go back to the beginning of the programme in order to see how this adorable all-American hero’s name was spelled. I guessed at Shiloe, and Johnny Shiloe became my pseudonym for the next twenty-four years, my cartoons for Viz all being signed ‘Shiloe’.

Chris had left school after staying on into the sixth form for two years. Jim had stayed on for a year, but left at seventeen. Chris had applied to universities, but was, and still is, narked at not getting accepted where he really wanted to go. An offer from Loughborough seemed to particularly annoy him for some reason. None of us had done well at school, my brothers had failed to achieve their desired targets, and Jim was much brighter than his education would suggest. I was now heading for the lowest finish of all, leaving school at sixteen with only two O levels in English and Art. As a CSE student I was entered specially for these, my best subjects, along with woodwork. However, the school did me the honour of forgetting to inform me about the date of the woodwork exam. They later did me what they seemed to consider a great favour: instead of arranging for me to sit the exam at another time, they had the examining board delete the ‘fail’ entry from my results and certificate. They knew how to treat kids back then.

Chris had not taken the Loughborough student opportunity and had instead, after a while looking around at train- and bus-related careers, taken a job at Newcastle’s single biggest employer of persons lacking the desire to live – the notorious ‘Ministry’.

The headquarters of the Department of Health and Social Security in many ways suited Chris. For a start, there were lots of forms to fill in. As far as I can tell, work at the Ministry went something like this. You spent all day working at a job that was neither interesting nor rewarding, but there was the benefit of a varied social life. During the 1970s the site employed 10,000 staff and contained banks, a post office, a hairdressers, a garden shop and a staff canteen with licensed bar. It was basically a well-equipped prisoner of war camp for people with families to go home to. It was even built like a POW camp, the premises having been established on the site in a hurry during the Second World War.

Chris’s job at the DHSS was another keystone in Viz’s birth. He’d been stumped momentarily at the job interview when asked why he wanted to work there, but came out with the perfect answer – he simply needed a steady and solid job he could rely on, allowing him to spend time on his hobbies during weekends and evenings. Apparently, when you’re applying to work in a place that no one has ever desired to work in, this is the best answer you can give.

Chris became involved in many activities at the Ministry, including working on an internal magazine as a football reporter, but the DHSS’s real contribution to Viz’s birth was to pay Chris wages.

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 Concordia Leisure Centre in Cramlington alongside Daniel Sloss, Steffen Peddie and Justin Moorehouse. More information is available here.