Extract #6 From Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’
The progress of Viz was steady both in terms of our production and sales. Sales were particularly of interest due to the fact that they almost always seemed to go somewhere beyond our expectations. The initial print run of issue 1 famously sold out in a couple of hours.
Extract #5 From Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’
Extract from ‘In the next two hours …’ The term ‘alternative comedy’ hadn’t reached Newcastle in 1981 when Andy Pop told us he had a new exciting venture. He’d seen an opportunity for getting crowds into the rather forlorn Jesmond Cinema, standing at the end of Sunbury Avenue, and in which I’d spent so much […]
Extract #4 From Simon Donald’s ‘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 […]
Extract #3 From Simon Donald’s ‘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 […]
Extract #2 From Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’
I made friends with most of the kids at school easily, and my humour certainly helped. I would try to make all the kids laugh. I was the ‘class clown’, that’s for sure. I always wanted to do something creative with the jokes. I felt it was a natural thing; comedy came easily to me.
Extract #1 From Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’
Extract from ‘Oh Dear. Big School.’ All three Donald boys attended the same secondary school that Mum had been to as a girl. When she was a pupil the school was two separate establishments, a boys’ grammar school and a girls’ high school, sharing a red-brick building opened in 1928 by King […]
