I'd never answered a small ad in Private Eye before, and I've never
answered one since. But there was something beguiling about the one that I
spotted in May 1979. It read: Bogus correspondant [sic] seeks similar. C.
Donald, 2 Lily Crescent, Jesmond, Newcastle 2.
I wrote, pompously correcting the spelling and asking what a bogus
correspondent was. Chris Donald replied, explaining that he was setting up a
slightly anarchic penpal club, and we continued to write back and forward,
with me singing the virtues of Chelsea Football Club and London, while
mocking life in the frozen wastes of Newcastle, and he responding in kind,
rubbishing Chelsea, praising Newcastle United and sneering at the capital.
“The last time I was in ‘the big city',” he wrote in September 1979, “I recall
seeing nowt but flooded bomb sites and derelict wasteland. When you travel
on the Tube you see nothing but filthy dilapidated sewers with rusty pipes
clinging to the walls, and when you get to your destination the fluorescent
Tube stations are full of snivelling winos asking you for a light and gangs
of punks sitting on ticket gates scaring the transport police.” In between
the banter, he outlined his plans for Viz. A 19-year-old DHSS
clerical worker, he saw magazine production as a way of escaping the daily
grind.
Viz, he wrote two months before the first issue appeared, would be
aimed at “students, and the local crop of woolly intellectuals who in their
spare time take their pewter tankards to the local real ale pub and sip
Eighty Shillings through their beards before making for their yellow
Renaults and going home at 10.25 - not 10.35, like everyone else”. It was
the kind of precise reader profile that modern magazines pay consultants
thousands of pounds to produce.
I was 22 and a local newspaper reporter in Kingston, Surrey. Keen to back any
publishing project, I contributed a scurrilous article to the first issue,
speculating that as the Prince of Wales had reached 30 without marrying
(THAT wedding was still a year and a half away), he may be gay.
On the strength of that, Chris decided that I should be the South of England
distributor for Viz. In December 1979, he sent me an envelope
containing ten copies of issue one - a hefty percentage of the 150
production run. I sold them in the newsroom to fellow reporters for 20p
apiece.
Today those copies are worth about £1,000 each. On Thursday this week
Sotheby's is auctioning the one that I kept, in its twice-yearly English
literature auction, together with 40 of Chris's letters, outlining his
concept for a quirky adult comic, “a cross between Private Eye
and my favourite mag of all time, The Beano”. Over the years, Viz
has been imitated but never bettered. Some may wish it had never been born,
as it has arguably played a part in creating today's ruder, cruder society,
where every bus journey seems to be accompanied by a stream of foul-mouthed
abuse from schoolchildren.
But in 1979, when Chris, his brother Simon and schoolfriend Jim Brownlow
produced the first issue in the bedroom of his parents' house in Jesmond, it
just seemed like a good laugh - a kind of non-student rag mag with an
original line in absurd home-grown comic strips.
Chris had a curious hatred of students, dubbing them “sponsored prats”. On the
A4 “poster” produced to publicise issue one (and also in this week's
auction) is the line: “Viz Comics are proud to announce that there isn't one
student on their staff. Viz Comics do not like students.” Over the years the
home-stapled mag launched such characters as the Fat Slags, Sid the Sexist,
the Pathetic Sharks, Roger Mellie: the Man on the Telly, Buster Gonad,
Johnny Fartpants, Finbarr Saunders (and his double entendres), and a host of
other unlikely anti-heroes. Viz also created the funniest letters page ever
seen in a magazine, with its ridiculous Top Tips column (save money on
contact lenses by cutting small circles out of clingfilm and pushing them
into your eyes) and the Profanisaurus, the modern dictionary of swearing and
surreal definitions.
As South of England distributor, I received a letter addressed to me as the
“Viz Comics Southern Regional Chief Editiorial Representative Reporter
(Articles)”. Chris always had a good line in sarcasm.
Viz took a while to establish itself, despite such innovative ideas as
giving a free ice-cream with the first issue (a lino print of an ice-cream
cone and Flake stapled to the back cover), and a real balloon with the
second - again, with a helpful staple right through it.
Issue two's print run was 500, although for months most of them sat, unsold,
on a shelf in Chris's bedroom. I experienced similar reader apathy and had
to scale down my commitment to just six copies for the entire South of
England.
However, by 1990 Viz was selling more than 1.1 million - outsold only
by Radio Times, TV Times and Reader's Digest. Needless
to say, it had become so mainstream that it no longer needed a part-time
Southern Regional Chief Editiorial Representative Reporter (Articles).
It also outgrew Chris's bedroom in Lily Crescent and moved to an office, but
not before I'd finally paid a visit to the creative centre in his home.
The Viz studio was a complete tip, with overflowing bins and bits of
scrunched-up paper on the floor. In some ways, that creative chaos was one
of the keys to its success. The mess was tolerated in the Donald household
only because it was a secret.
Chris's mother was confined to a wheelchair on the ground floor, so - as with
the early Daleks - stairs defeated her. If you glanced up the staircase it
all looked tidy, but go around the corner at the top and it was bedlam.
Meeting Chris face to face was our 84 Charing Cross Road moment - a similar
sensation to the bookshop owner and eager customer going a step beyond
simple correspondence (or correspondance, as Chris would put it).
Chris and I seemed capable of effortlessly writing provocative, cheeky letters
to each other, but found that meeting awkward and uncomfortable. The spell
was well and truly broken. I had a cuppa and left, and the letters dried up.
Writing or typing on to a sheet of paper is a satisfyingly detached way to
communicate. You can alter things, you can add bits, you can start again in
a way that the hasty, error-strewn chit-chat of e-mail can never replace.
It's like TV versus radio. As the old line has it, the pictures are better
on radio.
Chris, who quit Viz in 1999 and now works in a second-hand book shop in
Alnwick, is highly amused that his letters are being sold by Sotheby's. He
was approached by the Tyne and Wear Archives Service, asking if he would be
interested in buying them, then donating them.
“Cheeky bastards,” was his predictable reaction.
The letters give intriguing insights into a brilliantly creative mind. On one
occasion I asked him for the correct pronunciation of Newcastle, as I'd
heard someone say it as “Newcsl”.
He replied: “The lurcl prnounciashun uv ‘Newcastle' is not as you surmise. You
incorrectly write ‘Newcsl', which is close, but it is in fact
‘Newcassel-on-Tyyn' (pr. New-ka-sell). Ah div'n knaa why it is so
pronounced, but it may have its origins in the traditional coal-mining
industry. When a blurk is workin' doon the pit, it is necessary for him to
inhale as little as possible, to prevent him from getting coal dust on the
lungs. When saying ‘Newcarsel' in the proper manner, one inhales more air
than when saying ‘Newcassel'.
“After saying the word, you must breathe in to replace the air which you have
used up during pronunciation. The miners have therefore developed the
quickest possible pronunciation to alleviate the breathing in of
unnecessarily high amounts of coal dust.” It's as good a theory as any.
Why the name Viz? In a letter a month before publication of the first issue,
Chris wrote to say that it was simply a “whizzo pranks” type of name. Later
he admitted, however, that he'd settled on Viz because the word is composed
of straight lines, and it was easier for him to carve the title out of a
lino block.
I have Issue 12. They ran an advert, again in Private Eye, around 1983, looking for cartoonists. They got two replies. That slim, slightly ropey-looking publication was already paying more per page than IPC and therefore DC Thomson. That did make the voice at the other end of the phone laugh.
Rod McKie, Edinburgh, UK