The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids

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.