The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids. Chris Donald

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СКАЧАТЬ Brian could be very generous – a little too generous at times when it came to offering advice. On every visit to his shop I’d receive a lengthy lecture on business or graphic design and I’d be stuck there for up to an hour smiling and nodding my head. He was also a real stickler when it came to proofreading his adverts. He always insisted I got the spelling right, for example. He was a real nit-picker, Brian.

      When issue 5 was printed the Free Press invited us to come in and do some ‘self work’ finishing which meant that they printed the pages and we put the comics together ourselves. This cut the production costs considerably and was also an important gesture of compliance with the Free Press’s socialist principles. They were, after all, a bunch of commies, not a commercial printer, and for them the object of the exercise was to give us a share in the means of production. Jim, Simon and myself spent many a happy day at Charlotte Square collating, folding and then stapling comics together on a Dickensian saddle-stitching machine. Eventually they let us use the guillotine too, and finally the ‘Hobson’, a fully automated and highly temperamental page collating, folding and shredding machine.

      The Free Press was a fascinating environment to work in, with a wonderful mix of characters present. For me that place encapsulated the comical conflict between trendy, right-on socialists and down-to-earth, working-class people that was central to some of my favourite cartoons at the time. Cartoons like Woolly Wilfy Wichardson who orders weal ale in a working-class boozer, and Community Shop where a bloke in a vest goes into a community wholefood collective and tries to buy twenty Embassy Regal. The Free Press was a co-operative where all the workers were equal, but there was an obvious divide between the middle-class political ideologists whose idea it had been to set it up, and the working-class printers who’d been drafted in to work there. Printers like Jimmy, a fat Geordie bloke from Scotswood. He may not have had the intellect of colleagues like Howard, the idealistic hippy, and Andy, the hardcore socialist Scouser, but Jimmy could debunk the lot of them with his blunt wit and choice turn of phrase.

      Despite having been fobbed off by Malcolm Gerrie I kept on bombarding Check It Out with copies of Viz and eventually a researcher called Alfie Fox got in touch and invited myself and Simon to a meeting. It turned out Fox was new to the show and didn’t realize Viz was off limits. But our meeting wasn’t a complete waste of time. Alfie Fox took us to the canteen at Tyne-Tees Television for a chat, but I spent the entire meeting listening to someone talking on an adjoining table. A local TV newsreader and continuity announcer by the name of Rod Griffiths was holding court with a group of colleagues, and he was swearing like a trooper. It was astounding to hear such a familiar voice coming out with such unfamiliar language, and I was mesmerized. When we left the meeting we were no closer to getting Viz on TV, but the seeds for a new cartoon character had just been sown.

      Bizarrely, after trying for over a year to get Viz onto a shoddy local yoof programme, a slot on national TV fell into our lap. In June 1981 a hand-written note addressed to ‘Anyone from Viz Comics’ was left at the Kard Bar. It came from Jane Oliver and Gavin Dutton, producers of a BBC2 yoof show called Something Else. They were planning to make an alternative programme about Newcastle and were in town looking for suitably disaffected young people to take part. Something Else was a product of the BBC’s Community Programme Unit, and the idea of the show was to give ‘the kids’ access to television.

      When we met the two producers they explained that we, the kids, were going to make the programme, not them, the boring grown-ups. They were just going to help us a little. They hand-picked a panel of five appropriately discontented youths from the area, all of whom had got ‘something to say’. As well as myself, representing the comic, there were four others. A motorcyclist called Mick wanted to draw attention to the plight of motorcyclists who are occasionally barred from pubs just because they wear leather clothing. Mick was a fireman, and it occurred to him that if the pubs from which he was barred caught fire, it would be him the landlord would turn to to put the fire out. The irony and injustice of this situation clearly rankled with Mick, and the idea of filming people riding around on bikes clearly appealed to producer Gavin Dutton, who was himself a bit of a biker. Then there was Mark, a chubby, monotone mod who wanted to moan about local bands not getting a ‘fair deal’ from London record companies. There was also Tracey, an actress who I suspected was on the other bus, and had some sort of gripe about the stereotyping of women. And there was Stephen, a long-haired hippy who didn’t like being stereotyped as a long-haired hippy just because he was a long-haired hippy. This was going to be some show.

      As with all yoof shows there were a couple of live music slots in the programme to try and entice people to watch it, and because it was our programme the producers said it was up to us to choose the bands. I realized this was a golden opportunity for Arthur 2 Stroke and The Chart Commandos so I got to work lobbying the other panel members. The Chart Commandos were just about the biggest band in Newcastle at the time and their recent single, a dub version of the theme from Hawaii Five-0, had recently stormed in at number 175 in the charts. After a lot of arm-twisting all five of us eventually agreed that Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, and notorious South Shields punk outfit the Angelic Upstarts, would provide the music for our show. With this settled I ran all the way from the BBC studios in Newbridge Street to the Anti-Pop rehearsal room on the Quayside to break the good news.

      The next day producer Gavin Dutton rang me. He said he’d been thinking. Because the North-East had such a reputation for heavy metal music, would it not be a good idea to have a heavy metal band on the programme? ‘Not all Geordies are air guitarists,’ I told him. ‘You’d just be reinforcing another stereotype. Can’t we just stick with the bands we chose?’ No, we couldn’t. It turned out that Dutton, himself a bit of a heavy metal fan, had already twisted the arms of the other panel members and the decision had been made to replace Arthur 2 Stroke with a bunch of tight-trousered, cock-thrusting Charlie’s Angels lookalikes, the Tygers of Pan fucking Tang.

      My next contribution to the programme was to draw cartoons of a few other North-East stereotypes, such as a man with a flat cap and whippet and a woman chained to the kitchen sink. These were to be included in the show in the hope that the use of such stereotypes on national television would in some way help put a stop to the use of such stereotypes in the media. I seem to recall that was one of the producers’ ideas too. Jim, Simon and I were also going to be interviewed about Viz by another member of the panel. On the day of our interview the film crew were scheduled to arrive at my house at 2.00 p.m. We’d never been on telly before so the three of us decided to pop out to a local pub beforehand in order to calm our nerves. By the time the TV crew arrived we were fucking rat-arsed, Simon especially so, and for some reason we’d dressed up in a selection of silly wigs and false moustaches. Mark, the monotone mod interviewer, read out his questions with some difficulty, and a total lack of enthusiasm, while we gave a giggling performance of Ozzy Osbourne-esque incoherence. When filming was complete all three of us were invited down to London to make a trailer for the show. As a special treat they let us write out the programme credits by hand, in white paint on a very long roll of blue paper. It took us most of the night to do it, and we later learned this had saved them £125 in production costs. The tight bastards didn’t give us a penny. But the benefits of our TV exposure were apparent even before the programme had been finished. In July 1981 I got a letter from TV presenter Tony Bilbow saying he’d seen a copy of Viz at the Community Programme Unit offices and wanted to subscribe to future issues. He generously enclosed £10 and in doing so became our first ever celebrity reader. ‘Something Else Newcastle’ was broadcast on BBC2 at 6.55 p.m. on Friday 25 September 1981. In those days there were only three TV channels, and being on telly was a real event. Everyone either saw us or heard about it, and the programme resulted in a massive upsurge of interest in the magazine, from my parents in particular.

      Up till this point they’d been unaware that Viz existed, but keeping it a secret had been getting harder by the day. I knew full well that a BBC film crew arriving at the door might need some form of explanation, but before I’d had a chance to say anything my dad had invited them into the living room for a cup of tea and casually enquired about what СКАЧАТЬ