The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids. Chris Donald

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       Wavis O’Shave as The Hard

      On the back cover there was a poster of former Anti-Pop artiste Wavis O’Shave posing as The Hard, his Tube TV character. To get the photo Simon and I visited Wavis’s house in South Shields where he lived with his mother. This was the first time I’d met him and he turned out to be a highly intelligent and articulate individual. Then he started telling us about the trouble he was having with the Greek god Pan, who had recently trotted into his living room (Pan was half-man, half-goat) through the wall next to the bay window. As Wavis explained this to us his mother came into the room with a tray of tea and biscuits. ‘Mutha. Tell them aboot Pan, how he come through that waaaall,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right, he did,’ said his mother, who then gave us her own description of the event, followed by the question, ‘Do either of you take sugar?’

      Following Anna Ford’s Bum, Wavis recorded a second album under the name Foffo Spearjig and a single from that was released on Eccentric Records, ‘Tie Your Laces Tight’, with the brilliant B-side ‘You Won’t Catch Me on the 503’. I spent weeks designing a cover for the album, which would have been called Texican Raveloni, had it ever been released. The last time I saw Wavis was in the mid-nineties. I was sitting watching TV and suddenly there he was on Stars In Their Eyes, calling himself Callum Jensen and doing a terrific impression of Steve Harley. Unfortunately Mario Lanza won it.

      The cost of printing 2,500 copies of issue 10 was £393, or around 16p each. I could sell these to shops for around 20p, making a theoretical profit of about 4p on a cover price of 30p, but it wasn’t a very healthy profit margin. Despite the fact I’d never taken a penny out of the proceeds, or paid any of the cartoonists, the comic was barely breaking even. In the autumn of 1983 my mentor, Brian from the Kard Bar, told me it was essential that I get a new issue out in time for Christmas. Realistically there was no way I could do it. I had my hands full with design work and at the rate new cartoons were being drawn a single issue was now taking six months to assemble. So Brian suggested reprinting some early back issues to satisfy growing demand and hit the Christmas market. I hastily threw together a ‘best of’ compilation of the first four issues and called it No. 10½. In order to beef it up a little, Brian had another idea. Why didn’t we give away a free pop poster with it? He had rooms full of unsold posters dating back to the early 1970s if I was interested. Brian led me through the confusing warren of dark, dusty storerooms behind and above his shop like the Phantom of the Opera leading a captive performer to his lair. We eventually arrived in a small room full of unsold Osmond posters, crates of David Cassidy key rings and sacks of Bay City Roller scarves. Fashions were short lived in the pop world and Brian had clearly had his fingers burnt on more than one occasion. He pointed out a stack of boxes which he said were T-shirts for the hugely popular ET movie. Anticipating the huge demand he’d ordered them all well in advance, before the film had been released in the UK. Unfortunately he ordered all of them in medium and large sizes, not realizing ET was going to be a strictly under-twelves phenomenon. In another corner of the room were parcels of wall posters, some of them still unopened, featuring David Cassidy, the Bay City Rollers and the Osmonds. ‘Unfortunately most of them are too big to fit inside the comic,’ said Brian, ‘unless you folded them somehow.’ ‘That’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘We can chop them into quarters.’ Quarter of a picture of the Bay City Rollers would be much funnier than the whole thing, I reckoned. So we carted the posters off to the Free Press, guillotined them, and inserted the severed remains of the seventies’ pop icons into the middle of the comics.

      By 1983 I was working virtually full-time as a graphic designer. I wasn’t earning enough to make a living, but I was earning more than enough to get done for social security fraud. I wanted to go legitimate but couldn’t see how I was going to do it. Then a customer of mine, Walter, mentioned the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Apparently the Government paid budding entrepreneurs £40 a week, for a year, to get them off the dole and into business. Walter managed a band called The Hostages and was trying to get them signed up to the scheme as well. I looked into it and discovered that I wouldn’t qualify for two reasons. Firstly, your business had to be brand new, not an existing enterprise. Secondly, your business couldn’t involve anything immoral or controversial. But what the fuck. I decided to apply anyway.

      At the interview I told them I was starting up a brand new graphic design business. They didn’t seem in the least bit interested. In fact they didn’t even ask to see the documents they’d told me to bring along, one of which was a bank statement proving that I had £1000 capital to start my business with. This was the money that had gradually been accumulating from comic sales over the years, which came to around £960, topped up with a few quid from my Post Office Savings Account. I was in and out the door in a matter of seconds. They simply rubber-stamped my application, wished me good luck and called in the next budding entrepreneur. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was often ridiculed for being a political scam to cut the dole figures, and I suppose it was. But it did actually work, albeit on the ‘throw enough shit at a wall’ principle. Fortunately I was one of the shits that stuck.

      So I finally signed off the dole and became self-employed in November 1983. Two months earlier I’d written to another BBC yoof programme in response to an ad I’d seen on TV. The producers of a show called Sparks said they wanted to hear from any ‘bright young sparks’ who were involved in setting up their own small enterprises. Viz seemed like an ideal candidate for the show and a couple of weeks later a producer called Tony Matthews came up to Newcastle and met myself, Jim and Simon. He liked what he saw and the following week he wrote offering us a slot on the show. Tony said he was keen to bring some of the characters to life on TV, either by animation or using actors. He was also keen for us to have a big input into the programme. We weren’t supposed to be making the programme this time, but what Tony did was effectively give us a free hand to make our own TV commercial. Under the directorship of a girl called Alex Laird, who I think had a slightly bent nose, our little film was shot on location in Newcastle in late 1983. Jim, Simon and I were filmed drawing cartoons, talking about the characters and СКАЧАТЬ