The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids. Chris Donald

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СКАЧАТЬ our right-wing newspaper columnist, and the BBC even allowed us to hire a proper actor to play Roger Mellie. We picked a bloke called Charles Pemberton out of an actors’ sample book and the BBC Costume Department knocked up a black-and-white stripy jacket for him to wear. Sparks was a BBC Education programme, so our film had to be educational in some way, so I wrote a set of accompanying notes giving advice to any viewers who wanted to set up their own magazine.

      Sparks was broadcast on 3 April 1984 at 7.05 p.m. on BBC2, and our little piece came across very well. Great credit must go to Tony Matthews and Alex Laird for capturing the spirit of the comic so well on the TV screen. Not everyone approved of the programme though. The following written complaint was received by the BBC the day after Sparks was broadcast.

      Tonbridge,

      Kent

      3rd April 1984

      Sirs

      BBC2 programme at 7.05pm today (Sparks) I switched on to BBC2 just after 7 p.m. this evening to be greeted with absolute filth. What made me livid was that I could well have had my two grandchildren with me and they could easily have been tuned-in to that farrago of gutter language, etc. That apart, I myself have no wish whatsoever to see or hear such muck, and for the life of me cannot understand what sort of people now run the BBC. I noted who directed and produced this programme and that three females were also concerned with it as Production Assistants or similar. What delightful people they must all be . . .

      Neither I, nor my wife, nor many of our friends, have any wish to see the sort of filth that Sparks was full of, and it’s high time your organization cleansed itself of them. No wonder our times are what they are; you bear a heavy burden of guilt, but I suppose it doesn’t really bother you.

      R. H. Underwood

      The programme made a more positive impression elsewhere, and while the BBC were fielding complaints I was taking a call from Bob Paynter of IPC Magazines. IPC were Britain’s biggest and best-known magazine publisher. Paynter said he’d watched the Sparks programme the night before and was intrigued. He wondered if he might see some samples of our magazine. I posted off copies of issues 9 and 10 and was on tenterhooks for the next few days wondering what his reactions would be. Eventually he rang back. How did the three of us fancy coming down to London to have lunch with his board of directors?

      Paynter sent me a cheque for £276. At first I thought he wanted me to buy a car and drive down, but when I rang him he explained that this money was to cover the cost of three first-class rail fares. ‘There’s plenty more where that came from,’ he said in all seriousness. When the cheque arrived I sat and admired it for some time, then I used it to buy three saver return tickets. We pocketed the change, which came to about £60 each – the first money any of us had ever made out of Viz. We went down to London on 26 April 1984. At the time the Sun was serializing the kiss-and-tell memoirs of snooker player Tony ‘the Lancashire hot-pot’ Knowles. Jim, Simon and I rarely wrote anything together but I vividly recall writing a spoof of that on the train journey down. When we got to London we caught a tube to somewhere near the river and then walked the rest of the way, across a bridge, with me plotting our route on an A to Z. You couldn’t miss King’s Reach Tower. It was, and hopefully still is, a massive building dominating the south side of the Thames. This was the prestigious headquarters of the International Publishing Corporation. We announced our arrival at reception and a few moments later Bob Paynter came down to greet us. His overall attire – his smart green blazer in particular – made him look as if he’d just broken off from an important lawn bowls match to meet us. Paynter was in his fifties, with a greying, bouffant hairdo, and he bore an uncanny resemblance to Danny La Rue. He ushered us into a lift and told us we were going up to the Penthouse Suite to meet ‘the board’.

      When the doors opened we stepped cautiously out into a vast dining suite where a host of men in suits were mingling and sipping drinks. It was like walking into a dinner party. We all looked a right state in our jeans, trainers and T-shirts. A particularly well-dressed man came towards me smiling and I went to shake his hand. He was the waiter. I ordered a glass of orange. Then I was introduced to our host, John Sanders, the Managing Director of IPC’s Youth Group. Sanders was a funny-looking bloke, a cross between Walter Matthau and Wilfrid Brambell, with what appeared to be a very expensive old lady’s wig and a facial expression that made him look like he was permanently tasting soy sauce for the very first time.

      The view from the top of King’s Reach Tower was pretty impressive, due largely to the height of the building and the size of the windows. Sanders took me to one side and pointed out a selection of tiny little buildings below – London Weekend Television, the National Theatre, Waterloo Station and, finally, the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund. ‘Do you know much about the IMF?’ he asked with the enthusiasm of a man who clearly did and wanted desperately to tell someone about it. A few moments later I was saved from our one-way conversation about international monetary policy by a call to the dinner table. The table itself must have been at least six feet wide and three times as long. On one side, with our backs to the window, sat the three of us. Lined up all the way along the other side were ‘the board’, about eight of them in all. At this point Sanders, who sat in the centre facing me, formally introduced his colleagues. I can’t remember any of their names but for each one he gave a boastful, and to me entirely baffling, summary of their CV, punctuated by poignant pauses during which he smiled and we were clearly supposed to look impressed.

      For lunch we had shepherd’s pie and a barrage of questions. Sanders was feeling us out, gauging our responses to various probes. ‘I don’t like the name Viz,’ he said at one point, wiping mince from the side of his mouth with a serviette. He may only have been in his fifties, but he ate like a ninety-four-year-old. I didn’t rise to the bait. After the main course Sanders got down to business. IPC were interested in the idea of a comedy magazine for students – a younger version of Private Eye, as he described it. They hadn’t got very far with the idea themselves and when they saw Viz on the telly they wondered whether we might be the people to produce it for them. They were proposing a fortnightly publication date and a twenty-four-page magazine, produced by us from a studio in Newcastle. But first of all they wanted to put us to the test. Sanders offered to pay £1,500 for a dummy issue that would have to be ready by 31 May. We agreed. Once they saw the dummy they would then decide whether or not to proceed with the plan.

      After the meeting Bob Paynter gave us a brief tour of the Buster comic studio where we marvelled at some of the artwork. We asked whether it was true that they regularly reused old artwork and simply updated the wording. Our evidence for this was that we often spotted ancient vehicles in Buster cartoons – vintage lorries, cars and motorbikes. Bob told us they didn’t, all their cartoons were new, and the antique vehicles were the work of an eighty-year-old comic artist who still worked for them and didn’t get out the house very much these days. After our tour we headed out into the fresh air and back across the river. It was all a bit much to take in and we wandered across Waterloo Bridge, through Trafalgar Square and along the Mall in virtual silence before stopping for a rest in St James’s Park. I sensed a tiny bit of tension in the air and eventually Jim broke a longish silence with a question. ‘What are we going to do with the £1,500?’ Simon seconded it. I remember being furious and trying not to show it. There was me thinking, ‘How the fuck am I going to produce a twenty-four-page magazine in just one month when it currently takes six months to produce a single issue of Viz?’, and all they were thinking about was divvying up the money. I said I would use the £1,500 to finance production of the dummy, paying for materials, proper typesetting and darkroom work. Then whatever was left over we could split equally between the three of us. I could quite reasonably have demanded more as I’d be the one putting the dummy together and providing most of the cartoons, but a three-way split kept everyone happy. And, besides, I didn’t give a shit about the money. It was the daunting prospect of the dummy proving successful that was worrying me. Doing one comic by 31 СКАЧАТЬ