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