Doing a shit on your desk to prove no one’s watching
Viz magazine, animated pirates, and an important podcast in this week’s pot pourri of a newsletter
Yo ho ho! A few links for you to enjoy before we get down to it.
It’s This Machine Kills Wasps next Friday! Please come down to it if you can, I’ve booked some of my favourite acts and it’s my band’s last gig for at least a few months. The show will finish at 9:30pm or so, so plenty of time for a beer afterwards or a train back to London if you’re that way geographically inclined.
Read my interview with Paggy, a fascinating and very funny alternative comedian with lots of interesting and important things to say about things like performance, masking, and inclusion.
I am once again hosting pub quizzes. Here are some rambling thoughts on the quiz, and its place in one particular version of England. Eyes down looking.
Johnny’s Fartpants
I’ve been reading Chris Donald’s Rude Kids: The Inside Story Of Viz. As with the magazine itself at its peak, it’s laugh out loud funny, vaguely subversive, and rewards the reader with a clever turn of phrase or ludicrous situation on every page.
Younger readers probably won’t be able to get their head around Viz’ cultural importance, or even the importance of any magazine in this post-digital, post-everything era.
But at some point in the early nineties it was both ubiquitous and infamous - an unsustainable trick, but one that judging by Rude Kids was an incredible ride while it lasted.
Donald started Viz as a fanzine in Newcastle, and kept it going mainly because he enjoyed it more than doing anything else, except maybe playing pool in his local and spotting trains in Gateshead.
He hated students, and his job at the DHSS, but loved weirdo post-punk bands and drawing pathetic sharks.
The mag grew out of the music scene, first being sold in pubs and record shops before exploding dramatically once they found a publisher brave - or, as Donald heavily implies - greedy enough to take it on.
He writes brilliantly about the tensions between his merry band of cartoonists in Newcastle and their main enemy: their own publishers down in snooty London. His ability to protect his editorial team from outside interference is incredible, Viz’ capacity for situationist, southerner-confusing pranks and schemes second only to the KLF.
All the people you’d expect get well deserved kickings - James Brown, Harry Enfield, anyone who works in advertising - but what shines is the love for the comics and jokes themselves. He also writes very honestly about his own work, a man selling a million copies an issue but still wishing he could be bothered to make the effort to draw as well as Hergé.
Here he is on his own favourite strip:
‘Scooter-Dolphin Boy’ was the story of young Danny Dixon, owner of an incredible pedal scooter, who had befriended a highly intelligent dolphin while on holiday in Cornwall. Danny scooted everywhere, dragging his dolphin pal behind him in a large bath full of water.
Together Danny and his amazing dolphin rounded up rogues in a typically plucky, comic trip kind of way, with Danny doing all the work and the dolphin just lying in the bath going, ‘Eeeek!’ from time to time.
Donald is also very generous to the other writers and contributors, including the legendary Davey Jones, creator of the immortal, unimprovable Vibrating Bum-Faced Goats.
Pleasingly, Jones is some kind of recluse, sending off bizarre strips from somewhere in mid-Wales - another planet, in pre-internet terms - to the office in Newcastle, the whole editorial team gathering excitedly to open the tube containing his latest brilliant offerings.
There is also fun to be had in reading of Donald’s battles against those unable to get the joke. Here, for example, he is on his frustration at the writers of a ”Top Tips” video cash-in starring Vic & Bob:
One Top Tip was the recommendation that applying Tippex to your beard would make you look like an Arctic explorer. [The writers] had changed this to “tying an ice cube to your beard” will make you look like an Arctic explorer. This doesn’t work for two reasons. Firstly, you can’t tie an ice cube to your beard. At least not without some considerable difficulty. And secondly, an ice cube wouldn’t look like frost and snow on a beard. Tippex would…
… The majority of Top Tips consist of solutions to problems. In the Tippex joke, cor example, the solution is entirely practical. It’s the problem that is the joke. Nobody would want to make themselves look like an Arctic explorer.
Viz’ long decline and Donald’s own descent into depression and madness are both movingly told, though from the perspective of today’s publishing landscape, “only” selling hundreds of thousands of magazines per issue doesn’t seem like the problem it once was. At one point, Donald draws Tommy Brown, the manager of Billy the Fish’ Fulchester United, doing a shit on his own desk, just to make the point that no one is still reading.
But they were. And, though Donald is long gone, they still are. Strips like Farmer and Healey’s Drunken Bakers are still up there with the best ever, capturing the absurdity and bleakness of these isles better than anything else around.
Now, excuse me while I re-order my favourite piece of Viz tat:
Currently Watching
One Piece, on the discovery that the legendary anime is available on iPlayer. Episode one introduces us to a rubbery a hero who is clearly inspired by the Monkey King, and features a feisty lady pirate who likes kicking guards in the bollocks. Naturally, I’m hooked.
Currently listening to
Annabel Edmonds’ Punorama podcast. The writer / comedian’s show maybe slightly overdoes the sound effects, but otherwise it’s deeply impressive.
She tackles serious topics with humour, has written a great script, and has one of those ineffably calming, warm and professional radio voices. The most recent episodes, on predatory men in stand-up comedy, are essential listening for anyone in or around the industry.
That’s it from me this week! I’m trying to get into the habit of writing more regularly, so please come to my door and bang on it furiously if I haven’t sent out another newsletter by this time next week.