Talking Haiti triumphantly
Byron Rogers
25 YEARS OF VIz by William Cook Boxtree, £20, pp. 220, ISBN 0752225251 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 RUDE KIDS by Chris Donald HarperCollins, £20, pp. 378, ISBN 0007190964 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Atest for you. Viz, the comic now an improbable quarter of a century old, once ran a strip called ‘Harold and Fred’. It was the sort of thing you will remember from the days of Dandy and Beano, little characters running around and falling over, all with the three expressions of thoughtfulness, joy and shock. Except these faces were already familiar, not from films or television, but from the front pages of the tabloids. The strip had a subtitle, ‘They Make Ladies Dead’, and Harold and Fred, living next door to each other, were Dr Harold Shipman and Fred West.
In the first of the four frames reproduced in 25 Years of Viz, Fred, looking thoughtful, sees a woman moving into the empty house across the street. In the second he springs into action, roaring with laughter, Black & Decker in hand (‘I’ll just nip across and murder her with me drill’). Only he slips on some pills spilled on the ground (‘Corks!’), and is overtaken by his bearded neighbour (‘I’ll murder the new lady over the road, ta very much’). Now how does that leave you ? Amused, baffled or simply stunned?
Viz, with its two clubbing Fat Tarts capable of copulating and eating chips at the same time, and its foul-mouthed, self-important celeb Roger Mellie (‘The Man on the Tele’), could skewer the odd contemporary horror. But the main appeal to its millions of readers (at one point its circulation rivalled that of Radio Times) was the way its young creators, clinging to childhood, had raised two fingers to the whole adult world. Set against the certainties of comics and trainspotting (the latter being the passion of its creator, Chris Donald), the adult world was seen as grubby, unreal and absurd. Sex was grubby, unreal and absurd, as was celebrity, and, in its turn, mass murder.
Two maps sum up the mind-set of those behind Viz. In the first, that of the Shittish Isles, used condoms, sanitary towels and radioactive waste fill the Irish Sea. Planes crash, industrial sites vomit dark smoke, and the Yorkshire Ripper poses with a hammer. Dr Shipman is brandishing a syringe as he grasps a bewildered old lady by the arm, while a grinning Fred West leans on a shovel near a concrete-mixer in which two eyes can be seen. The Welsh burn cottages, sniff women’s bicycle seats, and, with erections, chase sheep. Fair enough. But what really got up my nose was a sign in the Welsh language. Bearing the traditional greeting, ‘Welcome to Wales. Arse-holes to all English’, this is misspelt and ungrammatical.
In a second map Europe gets similar treatment. Spaniards throw trembling goats off church towers, Frenchmen piss in their wine presses, Swedes attempt various forms of suicide, and it was probably only the age of the compilers (or the standards of their education) which prevented them showing jolly SS men chasing their victims into the gas chambers.
It reminded me of the little girl of three I once knew, who, like all children her age, was fascinated by her intimate body parts, one of which her parents, anxious to avoid public embarrassment, had told her was called a halfpenny. Only she pronounced this ‘haity’, and talked about it at such length they had to stop her: ‘No talk haity.’ Unfortunately there was then a coup against the young Duvalier, and for days she sat in front of the radio roaring with laughter at every news bulletin. All she would say was ‘Talking Haiti, talking Haiti.’ And, whatever the trendies said about Viz, that was the reason for its success in the 1990s. It was the triumph of the forbidden, the scatalogical, the exercise in bad taste: it was talking Haiti all the time. Buster Gonad bounced along on his vast testicles, Johnny Fartpants did, and Vlad the Impaler (‘and his cat Samson’) impaled people on stakes though, curiously, not the way the real Vlad did, which was a rare intrusion of good taste, or, again, of historical ignorance. Only then the original readership grew up, and circulation dropped to less than a third of what it had been at its peak.
25 Years of Viz is a large pictorial book with commentary, so you can follow the art-work that went into the comic. Rude Kids, the autobiography of its founder Chris Donald, and described as ‘a dead good buk’ on the cover, is, remarkably, just that. It is a good book.
Donald, a plump, bespectacled trainspotter and DHSS clerk, started Viz in the back bedroom of his parents’ house, became famous, gave up the DHSS, became rich and bought redundant railway stations, then gave up Viz, and, though a millionaire (as he many times reminds his readers), got himself a job as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop.
It is a fascinating story, with casual side swipes at the journalists who interviewed, and the comedians who befriended, him. Thus Harry Enfield ‘was a big sniggerer he laughed and chuckled a lot — but he was also smarmy’. Chris Donald’s one hero seems to have been Peter Cook; he liked his smile.
The ending is poignant. Recently into the bookshop there strayed one day another forgotten icon of the old world, the TV poetess Pam Ayres, ‘ageing but unmistakable’. Chris Donald takes up the story:
As I served her she pointed across to the poetry section. ‘I see you’ve got a few of my books in over there,’ she said with a hint of pride. We had indeed. And we had dozens more in the giant stockroom out the back of the shop. I didn’t tell her, of course, but the reason we have so many of her books is that we can’t give the bloody things away, let alone sell them.
I hope she’ll forgive me for saying so, but for a brief spell in the 1970s Pam Ayres’s career went into overdrive and she seemed to enjoy a level of success totally out of proportion to her modest talents as a comedy poet. I know the feeling. We have an awful lot of unsold Viz books out the back as well.
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow. Chris Donald is just 44 years old.
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