Simon Donald: Co-Founder of Viz Talks Legacy, Stand-Up, and the Power of Swearing

Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, Screen Rats, and welcome to another episode of Television Times.

Now today, oh my goodness, another absolute gem.

Today, I'm going to be talking to Simon Donald.

Now Simon Donald is the co-creator of Viz.

I was an avid reader of that, and the Profanasaurus and the annuals, and it's like peak 90s for me.

I know it came out in the 80s.

I know this is a podcast about television, and we do talk about the elements from that comic that turned into television entertainment and film.

So it does count.

And also I've been trying to talk to Simon for ages.

He lives near me.

He's got a kid at my kid's school.

And I had this really weird experience last year when I started the podcast.

Not last year, now it's the year before, isn't it?

Oh my goodness, it's 2025.

What are we talking about?

And he was on this TV show with Grayson Perry called Grayson Perry's Full English.

And he was in there with his brother on an episode talking about Viz and his comedy and music and stuff like that.

And I was kind of like, oh yeah, of course, I live in Newcastle.

That's where Viz is from, right?

I might actually be able to talk to him the very next day.

I take my kid to school and he's there in the playground.

Am I hallucinating?

Am I imagining that I've just seen the guy that I've actually just saw on TV, I'd love to speak to as one of the early episodes of the pod.

It turns out lots of people around here know him and they said he could be quite elusive and you might not be able to talk to him.

I thought, really?

But I keep badgering him.

I keep badgering him for nearly two years.

Finally, he comes around the house once we've moved into this nice bigger place.

He has a cup of tea, we hang out, we chat for ages.

I think we chatted for nearly two hours.

It's going to be edited down for you.

But yeah, it's brilliant.

I was so impressed that he came around and we had a lovely chat.

I was a bit nervous meeting him, I'll be honest with you, because he's fucking the creator of Viz in my house.

Do you know what I mean?

It's incredible.

I had so much I wanted to talk to him about.

I didn't want to give him too much like, I love you and bowing down to the genius of the man, all that sort of stuff.

But it's hard not to be impressed with the thing that him and his brother managed to do in creating that comic.

And it was an absolute phenomenon.

And anyone in England who was even, what would you be younger than me probably, like teenagers in the 90s would be like their peak audience.

I was mid-20s then and it was fucking right up my alley.

And I bought it every single edition.

And there were very few of them as well.

It wasn't like it came out all the time.

I think he said it came out every two months, but it was incredible.

An incredible cultural phenomenon in this country.

And I hope you enjoy this chat even if you're not listening from the UK because it is a really, really good one.

And I loved this face-to-face conversation.

And I really want to have more face-to-face conversations.

I don't mind doing the online ones, but they're not quite the same as when you've got someone in your house.

And there's no structure to this conversation.

We just sort of had some notes, things I wanted to hit, but like it really just went everywhere.

And I love those ones.

They are organic, they're perfect.

So, without further ado, let's get into it.

This is me talking to the exceptional Simon Donald.

Don't be offended and don't get in a tizz.

Look who I am talking to.

It's him off the Viz.

Roll up, roll up and welcome to another edition of Television Times with your host me, Steve Otis Gunn, where I'll be talking to someone you do know or someone you don't.

It might be funny, but it might not be, but it's always worth tuning in for.

So here we go with another episode of Television Times.

I was sitting at home.

I was watching Grayson Perry's Full English.

Oh, yes.

And I watched episode three, which you and your brother were on.

That's right.

And then I went and did the school run the next day and you walked past me.

And I was like, no, come on, that can't be the same guy.

So I didn't want to approach you and go, hey, by the way, our kids are in the same school.

But it's kind of wild for me.

It was like a little bit of a moment because I know your name.

I didn't necessarily know your face because I was a huge fan of Viz back in the 90s.

And, you know, I was fully engaged with it in the vernacular and...

Was it like mid 90s when it was just like really massive?

Like huge?

Well, it was about, I think, 91, 92.

It was at its sales peak.

We began in 1979.

And what seemed impressive at the time was that we sold 150 copies of Issue One.

It wasn't called Viz then.

It was just a one-off comic that we brought out.

It was called the Bump a Monster Christmas Special, but it was branded as being a production of Viz Comics.

So when we decided that we warranted making a second issue, we then eventually decided to run with that name, Viz Comics, as the title.

That was something that we'd just done together at school.

And it was myself, my brother, and actually Chris and Jim, who actually just lived two streets from you.

They'd done a few cartoon things whilst they were still at school, and comedy writing stuff, just around their friends.

You know, for instance, one of the things they did was they created a spoof, like a non-existent poetry competition, which theoretically had happened at school, and they pinned all the results, the winning poems up on the school notice board.

Of course, unless you actually went through and read them, you would just think it was like a normal results thing on the board, you know.

Chris was very much into doing stuff like that.

Whenever he was in anyone's office, he would steal a piece of their headed note paper, and he got this idea from Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, they used to do it all the time with one another, you know.

Anyway, we got together eventually in 79.

They wrote me in, because they knew that I was a lover of comics and comic art.

They said, look, we're going to turn all this stuff that we've been doing into a comic.

They'd done a couple of sort of photocopied sheets of cartoons and little sort of funny articles, basic stuff, you know, sort of horoscope jokes and stuff.

We're going to turn it into a comic, you know, printed on proper paper and, you know.

And would I like to join in?

Which I did.

So I was only 15, I was still at school.

So the first issue of Viz, I was at school during the day and then drawing comics at night and then on a Monday night would be down at the Gosforth Hotel, the pub on the Gosforth High Street selling them, even though I was only 15, you know.

So you still have a copy of that original?

The original one, yeah, yeah.

I've got one copy of all the early issues right up until we got a publishing deal in 1985.

All of those early ones are quite collectible.

I feel like they should be in a museum somewhere.

Who's got them?

Someone's got them, the British Library.

Theoretically, they have a copy of everything that's been published in Britain, every periodical that's been published.

Yeah, that's true, yeah, yeah.

You had a huge influence on me because I had a job in a tool shop at the time.

It must have been early 90s, so you're right.

I probably started reading early 90s.

And we had this really horrible boss.

So I wasn't a very good drawing.

I was when I was a kid, but it didn't progress.

But he just put comic strips all the time on the coffee machine, taking the absolute piss out of them and coming up with characters, did the same thing at college.

I think he had a lot of influence on us, on all the kids coming up just slightly behind you.

And it changed the way we spoke as well because like, honestly, this is not just because of you.

I'll be walking down the street and there'll be like an old lady and she'll look at someone and I'll think it's Mrs Brady, old lady.

I'll just go, oh, he's after me purse.

Or lines will just come out from Viz, like, you know, they're happy because they eat lard on the t-shirts or any...

I guess that they're happy because they eat lard is, that's more of a sort of old style advertising sort of thing, isn't it?

Yes, all of those like, what was it?

Go on, have an affair.

Yeah, yeah.

Fucking so funny.

They were t-shirts, right?

There must have been loads of merch.

Some of them went in the t-shirts.

Yeah, that's right.

But the whole thing, like, you know, Mrs Brady and a lot of the characters in Viz, they are stereotypes.

But, you know, I mean, that's really where we did get some criticism for it.

Oh, you know, you're just stereotyping.

Yeah, but that's what cartooning is.

Cartooning is, you know, you're recognizing something in a person or a thing that you believe somebody else will recognize in them.

And of course, there's an element of generalization to it.

But it's humor.

Humor always has to work like that.

Well, how did that?

Because obviously it started up here in the Northeast, in Newcastle.

Things like Fat Slags, for instance, which was massive.

Did you have any kickback locally for that particular?

No, there's an interesting thing with Viz.

People always expect us to have got into lots of trouble for it.

But unlike television, which has sort of famously created a lot of sort of pressure groups like, well, the likes of Mary Whitehouse and a sort of whole host of less organized people simply complaining because these things are coming into their sitting rooms, you know?

But Viz isn't intended to be sold to people who don't want it.

And it works very well in that regard.

So if you can't work out from what's on the cover that it's not for you, then God save us all, you know?

It's very clear that this is a silly, childish, scurrilous magazine that's going to have stuff in it that, if that doesn't appeal to you, you don't want to buy it, you know?

And I think to the greater extent people who don't want it, it's never landed in their hands.

Or if it has ever landed in their hands, they've looked at it once and gone, oh, this isn't for me.

And that's fine.

That's fair enough.

I mean, I wish the world was more like that around sort of broadcast, you know?

I wish people would just look at things and say, oh, yes, I see this isn't for me.

Yeah.

Well, if you don't like it, don't watch it.

Getting their knickers in a twist about it, you know?

I remember reading a quote from John Pertwee when he was Doctor Who, and his response to all of the people who wrote to him saying, I'm a parent and this program is far too frightening.

He used to say to them, there's a button on your television with which you can switch the set off, you know?

And it was like a stock reply, you know?

I thought it was great.

I mean, I think nowadays, you know, the likes of the BBC wouldn't allow him to, you know, they'd have contracts written up that said he wouldn't be allowed to personally respond, you know?

It's all so sewn up now.

I mean, I like that as an attitude, you know?

And I wish more people could see the world that way.

You get a lot of this nonsense, oh, you can't say this anymore.

If you're a comedian, you can't say anything anymore.

There's no truth in that at all.

It's simply, it's only a question of how good you are.

And it's all about punching up or down.

If you're punching down, that's horrible.

But it's all about intent as well.

I did a show at The Fringe in 2012 called School of Swearing, and I looked into language and how words become swear words.

And I concluded very quickly when looking into it that it's very much a class-based thing.

And the upper class people have absolutely no interest in it.

Because they're too busy riding around on horses, getting pissed and killing animals for fun.

And then, basically, it's of no interest to them, right?

So working-class people, they don't have any interest in defining what's good and bad language, because they have other things to do, like working and bringing up their kids.

But also, they are not the people who make judgmental decisions in society.

So it's the middle-class, it's the ones who want to prove something.

Often what happens is a word will become fashionable, this is through history, so a word will become fashionable amongst the upper classes, the traveling classes, the classes who, in the days before working people could have holidays.

So the people who traveled abroad, they would use foreign words and words they picked up from other places.

So upper-class people, very rich people would be traveling and they went to Russia and they used to drop Russian words into their conversation, show off that they had traveled.

So they would say, Oh, that's a Blodgrig good show.

And, you know, the idea was people would say, sorry, what was that?

And they'd say, Oh, Blodgrig good show.

Oh, don't you know?

Blodgrig, Russian.

Have you never been to Russia?

You haven't traveled.

Anyway, Blodgrig means very, extremely.

Yeah, very, very Blodgrig good show.

So the middle classes started to copy.

They use the word because it makes them sound like they're part of the trendy set.

The upper classes stop using it because it's now a common word.

And then the middle classes are copied by the lower classes.

And the lower classes are using the word freely, by which time middle classes don't want to use that word anymore.

And they stop using it because it's not fashionable anymore, because people more common than themselves are using it.

And then when the time comes to classify words, that's all done by the people in the middle classes.

And they classify this word which is corrupted into bloody through use.

They classify it as being a dirty word, because it's a word only used by the unwashed.

It's a common word.

And that's pretty much the story of how all these things go.

There's a few exceptions.

And I was talking about intent and why we didn't get in too much trouble was because it was never our intent to upset people.

It was our intent to amuse people.

And one of the most offensive words, I found this out in this School of Swearing show, because I used to give out an exam at the end and a few people filled it in.

And I asked people on that form what the first swear word they ever learnt was.

And one woman put cow.

And yeah, I kind of discussed this and I thought, right.

To her, that was and still can be a deeply offensive word both in our culture and even more so in other cultures where cows are revered, right?

So that made me think straight away, of course it's all about intent, because you can use the word cow as a really offensive word, a deeply offensive word, but it's not an offensive word.

If you look at it on paper, it's just the name of an animal.

Yeah, of course.

And that's really what all of these words are.

So even the sea bomb was once an inoffensive word.

Well, yeah, my family are mostly Irish and that word is used liberally as a sort of, you know, come here, you can't, you know, it's just a word.

It doesn't mean anything.

And in Scotland, have you ever seen, there's a fantastic piece of news footage from one of the railway stations in Manchester, the second leg of a European football tie between Glasgow Celtic and one of the Manchester teams, probably United.

And there'd been some trouble at the first leg, which had been in Scotland.

The Glaswegians are all getting off the train.

It was like for, you know, today at six or whatever, you know, the local news programme in Manchester.

So this guy gets off the train, he's stopped by the interviewer, and the interviewer says, how do you think the fixture will go tonight?

And, you know, are you at all worried about crowd behaviour after the weekend, you know?

And this Glaswegian says, oh no.

He says, I'm just hoping it's going to be a great game.

You know, we are just here to see the game, and we're just hoping that everybody can't get something.

Right?

And it went out on the news.

It was fantastic.

But yeah, I did a lot of my early stand up gigs in Scotland, and I was really surprised when I started gigging in London to discover that some venues they just don't like you using the C word.

Really?

Yeah.

Stuart Lee told us a story.

Like this woman said, oh, we don't like using the cunt word.

He said, what?

And she said the cunt word.

And he said, you mean cunt?

And she says, yes, yes.

He says, well, why did you say the cunt word?

Like, you know, and she says, oh, like, I used to say the c word, but some people didn't understand what I meant.

Literally saying it.

And another, I've got a mate who works in California and in a conversation, not a business conversation, but a conversation with a business colleague, he said, oh, there's a few things that are picked up and changed culturally.

So, for instance, the n word.

And this guy says, oh, you can't say the n word.

He says, yeah, no, I know you can't say the n word.

That's why I said the n word.

He says, no, no, no, you can't say the n word anymore.

You can't reference it.

He says, what you mean?

I can't refer to the word anymore.

It's now illegal to refer to the word.

And this is like I say, where does intent have any place in this?

Because that's the truth of everything.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Did you know that cuntie has a new meaning as of this year?

Is that right?

I think it's part of the brat thing.

I'll have to look into it.

But I know that somebody told me that it's been sort of basically rebranded and taken by women to mean something completely different.

And it's actually being used a lot in America, which is quite odd because they usually have, you know, they bleep out the word shit from Gordon Ramsay's shows.

For God's sake.

I love the fact that we, I know I'm not very proud to be British or whatever.

But when I watch the BBC or something, and they do have loads of swearing in it, I just think, oh, isn't it great that we don't do that thing that they do in America?

Well, I spent quite a lot of time in America.

I used to live with a woman who did some of her training as a doctor in the States.

I traveled all the way across the States in the mid-90s, all the way from East to West Coast by car, you know.

And it is absolutely alarming.

Because what we know of the States, almost everything we know is cultural.

So we know television.

It's all through television, isn't it?

And all of that is produced by quite a small percentage of the population of the States, you know, the East and the West Coast mainly.

But most of what we know of America is not the great vast part of America.

And, you know, you watch the television, they have no international news on their TV news.

You know, they'll do the local news, which is local in their area.

They'll have the state news, which is like wider state news.

And then they'll have a few, maybe one piece about something big that's happening in the States generally, you know.

Yeah, it's unbelievable.

You go there and you expect them to know as much about our culture.

We've been bombarded with their culture all of our lives.

Yeah.

And the generation before us and before that.

I'd say anyone that watched Telly after what, if you grow up 60s, 70s, 80s, that's the pinnacle.

Everything was American.

Our TV was unwatchable.

Yeah, and music, film.

A Quinn Martin production.

Yeah, absolutely.

All that stuff.

But when you arrive there, you expect them to know as much about, I mean, it's sort of, you don't do this consciously, but you expect them to understand as much about our culture as we do about theirs and they know nothing.

I met so many people in the States who couldn't work out what country I came from.

They understood that I spoke English.

Some of them thought I was from somewhere else in the United States.

Canada, for instance.

Yeah, there's a lot of Wisconsin-y, you know, they do the use thing.

There is a bit of that up there.

They thought up towards the Canadian border, perhaps something like that, or maybe from Canada, you know?

Yeah.

And then even a guy, a waiter in Los Angeles, when I arrived, had a case with me and he said, Air France, just arriving.

And I said, I'm sorry, I don't understand, I'm not from France.

Bonjour.

And he says, oh, I'm sorry, Air Canada, just arriving.

I'm from England, man.

You know, that language that you speak.

It goes the other way.

My wife's Canadian, but she lived in Arizona for a long time, so we go over there to see her parents sometimes.

And last time we were there in Starbucks, you know, and they asked for your name, they go, where are you guys from?

And my wife, in my opinion, in a fully North American accent, went, England, and she went, how are you enjoying your stay?

And I was like, does she think you're English?

But they did.

It's unbelievable.

It is absolutely weird, but it's, like I say, it's just they don't get our culture.

They, you know, they don't see our culture.

It's not put in front of them.

Yeah, it's old fashioned, isn't it, how they see us?

Yeah, but it's because, you know, if they got, you know, if 60% of their entertainment came from England or from Britain, it would work, as we understand it with them, they would know the way we speak and they would know where we come from and stuff like that, but it's just, they don't see it.

Also, have you seen that clip of, it's an Irish politician, I think, showing remarkable restraint when being interviewed in America.

And one of the things that's come up on the news is about the exchange rate.

This guy is going, well, that won't affect you guys in Ireland though.

No, he says, we do use the euro.

And he goes, oh, you use the euro in Ireland.

He says, that's right.

He says, but you guys use sterling.

You use the pound.

He says, well, Northern Ireland uses the pound, you know.

No, they're not going to understand.

And he says, whoa, hold on.

He says, you guys use two different currencies.

You know.

Where do you start at that point?

It's two fucking countries.

You've heard of North and South Korea, right?

And all that, you know.

And it's like, how?

I met a person in America who didn't understand the different currencies.

And he thought a pound was a dollar was everything because they were all worth the same, right?

And I was like, no, a pound, you know, like a pound is worth one and a half dollars or used to be two.

He goes, what do you mean?

I goes, well, you know, because so if I go to England, my dollar is not a dollar isn't a pound.

I went, no.

And it was like I was telling him something he'd never heard before.

Like I just invented broccoli.

It was fucking mental.

Yeah.

This guy was staring at me.

I was like, are you hearing this guy?

I've spent a bit of time in Canada as well as had a month in Vancouver in the mid 80s.

In the mid 80s.

How was that then?

Beautiful.

Yeah.

I went there via New York.

You're selling your Vizs?

You have them in your hand?

No, but it was straight after we got our publishing deal.

Virgin was our first publisher.

So we got Virgin discount on Virgin Airlines and the Libyan bombing had just happened.

No Americans wanted to fly.

So we could book on standbys knowing that we could get on the flights.

So we flew to New Jersey for 25 quid from London.

And then hopping across the States at the time only cost $99.

So we got all the way to Seattle for like 68 quid plus 25 quid, whatever that works out how I'm dyslexic.

But anyway, it wasn't very much.

Very cheap.

We ended up, drove up with friends to Vancouver and stayed up there, but Vancouver and Vancouver Island and Whistler and all that beautiful up there, man.

And I didn't realize, I didn't really realize how beautiful Canada was until I visited loads of other countries and I kept looking back on it and I go, God, Canada was...

That's what I think about the UK when people slag it off.

If you go a bit of traveling and go around the world, you might actually be a bit more grateful for what you have.

Yeah, exactly.

Because as bad as it can be, and it can be, it's still, I'm not patriotic, like I said, but I still think we're very lucky.

I'm very lucky I popped out my mum here.

Yeah, it's one of the most, I mean, regardless of, you know, it's very easy to focus on the negative, especially when it's all over the media.

But it is one of the most open minded societies in the world.

You only have to think to yourself, well, hold on, where else there's a few Scandinavian countries and so on.

You can think of Canada is pretty good.

Yeah, but then how much of the groceries there?

For me, I need the proximity of the Sainsbury's.

When we moved here, the proximity of the shops around here is just like, this is perfect for me.

I can't imagine living anywhere else in the whole island.

I mean, maybe North London if I was a millionaire, but you know, who wants to live in Hampstead really?

Well, everyone probably.

Well, I used to.

Did you?

I lived in Highgate.

Oh, we lived in Highgate.

Whereabouts?

Well, we rented.

That is still living?

Yes, in a flat on Highgate Road, just past Ripping Yards up near the station and Muswell Hill as well.

Oh, wow.

I lived on the old Coots estate.

Oh, yeah.

I was born in Whittington Hospital.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I never got to live there.

It's too fancy.

My family all moved out in the seventies.

So I can tell you, I've said it a lot, but I'll tell you, but my nanograd dad had a house in Highgate in the early seventies and they were offered to buy it for 30 grand.

And I went back there, what, 15 years ago, and it's now three separate apartments worth 1.5 million.

That would have been mine.

I had a one bed flat there.

I moved there after my brother died, actually, my oldest brother.

You might call it now a period of reflection, you know, but I'd always wanted to live in London ever since the day I first went there on a trip in 1981.

And I thought, now is my chance to sort of reset my life and...

Is this after you left Viz?

Yeah, this is a few years after that.

Yeah, I mean, this was about six years after that.

I left Viz at Christmas of 2003 and I did various things after that, but moved to London in 2009.

And...

Oh, I would have seen you.

I literally lived there from 2009 to 2013.

Oh, wow.

I would have passed you on the way to...

On the way to...

I used to walk, because of where I lived, I used to get the tube from Archway and then get it back to Highgate, so I could always walk downhill.

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But for now, let's get back to the current episode of Television Times Podcast.

Your big characters, am I right in thinking is Sid the Sexist and Billy the Fish?

Billy the Fish, I was involved in the graphics of Billy the Fish at one point.

I can't quite remember what I did.

And I used to co-write it with the other guys in the team.

It's so weird.

Even now, I look back at it.

I was looking at it yesterday and I thought, I used to find this hilarious.

I still do, but like, it's so weird.

Who came up with that?

Well, my brother Chris came up with it originally.

But it's just, I mean, if you grew up with British comics, you know, it's all just about or based around at least the sort of preposterous way that comics tell stories.

Yeah, they do sound like kind of like Buster Gona and his testicles.

It does sound like something from The Beano or Dandy or whatever.

Well, yeah, it was The Beano for grownups is the way a lot of people have described it.

But I don't know if you know the story of the 1966 Batman TV series.

I know the show.

But the guy who produced it, he'd never seen comic books before.

And somebody said to him, look, I want you to make this show.

That explains everything.

I want you to make this show.

And he said, no, I don't think I'm interested.

And he said, no, no, I think it'll be a lot of fun, you know.

And he gave him a couple of comics to read.

And he read them on the plane, like never having seen them before.

And he thought to himself on the plane, what would be brilliant will be to make this, but just make it like it's still a comic.

So they say unnecessary things, you know.

So it's like the, oh my, you're taking me by the throat.

Yeah, of course they do, yeah.

All this stuff that's said in words is unnecessary.

Yes.

And it's so many things that are told in a different way in comics.

Yeah, it's almost like the lines, if you remember in The Matrix, there's a bit in The Matrix where he's being chased and Neo's being chased and he's on the windows, oh my god, why are they after me?

I don't understand, why are they getting me?

Why won't they leave me alone?

I'm like, why is he speaking like that?

It's just a couple of minutes.

It's all like the whole of Batman is like that.

Yeah, that's right.

So that was kind of how that came about.

And it's the same thing with Billy the Fish, is what we sort of focused on was all those absolutely bizarre ways that things happen in those boys' comics, the football comic.

You always get a voice from the crowd saying, Oh, my, he's hit that 60 yards, you know?

And then it's like, he's hit that like a rocket, you know, and he's managed to get that out before it's gone in the net, you know, and all of these...

Like in a fish kick a ball.

Well, it's so mental.

You can swim through the air, you've forgotten that, obviously.

Yeah, I know.

It's a mad little thing.

And then, obviously, what used to happen in those, in the Beano and that, every now and again, they would get a celebrity player to play for Melchester Rovers.

So we just sort of started to work on that, the idea of getting guests in, but also getting players with special abilities.

So you probably remember, or you may not, Billy's Boots was a strip in which the kid could only, he was a brilliant footballer, but he could only play football brilliantly when he had his granddad's boots on, right?

So his granddad, he used to wear these old neck and leather boots with like toe end caps on them and leather studs, you know?

And in his granddad's magical abilities of football, I came through to him if he wore the boots, right?

So we started to base characters on that.

So we had, I can't remember what his name was, but it was Professor Somebody.

He had all the initials after his name and they were always there whenever somebody says, oh, Professor Such and Such, it has hit that like a rocket, you know?

And then there was Johnny X.

I remember when we came up with Johnny X was the Invisible Striker.

It's like the perfect foil here.

Nobody knows where he is.

And then we got the guests, so Shake and Stevens came and played for them and Mick Hucknall out of Simply Red, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Of course.

It was always great fun.

Sid the Sexist was, that was my baby.

Yeah, yeah.

I sort of came up with that.

I always drew it and...

Did that ever make it to TV?

Did they ever make it to TV?

Yes, it was the Sid the Sexist.

Billy the Fish and Roger Mellie initially went to TV on Channel 4.

Billy the Fish, it worked for TV because we made it, we said it should be made as much like Captain Pugwash as possible.

And the Roger Mellie one was, it worked the same way, but it was more adult content.

So Billy the Fish was all suitable for children.

There's no swearing in it, you know.

Because the Profanasaurus was massive, right?

So that's how Roger Mellie got on the telly?

Or was it just...

No, no, this is all pre-Profanasaurus.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

I got my dates all wrong.

So the Profanasaurus began as Swery Mary's swearing dictionary.

Because we had a character called Swery Mary and her thing was, her mission was to try and swear on the front cover of Viz.

And we launched a website, early days of websites.

And we asked people to contribute to Swery Mary's swearing dictionary.

And people did.

But it wasn't well managed.

We hadn't thought it out.

People could put contributions in and it wasn't edited and it was just all a bit of a mess.

There was all this sort of horrible offensive stuff came in.

Never ask the audience.

Yeah.

So what we did was we just downloaded it all, all people's suggestions and went through it all and added that to what we already had.

And we had this cover giveaway book.

It was going to be called Swear Mary's Swearing Dictionary.

But one of us, I don't remember who, one of the team at the last minute came up with the idea, oh, what about it's like a profanasaurus, like a swearing dictionary.

So it's like a thesaurus, but like a profanity.

And that's when, oh, like Roger's.

Roger's thesaurus.

It's like Roger's.

So clever.

So that was changed last minute.

It became Roger's Profanasaurus.

Then we did a second one and then we thought, oh, we should put it all into a book.

And Terry Jones wrote us a forward for that.

Because I'd met Terry Jones at the Tyside Cinema, a screening of Holy Grail.

And we remained friends till the end of his life.

He wrote the forward to my autobiography.

And when I was living in Highgate, actually he lived just not far from me.

It was Monty Python Central in Highgate when I was up there.

So that book came out, but the TV thing, it was actually one of the last things Peter Cooke did.

Peter Cooke voiced Roger Mellie on it.

And Harry Enfield did all the rest of the voices on it.

Harry had done all of the voices on Billy the Fish.

He did the lot.

But the Roger Mellie thing went out late at night, I guess on Channel 4.

And they then commissioned two further of his series.

One was Sid the Sexist and the other one was The Fat Slags.

Now, when they were commissioned, there was a different person in charge.

I don't remember his name, but he came and had a very serious meeting with us.

He had very serious concerns about 27 words and phrases.

And we said, well, you do know that this is called Sid the Sexist.

Yeah, et cetera, you know.

And anyway, they decided not to broadcast it.

But Polydor, who were the video distributor, they were happy to go ahead and distribute it anyway.

So just, yes, it went to VHS tape, I think it was at the time.

And then it was later.

The Fat Slags one was made in like plasticine animation.

The claymation, the early ones.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen those, yeah.

And the Sid the Sexist one was done by, it was animated by the same guy who did Billy the Fish and Roger Mellie.

I was quite involved in the whole process.

They came up and I took them around Newcastle and took shots of all the places where I thought things should be based.

The big market becomes the backdrop for a lot of stuff and restaurants that actually existed.

Sid the Sexist pub was in Walker.

It's still there.

Sounds like this guy was based on someone you knew.

Ah, yes, he's called Graham Lines.

There we go.

He's still alive.

He didn't discover that Sid the Sexist was inspired by him until my brother wrote his autobiography in 2004.

So he read about it in there.

And he went, oh, right.

But it wasn't based on him, so to speak.

It was inspired by something that he said, although there were touches of his character in it.

But I'll tell you what happened.

I'll give you an idea of what I mean by this.

So Graham was a mature student at Newcastle University, and we were just in our late teens.

He would have been probably in his mid to late 20s.

And he was studying advanced mathematics at Newcastle University.

He was a very bright guy.

But as a mature student, he had taken on a job to help fund his education.

And he was working at what is now known as the Reclamation Center at Bycas.

He worked the front desk.

So he used to answer the phones and deal with the people coming in to queries about where they dumped their refuse and so on.

And he spent his working day working with all of the bin men.

So he had through this developed quite a rough and ready sort of Geordie sense of humor, which I dare say was in him to an extent to start with.

But the other thing about him was he had this bin man macho bravado type thing going on, but then he was dreadfully shy around women.

And he was 27 and he didn't have a girlfriend and he didn't seem to have any hope in that direction.

So he couldn't face asking this girl out that he fancied.

So he thought the best two people he could go to to ask for advice on how to ask a girl out would be two teenage boys who spent their entire time in their bedroom drawing comics, right?

Yeah.

And I actually did have a girlfriend.

I think that's probably one of the reasons why I thought I might be able to help him in some way.

So he came around and he said, oh, you know, I've really fancied this girl Sandy and I want to ask her out and I don't know how to do it.

And he said, what do you think I should do?

And I said, well, maybe you could ask her out.

And he said, nah, I don't think I could do that.

And I says, oh, what?

You mean you couldn't do it in person?

Why don't you just, yeah, bring her up.

You got a phone number, ring her up, you know.

Just say, hey, you know, I was thinking of going to the pictures.

Would you like to come with us?

He said, nah, I don't think I could do that.

And we said, is there anything that you think you could do?

I said, well, could you, maybe you could write to her, you know, write her a letter.

At which point he sort of goes, ah, nods.

He pulls this little piece of paper out of his pocket, right?

And it's this tiny little, like the size of a post-it note.

And it's all folded up.

And he unfolds it.

And he hands it to me.

And he says, do you think that will do the job, like?

And I looked at it.

And it said, dear Sandy, I would like to go to the pictures with you if you're interested, please call me on this number.

And then the phone number, and then from Graham, right?

And this was in mirror writing.

He'd written it backwards.

Like an 11 year old kid, right?

So he says, that will work.

I'll impress her.

And as I said, well, Graham, if that's, you know, if you feel confident that you can do that, you know, just do it, you know?

And he says, ah, right, right.

And off he went.

So we headed down our garden path.

Me and my brother were standing at the door saying, I'll see you later, Graham.

And he gets halfway down the path, and he pulls the bit of paper out of his pocket again.

He unfolds it and he waves it in the air.

And he says, yeah, lads, do you think this is gonna pull me some fucking toddy tonight?

I don't know how it passed me by but I have no recollection of it whatsoever.

The Fat Slags movie.

Were you involved in that?

Or was that just after your time?

It was, no, that happened when I was still there.

And we founded Viz, Chris, Jim and myself in 1979.

Chris left 20 years later and I left in the end of 2003.

So somewhere in those four years this happened.

And what it was, it was the first time that the publisher had ever taken out an option on something which he had a right to in his contract without our approval.

So it was sold, I think Chris was involved in talks with John at some point about this.

And John had said, Oh, don't worry, it's an option.

Somebody's buying an option and the film will never get made.

And, you know, it's money for nothing.

And then the next thing, somebody made it, you know.

And it's awful.

We had nothing to do with it.

I assumed as much looking at the trailer.

I mean, when it was released, I made a statement to the press and I said, you know, that we've had nothing to do with this.

Don't go and see it.

I mean, a guy who was asked to do a music edit on it, the people who sent them it, they didn't know that he knew me.

And he sent me a copy of the film.

So I saw the film before anybody else did.

And it was fucking awful.

I mean, in every sense, it was awful.

And we just kept saying, why didn't you ask us to write it?

Because what makes Viz what it is, is that it's always been written and created by the same team of people.

Does that not make sense to you?

I don't know what these people thought had made it work if it wasn't the writers, you know, and the creators of the artwork and so on.

The fat suits.

Terrible idea.

Obviously, the first mistake they made was they did not use fat women.

Because the whole point of The Fat Slags, I know a lot of people, including myself, when we came up with the strip in the first place, I was actually on the side that voted against the title Fat Slags.

I just thought it should have been called The Fat Lassers, the fat girls or whatever.

But the point, the whole point of it is supposed to be that they absolutely do not care about what the world thinks of them.

There's a woman on Armando Iannucci's Comet Britannia series.

There's a feminist on that who I've actually shared the stage with at talks before, who says that the whole enjoyable aspect of it is that these are two independently minded women who just do whatever they want and they just don't care.

They're enjoying their lives.

I know it's really outrageous and a lot of what's funny about it lies in how completely outrageous it is.

But the point is they are in control of their lives and they are not ashamed of being fat.

Yet, they used two thin women in the role in this film, which is just so wrong.

They shallow held it.

And also, I mean, the script's terrible, etc.

But I was involved in the creation of the Fat Slags, all four of us, the four main Viz writers, throughout its sort of main period of success.

And it was the first, one of the first times, I think, that we acted together as a team to consciously create a new strip, a new character, a pair of characters, as it turned out.

And, you know, we came up with the Fat Slags.

And from almost day one, maybe immediately after the first strip, I think it went into the hands of Thorpey and Graham.

So Thorpey and Graham did it, and me and Chris continued doing other things.

They sort of took that and ran with that, you know.

I was never, it's not my favorite thing in Viz, I have to say, you know.

If that's your next question.

Top tips.

Yeah.

Students, imagine.

The Letters page.

That's a lovely.

Well, the first thing I go to, if I pick up a copy of Viz, are Davy Jones' cartoons.

So Davy Jones, he just lives around the corner from you as well.

Davy Jones does Gilbert Ratchet, Roger Irrelevant, Vibrating Bomb-Faced Goats, Diana Ross' Dogshit Museum, et cetera, et cetera, right?

So Davy is a man alone, you know, he sort of works independently of the rest of us.

We did used to do writing meetings with him, but unlike the rest of us, when Davy came out of a writing meeting, he didn't have a finished script.

He just jotted down notes, right?

Then he took it away and he did it alone.

He's the one, if you ask any of the Viz writers or artists who their favorite Viz cartoonists would be, I pretty much guarantee they'll all say Davy Jones.

Because his work is unbelievable.

I literally, the first time I ever read a copy of Viz that I hadn't seen before it went to press, this happened because I'd been to the States whilst that deadline happened.

So I'd submitted my work, gone off just before Deadline Day and Davy had completed this cartoon in the last two days.

So I'd never seen it.

And I arrived at Gatwick Airport to do a change over, to fly up to Newcastle and bought a copy at the newsstand.

I'll never forget it.

It was Donald Sutherland in There Goes My Night Hood.

And Donald Sutherland was trying desperately fawning to the Queen to get himself a night hood.

And he ends up standing, he's standing on the stage at the Royal Variety Performance.

All through it's like this farcical build up of circumstances that end up in him standing on the stage at the Royal Variety Performance in a bucket of shit, wearing a swastika, like Sid Fischer's t-shirt, and a Queen Bee has flown up his hogs eye.

And he's, the only way he can think of to get it out is to try and wank it out.

He's going, get out Queen, you fucking...

Get out.

And I literally fell off a chair at Gatwick Airport.

How often did it come out?

Every eight weeks.

Every eight weeks?

Was it that?

God.

Every two months.

Wow, that is...

It's every six weeks now, I think.

Is it?

So how do you feel when you see it on the shelves now?

I mean, who's in charge of all that?

This sort of line up, the story of how it worked was, in the beginning, there was me, Jim and Chris, the two brothers and our school friend.

And then in 84, we took on as a contributor, Graham Jury from Nottingham.

So he became a real sort of stalwart of Viz.

So then Jim, by this time, had chosen a different career path, because we still weren't making any money out of Viz.

Viz was a money-losing operation in its early days.

But by this time, it was just about breaking even.

But Jim got involved in property development.

He eventually moved away to Cardiff in Wales, and he lived there the rest of his life.

Yeah, so he was sort of easing his way out of Viz.

He didn't contribute too much.

He was really gifted.

He was never really devoted to Viz.

He was a strange man to understand because he had such a talent for it.

And we tried to encourage him.

We tried all sorts of different ways to keep him on.

And, you know, he just didn't have a love for it, you know?

It's a strange thing.

Anyway, he was kind of moving out as Graham moved in.

And then Chris placed an advert in the small ads in Private Eye just after we got our publishing deal with Virgin.

And it said, wording of the ad, if I can remember it was, a bum rate paid by National Magazine for funny cartoons.

Says man.

A PO box number.

Gawpé was the only person who answered it.

Yeah.

And we saw his work and straight away we said, yeah, we've got to have him on board.

And we eventually got an office in Jesmond, Portland Terrace.

We then all got together and worked in an office.

So that was 88, sort of spring of 88.

And that was the sort of time when things really started to come together.

When working as a four, as a writing team, we really became much more productive.

At the same time, John Brown, who had been at Virgin, had set up his own company to run with the publishing of Viz.

And he was then able to put so much more time into it.

And sales just absolutely rolled over.

Every issue was doubling in numbers.

And the Christmas, you did Christmas annuals, right?

Yeah, we started doing Christmas annuals about that time, yeah, sort of 87.

And yeah, the Viz Christmas annuals still sell really well.

So does the Profanasaurus, still selling, you know, several editions down the line.

It's a great story, man.

I love what you've contributed to the world.

And it's just absolute pleasure to meet you and chat to you.

It's quite all right.

And you're to be in my house.

I've got to eat some biscuits and that.

Yeah, you go eat your own biscuits.

It's weird, I seem to be living in the sort of a map of Viz people around my house.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's nice to find out.

Anyway, thank you for coming.

That's quite all right.

That was me talking to Simon Donald, co-founder of Viz.

What an amazing conversation, he came round the house, we had a cup of tea, we had a long old chat.

So spin it down for your listening pleasure.

Check out his comedy online, go see him if you can and read his book, In Love with Viz.

All links available at the show notes of this episode of the podcast.

Okay, now to today's outro track.

Right, let me jump in here and tell you about today's outro track.

Right, it's about 30 years since this song was made, almost to the month.

That's kind of how I ended up putting this song here.

I was looking for fun things after our chat with Simon, but I thought, what was I actually doing this time three decades ago?

And I was writing this song.

It's a series of three songs joined together.

It was called Death in Three Easy Movements, like, you know, something in three easy payments.

And my nana just died, and my grandad had died some years earlier, but with her death, it was like the last parent.

Now, some of you might know that my relationship with my parents is somewhat complicated, but my nana and grandad were basically my real caregivers.

And when she died, you know, I tried to use comedy to kind of get around it and wrote silly songs and stuff.

And yeah, there's some real hearts to this one.

I got a little tearful listening back to these songs.

There's a few in here.

They're real sort of cries for help, you know, and it sort of made me realize that how much fucking pain I was in back then.

I mean, seriously, I didn't know it at the time.

And I feel bad for my younger self.

And you can hear the loneliness in the end part.

But how I made the song, fuck knows, fuck knows, because I barely had any equipment.

An old Atari had, I think it was a one megabyte memory, and used to put floppy disks in it.

And somehow I did this arrangement of three different songs in three different timings with like orchestral backing.

I mean, it's really badly recorded, I guess by today's standards.

I've cleaned it up a little bit, but you know, it's got heart and it's kind of funny.

It's my take on dealing with this enormity of being alone, essentially, is how I felt at the time.

So yeah, with that hilarious bit of outro, let's give you the song.

This is called Death in Three Easy Movements, which is made up of three songs, Why Do We Always Meet At Funerals, The Undertaker's Song and Dropping Like Flies, recorded in very, very early 1995.

Well, the tuning up of an orchestra used again on We Argue in Silence years later.

Well, thanks for listening to that, and thanks for listening to this week's episode with Simon Donald.

And we'll be back again soon.

But for now, thanks for listening.

I'll see you next time.

Look into my eyes.

Tell all your friends about this podcast.