With a cast including Sid the Sexist, and the Fat Slags, Viz was the publishing sensation of the late 1980s and became the country's third best-selling magazine. As it celebrates its 25th anniversary, Nick Morrison talks to the man who started it all in his bedroom.

BERNARD Lester's crime was to bring a shiny new 5p into school as his dinner money. It was 1969 and the dawn of decimalisation, and a 5p piece was something of a rarity. But what was surely intended as no more than a harmless diversion before the start of class left an indelible mark on the then nine-year-old Chris Donald.

"The teacher called Bernard Lester to the front of the class for everyone to look at his shiny 5p piece. I had a shiny 5p piece, but she didn't call me up," he says, suddenly animated by the bitter memory.

"When Friends Reunited came along, I registered and I started trying to get even with people. I sent him an email saying 'You are the bastard with the shiny 5p piece'. He had forgotten all about it," he adds, sadly.

Poor, unsuspecting Bernard Lester is not the only one. There is the bloke who threw Chris' school bags into Jesmond Dene and is now in the RAF - he received an email. And there is the girl who loudly told Chris on the school bus that she didn't know how he had managed to get into the top stream. "I always hated her for that," he says. Mostly, he gets rather bemused emails in return, but she didn't reply.

"It's not really about getting even, it is just holding grudges," says Chris, now 44. He admits it's all very childish, but then it's perhaps what you would expect of the man who created Viz.

With an array of characters including Johnny Fartpants, Sid the Sexist, Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles, Finbarr Saunders, and his obsession with double entendres, the Fat Slags and Roger Mellie, the foul-mouthed tv presenter, Viz brought toilet humour at first into the publishing fringes and then firmly into the mainstream.

Viz was the magazine phenomenon of the late 1980s and early 1990s. At first gradual, its circulation rise took on a seemingly unstoppable momentum, until, at 1.3 million copies, it was the third best-selling magazine in the country, behind only the Radio Times and TV Times.

Now, facing competition from lads mags and with fart jokes no longer edgy, it's settled back at nearer the 200,000 mark, still a healthy figure for a magazine begun in the bedroom of the Donald family home in Jesmond.

"I was obsessed with magazines. When I was about five I made magazines for my teddy bear, called Yellowy. He had a little newsagents shop in the corner of the room," Chris says.

At school he created the Fat Crusader, a pupil who turned into a superhero to mete out a grisly kind of justice to bullies and thugs. "He would sharpen their heads with a pencil sharpener and one had a post-box stuck up his bum. It was all very crude and very violent, but people seemed to like it. I don't know why."

These magazines might have been popular with his classmates, but they were also perhaps a reason why he was considered a little weird at school.

He says his sense of humour was the result of watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, with their endless death and mutilation, coupled with years of talking nonsense with his two brothers.

After leaving school and going to work for the DHSS, he teamed up with school friend Jim Brownlow to create The Daily Pie and Arnold, magazines filled with cartoons and sold to friends in pubs. In December 1979, when he was 19, they put together the Bumper Monster Christmas Special, which was to become Viz, and sold it at punk nights at the Gosforth Hotel.

"I only took about 20 or 30 copies because I didn't think we would sell them, but we sold the lot and had to go back and get some more," he says.

Its success persuaded them to publish a second issue, in March, and it was around then that Chris experienced something of an epiphany.

"I was walking back from town. I passed the civic centre and there were some students lying on the grass and I noticed they were reading a copy of it and laughing. It was the first time I ever saw someone I hadn't sold it to reading it in public."

But Viz was no overnight success. Its popularity spread by word of mouth, and after five years sales were at 2,000 an issue and still confined to Newcastle. It was picked up by Virgin and HMV, and sales rose a little further, to 5,000, but as yet there was no big breakthrough.

Still, it attracted the attention of magazine giant IPC. A proposed deal fell through, but it gave Chris the taste for having a publisher, and in 1985 he signed with Virgin Books. For the first time, Viz was available across the country. It was still a gradual rise, but now the steps started to get bigger.

"It happened quite gradually, so at no point did you stop and say this is all a bit amazing. Throughout '87 and '88 it kept doubling and every time we got the new sales figures we were staggered, but it was very difficult to take in because we were very busy. It was like going over rapids in a boat: you haven't got time to think about it, and when you stop you think 'Jesus, how did I do that?'," he says.

It was only in 1987 that production of Viz moved out of his bedroom in his dad's house and into an office, with the magazine put together by a small group of friends, including Chris' younger brother Simon.

"We never thought what we were doing was particularly clever. We just kept doing what we had always been doing and the sales kept going up.

'It was the first time that anyone had put that sense of humour in print, and it also connected with an enormous boom in alternative comedy - we were quite lucky in that. I would not put us on a par with Monty Python, but it was a similar kind of thing."

He says he never felt pressured by success, but he realised it was unsustainable, and when sales started to slide they were forced to think about what they were doing wrong. It was around this time that disillusion set in.

"It was the first time I was aware of things not being fine. I'm a miserable bloke by nature: I tend to get sick of people. It's not that I don't suffer fools gladly, I don't suffer anyone gladly.

"I started to get sick of working with the same people. You get to know people too well, and I would suggest we work from home, but they thought it was great having an office. I started to hate the routine and we started to have rows about the way we were working."

His argumentative nature meant he picked fights with his collaborators, he says in the hope it would stir things up creatively, but you suspect it was also just because he was bored and wanted a row. Eventually, after threatening to resign several times, he left in 1999, although he continued to draw the occasional cartoon.

He's still friends with his former colleagues, but it sounds as though those bonds were tested to the limit.

"They say I was unpleasant, and I only agree because four or five people say it. Simon described me as the most miserable man on Earth, but I don't know if that is true."

Finding himself at something of a loose end, he dabbled in the restaurant business - "a miserable failure" - then went to work in a friend's bookshop, where he still helps out a couple of days a week. He is the editor of the show magazine for the Northumberland village where he lives with his wife and three children, and fixtures secretary of the local pool league. He plans to follow his book about Viz with a series of other based-on-fact works.

He still enjoys reading Viz, even though for years it has carried the cover-line: "Not as funny as it used to be."

Viz may have had the good fortune to ride a wave of alternative comedy, but it was surely the confluence of a dark sense of humour and the toilet gags which made it the enfant terrible of the magazine world. For his part, Chris says he's not naturally miserable all the time, but it's hard to believe him.

"If a tree falls down in a forest and there is nobody there, does it make a noise? In the same way, if I'm in a room on my own then I'm not miserable: it's only when I come into contact with someone that I'll be miserable.

"My wife says I'm in a bad mood, but I say 'If you go into the next room I won't be miserable'. I don't think my kids think I'm miserable. They're beginning to wonder, though."

And then there are his grudges and his desire to get the last word on his enemies, even if they have forgotten all about it.

"I'm obviously bitter and twisted; I will get over it eventually," he says. Somehow this seems unlikely.

* Rude Kids: The Unfeasible Story of Viz by Chris Donald (Harper Collins) £20.