Interview: Chris Donald
Trainspotters, former football hooligans and anyone with strong feelings about Vera have been loving Chris Donald’s latest creations. David Whetstone met him in ‘Tynemooth’
Chris Donald, in his recently purchased beanie hat (Tesco, if you follow fashion), is reflecting on his early creative stirrings as we contemplate his spoof railway posters at Tynemouth Station.
As a newish member of staff at ‘The Ministry’, which is what everyone called the mighty complex in Longbenton which opened in the 1940s as the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, he had been recruited to a five aside football team.
But since he tended to find himself on the subs’ bench, he took to writing match reports.
“They were circulated round the office and people loved them.”
He chuckles quietly.
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“Then I started doing player profiles and they were quite popular too. But I got into a bit of trouble because I quoted someone in the pub afterwards who criticised one of the strikers.”
To paraphrase, he had said that so-and-so couldn’t score in a ****** with a ??? tied round his ******. Chris, of course, didn’t put it quite like that, telling it how it was.
“A lady complained and I was summoned to the manager’s office.
“I was surprised because he didn’t tell me off. He said, ‘You’re showing some sort of potential there for journalism. There’s a vacancy for the assistant editor’s job on the in-house sports and social club magazine. Why don’t you apply for it?’
“So I did and became assistant editor of The Bulletin, as it was called. They didn’t let me near the editorial, though. I just ran errands for the editor as a punishment really.”
Chris’s talent for journalism, if you can call it that, flourished most famously in Viz, which grew out of the popular comics he started at school with inky-fingered fellow humourists.
This was what was to occupy his time after his formative years at The Ministry which he looks back on fondly.
“I worked there for two and a half years and it was good fun… well, if you like administering National Insurance contributions for people working abroad in countries that don’t have a reciprocal agreement with the UK.
“And if your National Insurance number ended in 43, 44 or 42 c or d then I administered those contributions. I started in October 1978 and I think I left in June 1980.
“I was working on Viz at that time too.”
The Viz years are also far behind Chris now – he bowed out some years ago – so how does a socially aware chap with a talent for art and a quirky sense of humour fill his days?
Well, these posters – on show at the Globe Gallery in North Shields and now in the Bridge Gallery (as they call the bridge over the Metro lines at Tynemouth Station) – offer part of the answer.
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He started doing them on Facebook when bored, making posters for films he’d invented. His favourite was The Sex Invasion of the Daleks. “That was quite good.”
His mind then turned to the travel posters which railway companies used to put out, depicting popular destinations in upbeat style.
Chris, always into trains and stuff, was something of a devotee.
There had been one in the Viz days, he muses fondly. It, too, had got him into a bit of trouble.
“It was based on a real poster but it said, ‘Skegness is ******* ****. Come to Mablethorpe’ and it had a jolly fisherman skipping along the beach with dog turds and litter on it.
“Skegness kicked up a right storm about that. It turned out that the council had inherited the copyright on the original poster and I just assumed it would have gone with railway nationalisation and nobody would be bothered.”
Running with the same idea to stave off boredom, he created his ‘Tynemooth’ poster, replacing elegant 1920s trippers with modern lasses eating chips and a chap with a hoodie.
He showed it to Rashida Davison, who runs the Globe Gallery, who’d suggested a poster exhibition.
Ruefully, Chris said she’d rejected The Sex Invasion of the Daleks and requested more in the travel mode… and here they are.
After the Tynemouth one he turned his attention to Vera, making fun of the series for its geographically implausible mix of locations (a common complaint levelled at TV dramas when characters are seen to make five-minute journeys which locals know fine well would take 50, what with roadworks).
So there she is, the great detective, beside a Hadrian’s Wall strung with North East landmarks. (And if you look carefully, you’ll also see Vera attending a crime scene on the Tynemooth beach. Another TV legend, Supergran, is shown standing nearby.)
The Ministry came next, Chris taken with its similarity, obvious to him at least, to a Butlin’s holiday camp.
“Well, the buildings, the single-storey ones, were in the same style and it was very self-contained. You didn’t have to go off site to do banking or anything.
“In Butlin’s posters there’s always a lady in a bikini with a beachball or something and a family behind her looking all happy. It’s been popular, that one. So many people have worked there.”
The one of Whitley Bay, done as if advertising the Tour de France, reflects the seaside town’s recently acquired cycle lanes.
Says the artist: “There’s this big painted road thing and people who live nearby were telling me it’s very controversial. Some of the traders think it’s bad for business. I’m sort of on the fence a bit whether I approve of it or not.”
It was an original Whitley Bay poster that spawned his new-look one for Morpeth.
‘Life is Gay at Whitley Bay’ goes the slogan on the original 1960 version with its happy, holiday-making family in a boat.
Chris relocated the boat family to a flooded Morpeth beneath the tempting invitation to ‘Mess About at Morpeth’. He also substituted his own dog for the poodle in the prow.
I wonder if he’s ruffled feathers among the residents of the Northumberland market town with this one and he thinks for a second or two.
“It is a bit harsh on them, I suppose. But I believe the flooding thing’s been sorted out now. My dad used to take us there to feed the ducks and a friend used to own a cheese shop there.”
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He says the Darras Hall poster, urging people not to come, is his favourite. It clearly tickled him. In Darras Hall, he says, they opened a station but closed it 13 years later because nobody used it.
All these posters, he insists, were meticulously researched.
He loved drawing the Austin 7 in the Darras Hall poster and just as it was about to go to press, he realised that the big house, an amalgamation of two recently offered for sale, had no guttering over the porch.
A last-minute guttering amendment is offered as an example of the attention to detail lavished on these creations.
But it’s nowhere more apparent than in the one poster you won’t see at Tynemouth Station (I suspect the restraining influence of Rashida here).
It’s the one advertising the ‘football specials’, the trains that used to bring away football fans to Newcastle on match days.
“I was a trainspotter and it was exciting when the football specials arrived because you’d sometimes get an unusual engine on them, but also you got about 500 football fans looking for a fight and other football fans waiting to ambush them.
“They all came to Manors, to keep them away from the city centre I suppose, and then they’d be escorted to the ground by police with dogs.
“A lot of people have asked for that one because they were football hooligans at the time. One bloke thought he recognised some of the faces and it was all coming back to him, the nostalgia.
“And the graffiti in that one is all authentic. I found photographs. In the ’70s, when I was a kid, the Longbenton Aggro Boys and their rivals from Newbiggin Hall were always the ones fighting in the Leazes End.
“You see where it says ‘Longbenton Clockwork’? That’s taken from Four Lane Ends when the new Metro station opened. Someone must have popped along and put that there with the eye thing from A Clockwork Orange.
“I don’t know if Longbenton Clockwork existed or if it was a figment of someone’s imagination but it looked good in graffiti.”
Despite the absence of this particular example of his handiwork, Chris says he’s delighted to see his spoof railway posters displayed at an actual station.
So, evidently, are the people who’ve been pressing their noses up against the glass and smiling as we chat. If you’re going to miss a train, what better way to miss it than with a Viz-style chortle?
Do catch the Jolly Days posters at Tynemouth Station or at the Globe Gallery, 87 Howard Street, North Shields, where they’re on show alongside the stories behind them.
Also being exhibited is Blank Canvas, featuring fabulous work painted straight onto the walls by street artists Toby Heaps, Mark One87 and Cack Handed Kid, whose ‘fish finger’ poster can also be seen at the station.