You don't expect comedy writers to be able to keep it up all day (ooh Missus), but Chris Donald has the sort of dry wit you'd gladly listen to for hours, preferably in the pub. The creator of Viz, the publishing sensation of the Eighties and Nineties, is now taking some time out and quietly turning a few ideas over in his mind. He is the classic entrepreneur, starting off a venture in his bedroom and turning a hobby into a business, with no apparent craving for endless wealth. With his "pubby" ambience and virtual normality, he still looks bemused by the term "entrepreneur". "It's funny, but a lot of my mates from back then are millionaires now," he says. "Andy Inman used to distribute Viz in the early days, then he developed into merchandising for the likes of Coronation Street. Sometimes we go off and play golf - that's an entrepreneur's thing to do, isn't it? The truth is, I play about twice a year." Chris admits that Viz and making people laugh were a neat way of getting into gigs and meeting girls, never dreaming that it could be a business that would grow enormously and, inevitably, start to become more like a job. "Viz was started by me and John Brownlow," he says. "We used to sit in the pub together and bring ideas up. It ended up with four of us and it was a bit of a production line with not as many good ideas. Publishing deadlines meant it was a bit of a treadmill. "I never thought it would be a business. I don't think you could invent Viz today. Things have changed - there are boundaries about what is acceptable and what's not. We were putting things on paper for the first time. "Times change and these days a lot of things aren't shocking at all. There's so much violence in films, for example, and if you watched Straw Dogs now, you'd just go, 'so what'. "The shock element evolved from bizarre essays at school when Jim and I used to get as many fatalities in as possible just to amuse other people. "It was a competition - sometimes I'd have 32 and he's have 36. Once I had 350 deaths in mine but he had 600 or something - a block of flats had collapsed. That's when the teacher noticed." Chris isn't the sort of wacky, custard pie-throwing clown that some people imagine you'd have to be to invent Skin Heed (his first Viz character) and the absorbing Sid The Sexist. Contemplative, you'd say. Witty, engaging, but contemplative. "Generally, comic writers tend to be a pretty glum lot," he says. "I met Steve Coogan once and he was the most boring person I've ever come across." And those characters - surely they're the result of a fertile imagination? "Characters come from somebody you know or somebody you've seen. Sid The Sexist was actually a friend who worked for the council in Wallsend. He was full of all these cheap lines about going out and pulling birds. "But when you went out with him, you always had a quiet drink then go off to the Barbecue Express in the Haymarket and back to his place to watch a video. He was the first person I knew to have one. "Viz was at its peak between 1982 and 1984 when most of the characters came along that sustained all the way through. The best moment was when I passed the Civic Centre in Newcastle and saw two kids lying on the grass laughing at it. That made my day. "By 1992, I started to realise it was all getting a bit repetitive - all formulaic. We used to deposite ourselves in a little writing room and if all four of us had nothing new we'd just resort to The Formula. "I actually wanted to fold it in 1991, but had it valued by a City analyst who put it at between £10m and £25m, which I thought was a bit vague. He charged quite a lot for coming up with that figure. "I stopped being editor in 1999. We were having more and more disagreements and elements of change weren't being received well - some of the others weren't receptive to new ideas. "I retained a share until we sold it to John Brown. When he came up with the publishing contract, we expected to sell 30,000-40,000 - at that time we were doing 5,000 - and we never expected to get to anywhere near 100,000. We reached 1.3 million at one point. "This November is Viz's 25th anniversary, so there's a flood - trickle, actually - of books coming out. The Very Very Best Of and a potted history, but I've written a warts-and-all version which I've been planning since the 20th anniversary. "That's published by Harper Collins in September - along with, I must add, William Hague's biography of William Pitt the Younger and Greg Dyke's autobiography. I think there'll be more laughs in mine than the two of them put together." Chris works three days a week "for a pittance" for friends who own Barter Books in Alnwick, cataloguing vinyl records and pricing books. The free days he used to write the real tale (out, he remids us, in September). He says: "If you do nothing all day, you end up doing nothing. "I'm getting itchy. I started a restaurant at the station house at Ilderton in Northumberland - against my accountant's advice, but I was always a bit obstinate - but I was only interested in the building and not the food, so it didn't do very well. "I'd like to have a shop somwhere like a nostalgia toy shop, selling train sets. A burger van, perhaps?" Being the creator of an anarchic beast such as Viz must have a traumatic effect on your friends and family, but Chris reckons not. He says: "When my son was about seven or eight, he came home and said someone at school says you do Viz and what is it? And I heard my daughter say, in answer to a question: 'My dad does stupid books and stuff'." 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