Clive Harris: Gunged but not forgotten

Very sad news today that my old friend Clive Harris has died. Known to the world as “Bill Shipton” – a nom de plume (or nob de plume as Clive would almost inevitably have termed it) he adopted partly to spare his parents’ blushes and partly just because he enjoyed assuming other identities. He was “De Forest Hill” for a number of his contributions to Mayfair, the soft-core girly mag we both worked for at the end of the 1980s. All of his aliases used elements of places he had had lived, though I am not entirely sure when he lived in Shipton. Forest Hill, though, was his home throughout the 80s and until he moved to St Leonard’s. 

It was at Mayfair that he first hit on the idea of launching Splosh! (variously Splush and Splash before he settled on the final title). It was this magazine and its various video/event/photoset spin-offs that dominated the last quarter century of his life. Although he claimed never to be an enthusiast for all things messy in the way that his many readers were, most of us had our doubts, but never pushed him too far on the subject. Despite his very public showman persona, he could be quite a private man. 

Splosh was to prove a real adventure for him and he recounted many of the more outlandish episodes with typical aplomb. There was the German photographer who visited him as part of a pilgrimage to the home of Messy Fun and, as a parting shot, pointed to the rear of his car and offered: “And if you are interested, Mr Shipton, my boot is full of pissing videos”. Surely a sentence not found in many phrase books. 

Then there was his injunction from a well-known high-street chain when his spin-off foot fetish line, Toes R Us, reached the attention of the nationals. He made the nationals again when he, a film crew, a bunch of scantily-clad young ladies and several gallons of custard were forcibly evicted from a Manchester hotel one evening. Knowing the hotel in question, it was probably one of the more innocent pursuits going on there that night. 

Despite his long association with Splosh, it was comedy writing that was Clive’s true love. I suspect that it was this element of sploshing – surely the most comedic of fetishes – that actually appealed to him. He was extremely proud of the sketches sold to the Two Ronnies and the two (I think) humour books he had published in the 80s. I suspect, he would have loved to have done more of that. 

His bawdy, carousing image was partly one of his other characters, but it was one he had played so long and so well that it was sometimes hard to tell where Bill Shipton stopped and Clive Harris started. The real Clive was a diligent son, resigned to spending Christmas and birthdays with his aging parents and never missing out on his filial obligations – though subsequently recounting these inevitably teetotal occasions with more than a touch of the Alan Bennetts. 

His sense of obligation and his obvious genuine affection for his parents was heightened by the early death of his brother. This was a person that remained clearly hugely important to Clive throughout his life and who he would sometimes namecheck with a sense almost of guilt that it was he that had reached adulthood and not his sibling. Typically, it was a birthday visit to his parents that stopped him attending a reunion of the last generation of Mayfair boys in April 2012. Had I known it would have been a final chance to catch up with him, the date would definitely have been changed. The fact it wasn’t is was something I will long regret. 

Although we failed to meet on that occasion – and it must be 17 or 18 years since I last sat down for a pint with him – we talked more in the last 12 months than we had since he last put together early issues of Splosh in my then house in Kidderminster (92-95). Always via Facebook, we caught up a lot on some of the intervening years. He seemed happy with life in St Leonard’s, though I sensed he sometimes missed the wider landscape of his London days.

Health – his own and his parents – was a forcible preoccupation over the last year or so but – in his own case at least – it seemed that he’d come through the worst. Obviously, that was not the case. Clive made an impression on everyone who knew him. His unconventional looks, on/off showman personality and his genuine wit and humour made him impossible to ignore. This was a man who was never going to be in the background (except in Viz where he has appeared in its comic strips as the token pervert/porn vendor since 1989 when he first interviewed its creators). He had a very competitive wit, hating to be out-ad-libbed by anyone and, in truth, he seldom was. 

As we talked of his health scares on line of late, we even – little knowing its imminence – joked about his epitaph and immediately agreed on one. It’s cheeky, a bit corny, but memorable never the less – the perfect farewell for Mr Harris/Shipton. 

“Clive Harris 

1957-2013 
Messed in Peace"
 

“Can we get away with a fanny that big?”

Just to underline the fact that I don’t hate every publisher, I’ve ever worked for I thought I’d share a story from 20 years ago when a much-younger Tony Murray spent two years (1989-90) as photo editor of Mayfair. Back then Mayfair wasn’t the Paul Raymond-owned gash-fest it is now. It was owned, published and edited by Ken Bound, a former sub on the Daily Sketch.

It was Ken’s firm belief that Mayfair, far from being locked away in between tugs in a short-sighted man’s sock drawer, was actually the subject of lofty debate at the high tables of Oxford and Cambridge. Here, he believed, dons and visiting archbishops would frequently discuss the veracity of Mayfair’s World War I tales of derring-do and act with outrage should we mis-caption the wingspan of a Sopwith Cuckoo. The truth, I suspect, was very different.

Ken had a curious collection of aphorisms he used to apply to the subject of journalism – in particular The Three Things Which Don’t Sell magazines. On a quiet afternoon, looking for a little amusement, it was always tempting to insert an anecdote about dwarves into a piece of girl copy. Inevitably, Ken would turn up in the editorial office five minutes letter and say: “Tony, I have to tell you, there are Three Things That Don’t Sell Magazines. One is dwarves, another is barbed wire and the third is…well I forget the third.”

We never did find out the third.

It was a slightly surreal place, where you’d often find the editorial team clustered in the main office and looking up at a slide-projected image of that month’s proposed centrefold with Ken asking: “Well boys, can we get away with a fanny that big?”

My favourite story, though, perhaps took place at Christmas 1990 during the Mayfair party, which were always highly drunken affairs. We started at lunchtime in a wine bar in Holborn and, as this was the last Mayfair party (Ken having sold the mag to Paul Raymond for four million quid), we really went for it.

Sometime in the early evening we staggered back to the Mayfair office. Ken was particularly pissed and soon departed for his private flat on the top floor. The rest of us were left sitting in his office, where we soon spotted the only thing in the building left to drink – a hugely expensive bottle of champagne bought for Ken by the printers as a farewell gift. It took us all of five seconds to decide to drink it.

The next morning, hungover and very much the worse-for-wear, we trooped into the office. A slightly indignant Ken called us all together and said: “I’d just like to know who drank my bottle of Champagne last night…”
Quick as a flash, David Jeffs, the features editor, responded: “Eh, you did, Ken…”

And we got away with it.

The mendacious Mr Jeffs, by the way, is now an assistant editor on The People.