Owt Good On, Mam? – Rude Videos

For anyone who grew up in the pre-internet days, there were few forbidden thrills like that of the rude cartoon. Have you seen Fritz the Cat?! He takes it out! The Magic Roundabout were all on drugs! If either literally or just mentally of school age, the novelty of swears and mucky behaviour in a children's medium is a magical combination, which is why the famed 'rude Rainbow' clip persists, and why South Park became so big so fast. Historically, one of the most notable is infamous underground comic Air Pirates, whose parody strip had Mickey and chums indulging in drug-fuelled orgies, over which Disney immediately sued. But a lesser-known lawsuit came in 1992, when Russell Church, publisher of Zit magazine, sued Spit magazine, for attempting to pass itself off as the former. Church lost, getting saddled with £32,000 in legal fees, and soon after was back in court, being sued by Anne Diamond after printing a joke about her child's recent cot death.

The absolute bare-faced cheek of that first lawsuit is breathtaking, considering Zit was an unapologetic (and infinitely lower quality) imitation of Viz. In recent years, Viz has rightly been re-evaluated as one of our nation's foundational texts, an institution of filth, silliness and classic British pathos. As such, it spawned a cottage industry of dreadful imposters, with Zit at the front of a very long, very stinky queue. An appalling low-rent copy, Zit's roster of strips included Bad Beth the Smelly Student (“she's fuckin' rancid”), Brian Damage, Peter Pooh Eater, Postman Pot (starring Shaun Ryder), and the honestly-pretty-funny-title Brookside's Ron Dixon and his Unfathomable Obsession for Excrement. Revelling solely in scatological shock with none of Viz's humour, covers bragged 'The Comic That Puts a Shine on Your Bell-End,' with written features like 'Are You A Fucking Poof Or What?' To emulate Viz even further, after characters like Roger Melly and the Fat Slags made their way onto Channel 4 in animated form, in 1993, Zit released their own cartoon on VHS.

Mercifully, Zit the Video is a scant 33 minutes, including plenty of padding, with lengthy, looping title sequences for each segment. It's so poorly drawn, its logo is unreadable, and the opening blurb warns off squares and softies for what's coming. “Close the curtains, blindfold the budgie and send Grandma to the shops, Zit the Video is here! After three years of hilarious on-page lunacy all your favourite Zit characters are now right here between the plastics in their very own pucker video.” First sketch presents their case fully, with Sam and Ella's Motorway Snack Bar; their names a massively overused pun in the wake of Edwina Curry's egg scandal. And we're straight in; a rabbit run over into mush, scraped into a bucket and tipped onto the grill, which a trucker eats then vomits over the screen, spilling a payload of nuclear waste and mutating Sam and Ella into having two heads and about twenty tits.

This thing is barely animated, mouths going up and down if you're lucky, and often moving when nobody's speaking. By some distance, the worst artwork to ever be professionally released, Zit's animation was produced on an Amiga, using Photon Paint. And with a mouse by the look of it. It does nail down the precise feel of the comics me and my pals were making in junior school, down to the same big eyes/noses/overbites style which was popular at the time, all knobbly knees and elbows. Incredibly, the voice acting may be of lower quality than the art, audio either blown out or muffled, with maybe a third of dialogue audible under the music. Often, you can hear the reverb of the small room it was recorded in, even when characters are outside. The music is both loud and repetitive, comprised of recognisable melodies with a couple of notes switched, and plonked out on a Casio keyboard, all of which is fitting for an adaptation of what's essentially a fanzine, but I doubt they sought to ape that by being deliberately shit.

Skits run a few minutes apiece; The Man Who Collects Eyeballs (hits people on the back of a head with a hammer, catches their eyes in a jar), Lamb Brusco the Alcoholic Sheep (keeps messing up suicide attempts), and Frank the Filthy Flower, “he's very rude indeed” (a potted plant who tells old ladies to fuck off, turning to camera at the end to bid us “and you can fuck off too!”) Longest are Acid Head Arnie, a droopy-lidded raver trying to pull in a club, which has more vomiting, and Dave Beef. The one bit that almost works for me, Beef follows a joke format I'm fond of; the pushing of a small idea all the way to its logical conclusion. Beef's a brutish wannabe doorman, taking it upon himself to bounce outside of shops, not letting customers in without a bow tie, etc. Then he's launching his own wardrobe out of the bedroom window because “I said no jeans,” causing his wife to cut his nose off with a pair of shears, and accidentally starting a fire in his house. As his children cry for help from an upstairs window, he refuses the firemen entry as they're not in the right shoes, and it ends with him letting a burglar in to nick his telly, as they are wearing a tie.

After Billy No Mates gets pissed on by a dog, the tape ends with an ad for the comic, “available in all good newsagents and a lot of shit ones as well!” Credits are topped by a 'Storys [sic] Produced for Zit Ltd by' for Ged Backland, who'd go onto head Hallmark's 'humour division' and create the bafflingly popular Auntie Acid webcomic and range of tat, which has 11m followers on Facebook, for its comical wisdom from a drawing of an old Scouse lady – “I've just discovered the world doesn't revolve around me. I'm shocked and upset!” He could buy us all twenty times over. A few years after this, Zit director Keith Bateman was one of the architects of the alien autopsy hoax, and along with Gary Shoefield, producer of Michaela Strachan's Birthday Video, the Roswell lads were propping up the straight-to-VHS novelty market.

From Zit we move to something far more mainstream, filling the shelves of the nation's bookshops. The Wicked Willie series was a range of humorous cartoons based around the observations of a talking penis, playing up the cliché that men are beholden to the whims of their bell. Legitimate best sellers, they can be categorised as 80's saucy stocking fillers; like 'rude' card games and wind-up dicks in seaside arcades. Conservatives always harp on about our delicate minds being warped by porn, but if anything, people back then were warped by the lack of instantly available grot; brains addled into thinking stuff like this was naughty and thus worthwhile. Back when it was illegal to show it going in and out, starved of proper sexual content, Wicked Willie was your only recourse. For a brief period, Willie was our Mickey Mouse, and when a schoolfriend owed me a quid, instead of paying it back, he swore to bring a stuffed Willie back from a Spanish holiday, teasing me in the weeks leading up with cries of “Wicked Wiiii-llie!” Had he kept his promise, it would've gone on to join what I assume were multitude Willies crammed into charity shops, occupying the space taken up today by the tomes of Clarkson and Moyles. (Another pair of talking dicks, right readers?! (that's enough – Ed))

As you might expect from such a layered concept as 'a nob what speaks', Willie was co-created by two men. One is its illustrator Gray Jolliffe – a man you've never heard of – the other is Peter Mayle, Willie's writer. Mayle's much better known as the author and subject of A Year in Provence, the memoir adapted as both a TV series and film, with Mayle respectively played by John Thaw and Russell Crowe. We're crying out for a sequel where Crowe gets rich inventing a talking dick. “Are you not entertained... by this little penis in a bow tie?!” But I'm afraid I've read this quote regarding Willie's conception, so now you have to too. “Jolliffe has said that the idea for Wicked Willie came to him one day while he was in the bath.” Just say you were fiddling with yourself and be done with it.

Willie span off into multiple animated videos, the first of which was 1987's Hello Willie. Directing duties fell to Bob Godfrey, whose work straddled the camps of children's shows like Roobarb and Custard, and comically mucky stuff about blow-up dolls with massive nipples, or the Academy Award nominated short Kama Sutra Rides Again, which was shown in UK cinemas as the lead-in to A Clockwork Orange. Willie's art style showcases both too much effort and not enough, utilising Godfrey's trademark gappy lines, as seen in Henry's Cat, but filled in with watercolour, leaving the audience aware some poor sod was leant over all day with a paintbrush, colouring a horrid smug-faced penis. All the characters have massive noses and exactly the same face, only differentiated by the woman having long hair and their boobs out. The titular Willie doesn't have a scrotal sack, so was his owner born with Anorchia, or surgically castrated? Either way, why does he worry about getting ladies pregnant? (“Vasectomy is never having to say oops!”) What Willie does have are horrible tufts of pubic hair at the base, though they've not gone so far to give him a glans; all-foreskin all the time, suggesting he suffers from chronic phimosis.

Wacky circus type music over a title credit for 'BEST OF BRITISH CARTOONS presents', as a cartoon penis gets closer to the screen. You heard it – this is the best, as a nation, that we have to offer. Willie's voiced, like many things, by Enn Reitel, finally giving an answer to the perennial question 'what would a penis sound like?' – a bit like Michael Caine. The human he's attached to is played by Andrew 'Sweaty/Cacky Raphael' Burt aka the original Jack Sugden off Emmerdale, with female voices by Kate Robbins and Susie Blake. Boycie off Only Fools did one of the later videos – “Marleeeene! A bleedin' dick's talking at me!”

What we have is a series of vignettes, with a framing device of Willie doing a stand-up routine. The content is that battle of the sexes observational comedy which outs the writer as a bit of a pig, trading off hoary old stereotypes like “For women, going shopping is a big part of foreplay,” and “Women get headaches when they don't want sex, men get headaches when they don't get sex!” We like footie, they like dresses, and we only pretend to listen while they witter on cos we wanna see their honkers! When one of the un-named man's conquests starts talking marriage and kids, Willie's packing a little suitcase and making his escape. He uses the pronoun 'we' when describing himself and the man whose groin he lives on, adding to the vibe of a schoolyard Tom Hardy Venom film.

Willie's origin – indeed the origin of all willies – occurs in the Garden of Eden, where an Attenborough voice posits the real bad guy is “a different kind of snake, the trouser snake.” God sends him a topless lady, who's less interested in the apple than she is Willie, about to put it in her mouth, before a cut to a pissed off God. From a technical standpoint, this is the biggest disaster I've ever sat through, with almost no dialogue fitting the mouth movements. Maybe the file was out of sync, but then all the sound effects (like honks when breasts are squeezed) are fine? Either way, it's never clear who's meant to be speaking. Voices either chatter from immobile faces, or mouths move to no sound; or over that of the narrator, giving female characters a gruff male voice. Audio often trails from one scene into the next, adding to an already discombobulating watch; who's saying this, the talking penis, or is the talking penis's voice coming out of that naked woman's mouth?

Everything's just so manky. The unending pink of flesh, the little pubes. Occasionally (when depressed or tired) the flaccid cock will lay across the man's thighs with a downcast expression. It's an mp4 of an old cartoon, but somehow I can smell it. In a scene when he stands next to a ruler, it's confirmed that Willie is six and a half inches, but at times he seems about three feet long. In a holiday section, 'Willie's Away', it's a shame they don't show what a sentient penis puts in his little suitcase. On the plane, Willie orders the man to squeeze a stewardess's bottom, and they're thrown off mid-flight, with Willie having his own parachute. The guy's clearly a massive pest, always with his cock hanging out. Fair enough, when it starts coughing at the doctors, that's a normal place to expose your length, but when it leans forwards to kiss the hand of a duchess, not so much.

His very nature asks a lot of questions. What happens when the man goes to the toilet? Mercifully, we're not shown Willie vomiting up wee or cum. Is this a world where all nobs and fannies are alive? Is Willie really self-aware, or is it all in the man's head? If imagined, the truth of every scene is even worse. In one section, a bored Willie leans on the windowsill gazing out at the rain. But if he's a Tyler Durden, any passers-by will look up to see some bloke sticking his cock out of the window. Similarly, when Willie peeks through the letterbox of a door labelled MANAGING DIRECTOR at a secretary's arse, the reality of what's happening is far more sinister. And when a grandad's Willie blows out the candles on a birthday cake, one's heart bleeds for what must be happening behind the frame; distraught family accepting there's no option but to put him in a home.

A section about star signs is one giant missed opportunity for a Russell Grant cameo with his own talking winkle. Matching jumper, very curly pubes; it could've been gold! Something which really speaks of the era is the inclusion of an ecological section, 'Willie Goes Green,' where we're lectured on global warming and acid rain by a horrible speaking dick. Although according to this, the biggest danger of the latter is it melting the leaves off a model dressed as Eve, exposing her fanny and tits. “If that's acid rain,” says Willie holding an umbrella, “let's have a downpour!” Always something so dejecting about these late-80's eco warnings to change things now, so the world won't be uninhabitable, watched forty years later when all the big corporations just decided fuck it.

Though it's some consolation to know that when the fires and floods come, all remaining copies of Hello Willie will be destroyed. Never again will anyone have to see a ghastly little penis in a hot dog bun, or with a condom put upon his head like Scrooge's sleep hat. A fat movie producer offers a big-breasted aspiring actress “a small part” as his own Willie pops up to give her a scare; a flashback has a topless woman ask “what on Earth are you doing?!” as the inexperienced man furiously licks a cat. You really feel for grown-ups of the eighties, that this was intended as a saucy video couples sat down and watched together when the kids had gone to their grandparents. It's also a prime example of the twee way sex was reduced to 'bonking with our dangly bits!!', referred to here as “the horizontal cha-cha-cha” and “hide the salami,” and with an earnest use of the phrase “a twinkle in his winkle.”

Aside from Mayle, the biggest names involved are the composers behind the synth sax-heavy soundtrack; a jingle writer who penned “only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate...” and the iconic KwikFit Fitters song, and Dave Arch, now musical director for Strictly. Also among the credits, additional material by Ashley Sidaway, who a decade later would co-write the film Rainbow, which centres on four children and a dog taking a magical journey on a rainbow, directed by – and I promise I'm not lying, look it up yourselves – Bob Hoskins. A movie, incidentally, which Sidaway wrote with his father, Robert, producer of Hello Willie. Imagine having to have meetings with your dad about a cartoon nob

Capping off the rough 'ages of man' story, Willie shows his now-elderly owner a picture of a topless lady, triggering a fatal heart attack. At the graveside, Willie pops up in a pram, saying (over the goo goos of a baby) “thank God for reincarnation, wonder who this is?” before the very distressing onscreen threat 'to be continued...' And continue it would, with many more books, and a wide range of merchandise, including a fruit machine where you could 'hold your willies', and a board game, essentially a cock-based Game of Life, where the goal was to “make hay while the sun shines during adolescence and middle age,” I suppose before erectile dysfunction hits, complete with the Jail mechanic from Monopoly, here renamed The Clinic. 1987 even saw a vinyl release, titled Record Size Willie. You what?! 7-Inch Willie was right there! Seeming to be a record of rude jokes, the track listing consists of 'An Evening with Wicked Willie and Friends'. Like who, an anus and perineum?

Though the official Willie website is now defunct, a DVD titled The Complete Willie was released as recently as 2010. Notable here is the frightening amount of special features, which include a 'Where's Willie?' game and trivia quiz about penises and semen, a guide (drawn by Joliffe) from Dr. Willie on how to examine your testicles for lumps, and 'Willie on the Street,' described as “a series of interviews with people on the street asking if they recognise Willie and if they have any embarrassing willie experiences.” The disc also claimed to contain five t-shirts, but these were just pictures viewers were expected to get on a shirt themselves. “Hello, is that Snappy Snaps? Yes I've an image here of a watercolour penis I need to get on a hoodie. Can you make this happen? By the way, it's 2010.”