by BillShipton » 15 Apr 2013, 14:40
My doctor's appointment has been cancelled as his MRI machine has broken down! And that's before it scans my custard-abused brain (it's supposedly routine but...). So to Paul, Carl, Steve et al.
Yes, Paul's legal representative really was named Snitcher and as he is alive and wealthy I can't possibly comment on him as a person. Probably equally true of Mr Bleach, who was Editor-in-Chief of all Paul Raymond's titles after originally editing Club International (for which I wrote a number of 'funny' columns including mock restaurant reviewer, Nataniel Fatbastard, which ran for five years!). It was under Mr Bleach that I wrote most of Razzle (under the excellent editorship of Rob Swift) and a lot of Club by doing day shifts at Paul Raymond, first in Brewer St (above the Revue Bar changing room!) then in Archer St, for a number of years. I was then unceremoniously sacked by him for something I said or wrote (I don't remember what, but it meant I got to watch all of Euro 96!). However I suspect that it was really an excuse to get rid of me as by that time the mags were largely run by accountants and even on a day shift basis I was more expensive than getting a couple of inexperienced youngsters in, which they subsequently did - and Razzle stopped being funny overnight!
Paul was VERY much motivated by money, especially towards the end. At a Christmas do, he famously told me when I asked about his days as a mind-reading act: "We were bloody terrible - thank God. If we'd been even slightly good, we might have carried on. Instead, I gave up and decided there was more money in buying the theatre!" So he bought the Whitehall Theatre (famous for its Brian Rix farces) and installed Fiona Richmond cavorting in a tank of water instead! In those days I think he enjoyed the whole soft porn lifestyle, and, of course, set up some of the best known mag titles in the business - Men Only, Escort, Club International, Razzle etc. But just like mind reading, he soon realised it was buying up property in Soho that made the most money so concentrated on that business and left most of the magazine running to its editors - though he still had very firm views on what worked and what didn't. Unlike the old Mayfair (where I learned my 'craft'), there had to be tits on every spread and he would go through the mags page by page with the editors, especially if their circulation was dropping. And definitely no jokes about nuns! You could say what you liked about celebs (and in Club in particular we delighted in being 'irreverent' - on one occasion publishing a picture of Jeremy Beadle to 'put on your wall and punch')) but Paul's Catholic upbringing very definitely meant that anything about priests or the Pope was out! One of the few subjects where pompous old Mayfair was more liberal than Razzle!
Incidentally, Paul never liked Razzle. He didn't get slapstick at all. He liked conventional rude-as-possible nudity. But he could see that Razzle made money so all the time it sold well and cost bugger all to produce, he put up with the custard fights and terrible jokes. However by the mid 90s, following the death of his daughter - the only one of his children interested in the mag business - he left the publishing side to the accountants. I could tell my days were numbered! By the end of my time, practically all the mags were designed by the same guy and written in-house by the same youngsters, so unsurprisingly they looked and read identically. Worse still, they competed with each other! Whilst I admired Paul Raymond's 'astuteness' I never did understand how he couldn't see that if he made the mags all alike, then if Men Only did well one month, Club's sales would go down. He didn't understand niche marketing at all! Tits and more tits was all they wanted in his view (and no custard!). When he bought Mayfair, he did the same with that and destroyed it (in my view).
Sorry, that wasn't very funny so let's end on one thing that stayed with PR to the end - his hairstyle! He persisted with a dyed orange curly mullet, carefully combed over at the front, till his death. In the wind, the top would flip open like a pedal bin or a toilet seat with a fluffy cover!
In the main they were happy days.
of dear Paul, Bill?
