Viv Graham was five foot ten and built like a bodybuilder, but what made him dangerous was his speed. His hands were unnaturally fast, and one punch was usually enough. In the late 1980s he worked the doors of Newcastle, and became known as the man who had taken on a shotgun and won. This film follows the city's doors from pub fights to shootings, ending with Graham's own unsolved murder.
Santini's
It started in a pub in the Bigg Market, when Graham's fellow doorman Robert Bell stepped into an argument between a man and two women. Bell was headbutted, and drove the man out of the pub with a barrage of punches. According to later court evidence, the man went home and came back armed.
Hours later Graham was sitting with Bell and others in Santini's restaurant when two men walked in with stockings over their faces. The shotgun came up and pointed at Bell. Graham grabbed the barrel, ripped the weapon free and smashed it against the wall. The fight spilled into the alley behind the restaurant, where Bell was stabbed repeatedly in the chest and torso. Graham threw a single punch that broke the attacker's jaw, then turned back to Bell and kept him conscious until help came. Bell survived, but only just.
A small city with big families
What happened that night was not unusual in Newcastle in the late 1980s. The city was small but volatile, and the West End and East End each had families with reputations and ambitions: the film names the Harrisons, the Conroys and the Sayers. Doormen were enforcers, mediators and targets, paid to hold the line against crews pushing into pubs and clubs. After Santini's, Graham was no longer just a doorman from a small village outside Newcastle, and that kind of reputation, the film says, does not protect you. It marks you.
Manhattan's, May 1989
In the early hours, Graham and his business partner Rob Armstrong pulled up outside Manhattan's nightclub to check the door. They had been followed. A gunman in a waiting Nissan fired a shotgun through the car's own rear windscreen. Graham had his back turned; Armstrong saw it and shoved him aside, taking the pellets himself. A passer-by was also hit. No one was caught. Armstrong recovered, and Graham called the gunman a coward. The word on the street was that the shooter had been barred from another venue and, high on drugs, had decided to settle the score.
Graham was not always the good guy. A couple of weeks later, at Baxter's bar, according to later court evidence, he punched a drunken customer who had been causing trouble and threw him out. When the man approached him outside, Graham knocked him down, and he cracked his skull on the pavement. He survived after life-saving surgery but was never the same again. Graham was convicted of grievous bodily harm and given an 18-month suspended sentence.
Other doors, other guns
Howard Mills, a tough Yorkshire fighter who had once fought for the British middleweight title, was working the doors in Newcastle by the mid-1980s. In 1987 he was stabbed three times while stepping into a brawl at Bentley's bar. No one was charged with the stabbing. Two years later, after a shift outside Hanrahan's nightclub, a masked gunman shot him in the legs, and Mills lost a leg. Again, no one was caught. The film's view is that these attacks were less coordinated than people said at the time: often they grew out of clashes with bigger doormen who could not be beaten in a straight fight.
Hobo's, September 1989
At Hobo's nightclub the door was run by Stuart Watson, 29, from Gateshead, a no-nonsense doorman who enforced the owners' wishes to the letter. That upset many local gang members, and a member of the Sayers family had been refused entry. In the early hours Viv Graham arrived with a group. Watson was called down, words were exchanged, and he was attacked.
In an interview clip, Watson describes being left alone as the other doormen fled, and holding on to a spiral staircase while blows came in. "He could fight but he wasn't a villain," Watson says. After stitches, he was back at work by the Tuesday.
Six men were charged. In 1990 five accepted lesser charges of unlawful wounding. Watson refused to give evidence. Graham received three years, which included the rest of his earlier sentence. When he came out he reclaimed his place on the doors, and he and Watson settled their differences.
Wallsend, New Year's Eve 1993
During this period, the film says, Graham seems to have upset some sinister figures. His partner, Anna, would later describe threatening calls in the run-up to his death. On New Year's Eve 1993 he walked away from a pub on Wallsend High Street towards his car. A gunman came up from behind and fired three shots at close range. Badly wounded, Graham dragged himself around 30 yards before fellow doorman Terry Scott found him. At North Tyneside General Hospital he was given around 30 pints of blood. It was not enough. He was 34.
More than a thousand people were interviewed and a £100,000 reward was offered. No one has ever been convicted, and the killing of Viv Graham remains one of the North East's most high-profile unsolved murders.