WCXX

I'm thinking, for example, of our response to the news that Prince Harry had attended a fancy-dress party in a Nazi uniform. We decided to find out what was the most outrageous fancy-dress costume you could wear in public without getting beaten up. The resulting article featured a photo of a white Zoo reporter posing, in black-face, at the door of a nightclub – with a black bouncer. (Our reporter didn't get beaten up. I have no idea why.)

I'm thinking also of how we hired Mo Mowlam, former secretary of state for Northern Ireland, as our agony aunt ("Mo's sex question time"). Nothing wrong with that in itself – she was happy to do it. It's just that she would file 10 issues' worth of columns at a time. And when she died, in 2005, we were only two columns into the latest batch. On reflection, the right thing to do at this point would have been to stop publishing them. Rather than, as we did, keep publishing them, giving the impression that a much-loved Cabinet minister was issuing sex tips from beyond the grave.

We weren't trying to be offensive. Offensiveness just seemed to… happen. Such as when we prepared a lucky dip of jocularly macho questions, from which celebrity interviewees were to draw. First up, England goalkeeper David James. Question one: had he ever seen a dead body?

Answer: yes. He'd been in a car accident that had killed an elderly woman. Her husband had died of his injuries four months later. Oh.

In the spirit of satire, we sent Tommy Walsh, co-host of BBC garden makeover series Ground Force, to Athens to report on delays in the renovation of the Olympic stadium. He got arrested for taking photos of it.

When a group of students decided to set a record for the greatest number of naked people riding a roller coaster, I was sent to take part. Five years later – without my knowledge – the resulting photo appeared on a greetings card. There I am, eyes screwed shut, not because I'm ashamed of my nudity, but because I'm terrified of roller coasters. The card is still on sale. That's a warning, by the way, not a recommendation.

I promise: we weren't bad people. We were just the wrong people. Lads' mags aren't staffed by lads. They're staffed by middle-class graduates, some from Oxbridge, struggling to guess what will appeal to a 17-year-old squaddie from Solihull. And getting it wrong, again and again. It took us six months to work out that young men liked cars.

I found the job stressful, and didn't always handle the stress well. The breaking point came one night while trying to calculate, for a cover feature, the market value of a particular model's 32F breasts had they been made of gold. In delirium I snatched up the objects closest to hand and flung them at the wall.

These happened to be a bottle of baby oil and a novelty penis measurer designed to resemble the head of a cockerel. At Zoo, even in the throes of psychological meltdown you couldn't avoid looking ridiculous.

But do I agree with the campaign to ban lads' mags? No. I'll leave aside arguments about censorship and move straight to the sales figures. Today, Zoo sells 35,596 copies of each issue. When I was there, it was 200,000. In 1999, one issue of FHM sold more than a million. Today, the circulation is 106,370. There's no point banning something people hardly buy. If campaigners are concerned about the young, they should try banning the two things that do distort their attitudes to sex: 1) the internet, and 2) camera phones.

I wish them well in their efforts.