JNLister

is Insane Championship Wrestling in Scotland's "TV show" that isn't on TV. Think 1995 era ECW but utterly Scottish. The show I saw live in May is covered by the two most recent episodes (15 and 16) and pretty much has a bit of everything from comedy to death match to wonderfully overbooked run-ins to the title match being the big deal, with a bonus Prince Devitt match.

The Broadcasting Cable list is utterly wacky. Slamboree 95 actually did a 0.57 buyrate, which would be a couple of hundred thousand. WrestleMania in 1998 is nowhere to be seen in the list. What with WM7 being listed there, I suspect the real source is "claims by the promotion". Either that or Showtime Event Television (which was Showtime's PPV distribution right?) is extrapolating from its own numbers and they are so tiny as to make such extrapolation highly unreliable.

I was amazed by the "So what was the main event going to be if the Punk-Del Rio confrontation hadn't happened" line. It's a perfectly valid question in reality, but makes no sense in storyline when, I'd estimate, the majority of RAW episodes have main events set up during the show.

Apologies if this is obvious, but I always assumed they do that in soaps so that they've got a few seconds they can leave in/edit out to make sure the show hits its runtime.

Not officially still involved (worked there from 98-05). A fair bit of my writing is effectively rewriting existing stuff to make it clearer though, so I'm an unofficial campaigner!

Look forward to listening to this, but in the meantime thought I'd share that I spoke to Missy Hyatt for a piece on Heyman and she was very strong on the idea that a lot of his work of getting behind a young guy and trying to both help them develop and push them with management was a response to Eddie Gilbert doing the same for him when he started out. Oh, and to share that when I was a spokesman for a language campaign (pro clarity, anti jargon), I did a radio piece about the Atkinson faux pas. You would not believe how strong the warning was from the station that under no circumstances were we to actually say the word that the discussion was about!

Thought you'd appreciate this line from a bio I just did on Mike Marino:

Really enjoyed this edition, particularly the way it looked at so many different aspects of his work rather than just being a straight history of Canada piece. I should mention from my own perspective that FSM editor Brian Elliott has done some work with Slam Wrestling in the past and Greg's influence is very clear on the style and approach Brian looks for among his writers.

Just found this in a 1962 British wrestling program. Looks like Monsoon and Hayes weren't the first to start the public references.

Listening to a Mitchell/Keller show, they heard Feinstein didn't want to license the Kulas footage as although there shouldn't be any legal issue with doing so, he's gunshy after being sued by the Kulas family.

Just heard the guys who made the documentary plan to have it up for download on the main barbedwirecity.com site at some point for $12, which I assume means a bigger take for them overall.

Highspots (.com not .tv) has it for $15. The DVD extras appear to be:

What are the extras on the DVD? Are they worth an extra $10 over getting the download of the main feature?

What is he referring to exactly? Burning down arenas? Is he being literal? And the rest. . . The Sportatorium in Dallas burned down in 1953 in the middle of a promotional war.

DiBiase-Duggan tuxedo match is also on there. Looks like a hell of a set.

I've just started a "watch all the WrestleMania DVD extras I've not watched before" season. The goat is brought by Hillbilly Jim for Body Donnas-Godwinns on the WM12 pre-show. While I'm at it, the same show has Huckster-Nacho Man and the bored audience (extras, it's filmed in a studio) are all reading copies of The Sun, a British newspaper. Anyone know why?

I think the answer depends on how you interpret the question. For example: * Undertaker has the best consecutive run of matches. Aside from some people on here's view of last year's show, most ratings have him at least **** for the matches over the past six years (Batista, Edge, Michaels x 2, HHH x 2). * Michaels is arguably the best overall if you take into account the positions he was in. He's got the great matches with the good opponents, but also had decent matches in situations where his opponent wasn't so favorable. From his second year as a singles guy, you can make a case for him having match of the night on 11 out of 13 shows he's been on, the other two being against Vince where MOTN was bordering on impossible, and against Flair where even then you can argue it as most memorable match. * Savage is arguably the best if you look at each Mania as chapters in a story. With apologies to Crush, Savage at two through eight is a fantastic long-term story with Elizabeth. He dicks about using her as bait against George Steele, then the next year it backfires as Steele costs him the title. He wins the title tournament thanks to Liz getting Hogan's help, leading eventually to the split between the Megapowers and in turn between Savage and Liz. She gets a measure of revenge against him and his new woman at Mania 6, then saves him from Sherri and they reunite at 7, winding up with him saving her honor and getting the title back to boot at 8. Scary/weird/not obvious thing on Hogan is that after this week he'll have only wrestled at 37% of Manias.

On most boards I visit, a serious topic usually winds up with a string of weak visual puns. Here, the opposite appears to be the case ;-)

I'm flying up to Glasgow in May to visit a friend and go to an ICW doubleheader (womens promotion on Friday, main roster on Sunday.) Really looking forward to it.

I remember I was going to reply to this months ago but never did. YAY BUMPED THREADS. I believe that what the WWF did was promote the show in vague terms if there was only a single closed circuit location in a given TV market with the intention of misleading people into thinking it was a live show. At least that was what those Observers said, I don't think I've ever seen any of those ads. I told the Dallas(?) story somewhere else on this board once. I believe it was a 40" TV (for screen height, a modern 50" TV would be the closest comparable size). Just dug the issue out (well, dug it out on Saturday then spent three days trying to overcome the CAPTCHAs here to reset my password.) Sound like the advertising was a bit vague as some people genuinely believed WrestleMania was going to be in the Fair Park Coliseum in Dallas. As well as only being a single 45 inch TV (WWF had said they'd provide four), the sound was unintelligible for most of the show. They sold 1,500 tickets but had to refund 400 people. It was only $10.25 though.

"OK, I'm interested in writing for you. I've done a 13 part series for HBO, so I think I could write some compelling storylines for you and make great TV drama. How does production work?" "Well, our main show is three hours, plus we have a secondary two hour show that's sorta part of the story, plus another 2 1/2 hours of spin-off shows featuring the lesser characters. We air a new episode every week, all year round. We start writing at most five days before broadcast and finish writing on the day of broadcast. Occasionally we rewrite as the show is airing. We use athletes and bodybuilders rather than actors and we hand them the script on the day of broadcast. We don't do rehearsals. A lot of the stuff we film before an audience and broadcast live, so it has to be done first take. We have this weird deal where some of the characters are aware they are in a television show, but in some of the scenes set 'backstage' the characters don't always seem aware they are being filmed and their actions broadcast on live TV, though we do show it to the live studio audience and pipe in their reactions. Absolutely any storyline you write can and will be thrown out or completely altered by your boss depending on his mood. Oh, and for every fifth episode or so we charge the fans $55 to watch."

If nobody else has got it to hand, I'll try to upload it tomorrow.

If he'd lived, the publicity wouldn't necessarily have been worse, but it would have been longer. Instead of a couple of months before it faded away (save for a little bit of coverage during the Senate hearings), you'd have had the media circus of the trial including whatever revelations it brought out and possibly some WWE names getting called to testify. I don't know how such decisions are made in Georgia, but presumably the death penalty could also have been on the cards, in which case you're talking years of publicity, especially if mental disorder is cited as a defense.

Researching for a recent interview I did with Jones for FSM I came to the conclusion that although he's probably not the best wrestler of the World of Sport era, he's probably the guy who had good/great matches with the widest range of opponents. Incidentally, as best I can tell Jones-Rocco was the pairing with the most matches on ITV.