JNLister

I've never seen Southside, but heard good reports from them. From what I can tell they are one of the relatively rare groups that aren't based around a training school and don't really have their own roster as such. Instead they use a variety of guys from around the country. Do you mean the Channel 4 thing that was just five minutes of spots of the two guys in an empty building to a techno soundrack? That was Kid Fite and Davey Blaze who are both based in Scotland. It wasn't at an actual show, but was filmed for an art film of some kind.

Hogan built the house; Austin turned it into a hugely profitable brothel until it got closed down? The inclusion of Orton to please the publishers/modern fans would be fine if the entire premise of the book and the thrust of a lengthy intro wasn't that WWE produced a top 50 list that was chosen for marketing reasons.

I actually grew up in Stevenage and became a wrestling fan there. WWF was huge among kids because the local government ran a subsidy scheme for cable TV, so you got cable (with a whopping three extra channels including Sky) for five years for a total of $175. Thinking back to being a 13 year old fan there, it's absolutely mindblowing to think that 20+ years later Ted DiBiase would turn up there.

That's not just a Keithism -- it was the basis of Rude's testimony in the steroid trial. However, he couldn't say Vince had explicitly told him he had to stay on steroids, just heavily implied it.

Nope that's it, but it was only added relatively recently IIRC.

24/7 is on demand right? Sky (satellite) only recently added on demand capabilities -- before that, only Virgin (cable) could do it and I assume WWE wouldn't want to upse Sky by giving Virgin an exclusive.

It's all the same stuff - TWC licensed a set amount of footage with the rights to unlimited repeats until the deal ended. They passed it on to Men and Movies and they continued until the end of last year when the contract ran out. At the moment nobody is airing it (other than the odd 30 minute show on ESPN), but a company trading as World of Sport TV has some rights and will be releasing stuff on iTunes. Footage wise, ITV Sport appears to have almost everything from 74 onwards, some but not all stuff from 72-4, and a couple of shows from 1970. We're not 100% sure, but it looks like what they have is everything that was recorded (on tape) rather than broadcast live. The archive of this stuff was a complete mess -- I saw the "listings" when I was selecting matches for the first run on TWC shows and its just a list of matches in no particular order and with no venue/date details. By the last few batches of TWC shows, I suspect somebody at ITV was just picking tapes out of a box at random. As mentioned on the Timeshift/McManus-Pallo thread here, there's a collection of 50s/60s film, but there's a huge fee just to cue it up and work out what's on it, let alone get a copy made. To address the main point, there should be slightly more 80s ITV stuff than 70s. If you throw in Relso, Screensport and continental Europe, you should get more from the 80s -- I'm not aware of any European stuff of note from the 70s that isn't ITV.

It happened in rugby. It was mainly blood capsules, but in one case the team doctor bladed a player. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodgate

If you don't mind a standalone program, I like Direct YouTube Downloader (http://www.majorshare.com/direct-youtube-downloader/) which lets you pick a format and have it automatically download and convert. You need to cut and paste the YouTube page address though.

I've heard the ring rats/driver license story before, but it was for US masked guys in the territory days and was "hardcore fans" rather than Meltzer specifically.

It's very hard to criticise Rey's 619 once you've seen anyone else perform it.

Here's a YouTube playlist of documentaries and matches we mention in the show:

It's on Youtube (without regional restrictions) now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nar7mAkZL0Q. Highly recommended.

It turns out they charge the equivalent of $1,000 to go into their library and cue up the films to see what is on them, then $350 to get a copy of one show's film -- that's just to have a personal copy and you get no rights to reproduce or distribute it.

If the non-Brits can find a proxy server or similar workaround, the show is now online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p9...s_and_Grannies/

I'd say Mistico is probably one of the very few guys who was arguably a Hall of Fame contender before they became eligible but may well not get in by the time they reach that point just because he could well be seen as a flop in WWE long-term.

50s and 60s looks to have been either live or broadcast as live on same-day (with the final match sometimes being left mid-flow), so in theory the stuff should be in full. As best I can infer, the stuff that was recorded for airing on later days is the stuff that ITV Sport still has available and has licensed for the two DVD compilations, ESPN Classic and the Wrestling Channel (and associated channels.)

Latest story is that Yorkshire TV (one of the old ITV network stations) has about 300 film canisters of 50s/60s British wrestling, but none of it is labelled so converting it would be a very expensive pot luck game.

BBC says not unfortunately. http://www.wrestlingheritage.co.uk/WEBPROT...eotherside1.htm The show was put together by Jarvis Astaire who looked to have been trying to set himself up in the wrestling business through the TV exposure. He wound up owning Joint Promotions for a brief while in the 70s.

The original 1930s/40s run was Emil Voit who was a former British Olympian in amateur wrestling. When they showed a couple of broadcasts in 1965 (from independent shows) they had Eddie Wareing doing it. Apparently some of the guys in the business were pretty unhappy with him because he used the same "oh he'll be ok, that won't hurt at all" schtick from his rugby commentary, which doesn't really help when you're trying to sell. Also turns out Reg Gutteridge did the commentary when they closed-circuited a Royal Albert Hall show in cinemas in 1966.

Don't know for sure but I'd be absolutely amazed if they did.

It sounds like they got the tape from a private collector who bought the original film from ITV -- apparently a few people have it, but they've always asked silly money when putting it up on eBay and the like. ITV do still have a lot of stuff on original film (rather than the tape library they've licensed to The Wrestling Channel) but you have to pay the equivalent of a few hundred bucks for a film and you won't know what it is until you get it!

Not sure at this stage. I have heard claims from people that "somebody" had a copy on film but never put much stock in them. As far as I've been able to tell, the only stuff that is still in the TV archive is from when they recorded it for later broadcast: the availability pretty much fits with the switch from live to recorded showings. It's clearly too early for this to be on home video tape. I have seen the odd vintage piece from people pointing a film camera at their TV set, but that's highly unlikely to have been full length recordings.

Stunning news from www.wrestlingheritage.co.uk No word yet on if or how the full match video will emerge.

This is nothing whatsoever to do with Ali-Inoki, but the Observer covering WrestleMania 1 had some great closed circuit stories. One venue had people raging because they somehow thought the event was taking place live in the arena, not on TV. Memphis was cancelled because they sold something like 13 advance tickets. And in one venue -- I think Dallas -- the showing was in a large arena but people turned up to find it was just four large (by 1985 standards) domestic TV sets arranged in a square in the middle of the floor.