Phil Lions

I think it was probably original unaired matches, but hard to say for sure without knowing exactly what matches aired each week. There was definitely commentary. Sometimes the TV listings would mention the commentator. In the case of Monaco in 1955 there's three names mentioned and off the top of my head I don't recognize either one of them as someone who did catch commentary for French TV (although I could be wrong about that) so it seems it was a different commentary crew altogether. Again, I'm not sure about that. By that I mean I don't know if RTF taped the footage and then sold it or if TMC worked out a deal to come in and shoot it themselves. My best guess is the former, but I'm just guessing.

Not sure about the first part. It definitely wasn't the footage from the news.

France. Now some of this is an educated conjecture on my part, but based on everything I've read I believe this is how things worked and France was the sole source. The catch footage that aired in France was only a portion of what was actually filmed and most of the footage was airing outside of France in countries where catch was broadcast on TV on a much more regular basis compared to France (i.e. Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco).

I've updated the original post a little bit with some new research regarding Monaco. So here's a couple of fun stats: Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1954: 2 or 3 Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1955: 9 or 10 Catch TV broadcasts in Monaco in 1955: 30 In short, Monaco was the first place to start broadcasting French catch on a pretty regular basis. It wasn't until 1957 that France would start doing a similar number of broadcasts per year, and overall only a handful of years in the history of catch on French TV would reach those kinds of numbers.

Roland Bock has passed away, at the age of 81.

Yeah, I sent that to Bob. 🙂 Valencia, 1951. In 1951 Gilbert Leduc (c) vs. Rene Ben Chemoul matches for the (FFL) World Welterweight Title took place in France, Spain, Germany, Morocco and possibly elsewhere too. The year prior Leduc had become the first Frenchman to win a catch World Title in France and by the looks of it Goldstein was using his influence to get Leduc featured as World champion in as many places as possible. That wasn't Quasimodo (Victor Castilla). That was Eduardo Castillo, who was actually a bigger star than Victor Castilla in Spain. Yep, Salvador Font. Also notice Cabeza de Hierro (Jose Tarres) in the semi-main.

^ That's Vic Hessle vs. Paul Leteurtrois. October 15, 1948, at Cirque d'Hiver. More footage from the same match:

The Spanish wrestlers' union was linked to the artists/entertainment union (Sindicato Nacional de Espectaculo) and it had somewhere between 30 to 70 members. The wording in the article that I found about its formation in October 1969 is a bit vague. "About thirty professionals out of the seventy in Spain attended the meeting, but it is necessary to clarify that the absences were equally represented in the letters of support that those not present sent to their colleagues." One of the main issues they wanted to fight against was the Spanish promoters hiring too many foreign wrestlers, thus limiting the work for the Spanish wrestlers. One of the big talking points in press around the formation of the union was how the Spanish wrestlers beat the Spanish footballers to the punch since recently there had been a lot of talk of the football players unionizing too.

There was the odd show here and there after that too, but more or less yes - you could say that 1986 was the end of the "lucha libre americana" era in Spain since that's when the last notable Spanish promotion closed shop. Although funnily enough, when WWF came to Spanish TV and the "Pressing Catch" branding was introduced, in the TV listings they'd still make sure to list it as "lucha libre americana" too since that was the most common name for pro wrestling in Spain up to that point. This is from September 1990:

Yes. Quasimodo (Victor Castilla Sancha) and the Argentine wrestler Gran Jacobo (Jacobo Rossi Sarrat) ran the "Los Colosos del Ring" promotion in Spain. It was in operation from 1974 to 1986. A few years before that Castilla served as vice-president of the first Spanish pro wrestler union (which was formed in 1969). Here are Castilla and Rossi posing with a few of their wrestlers at their wrestling school in Fuenlabrada in 1984:

Ah, okay. I see. I thought you meant that was his real name (which it wasn't). Yeah, he dropped the Quasimodo gimmick in France and went by Vicente Castilla in 1964-1966.

Not sure where you got that name for Quasimodo from. It's wrong. His name was Victor Castilla Sancha. Yeah, 1934-1936.

I had a hunch the popular radio personality Bobby Deglané, the commentator for this match, had to have some connection to wrestling. He was just too good at wrestling commentary here. But I hadn't really looked into it. Today I randomly found the connection. Turns out back in the mid 1930s Deglané got his start in Spanish radio by specializing in the broadcast of wrestling matches and was reportedly the first one to do wrestling commentary on Spanish radio. These were the early days of Spanish lucha libre (known as catch in the 1930s in Spain but later they switched to lucha libre americana as the most common name for it) and he did reports on wrestling matches for the radio in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. cc: @Matt D

Three: - March 20, 1976: Kader Hassouni & Claude Roca vs. Bernard Caclard & Albert Sanniez + Mr. Montreal vs. Inca Wiracocha - April 30, 1976: no specific matches advertised - August 7, 1976: Bob Plantin vs. Fred Magnier + Antonio Pereira vs. Jean-Claude Bordeaux + Michel Chaisne vs. Michel Di Santo

The ones in bold - TF1. The rest - A2. The last TF1 broadcast that I have a record of is from October 15, 1977 (Zarak vs. Jean-Pierre Le Comte + Le Petit Prince vs. Albert Sanniez). INA has two additional shows from 1978 (April 4 and May 17) in their TF1 archive, and the footage is out there already, but INA's actually got those two listed as "taped" as opposed to "broadcast" so it looks like those two were taped for TF1 but not aired on TF1.