David Mantell

RIP, condolences to family etc. In my mind it basically boils down to this: GOOD SIDE: Teaming with Gene Anderson in those classic late 70s JCP NWA World Tag Team title matches against Flair and Valentine The big turn on Dusty. The turn on Sting above (bear in mind if Tully hadn't been caught doing Coke, that would have been his spot and so would Barry Windham's 1990 Horseman stint.) Inventing the Road Warriors gimmick. BAD SIDE: Cutting Sting's original World title reign down from 12 months to 6.5 months (Sting should really have lost to Luger at GAB '91 when the match ended with Luger turning heel and getting help from Harley Race and Mr Hughes) and landing us with that enfeebled early '91 Flair title reign that even Flair admits was a mistake and he was in no state for.) Driving away a lot of young talent one of two of whom like Mark Callaway proved invaluable to Vince and replacing them with old timers that were old pals of his. UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY SIDE: Cussing out Vince and Jim Barnett until they walked out of the 1983 NWA convention and so inadvertently pulling the trigger on 18 years of conquest which ended up with the WWF as the last surviving US territory.

RIP Barry Douglas. Give the match in that post a re-watch in his honour. Last surviving wrestlng-related member of the Relwyskow family - George Sr, George Jr, Doug and Ann are already all gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Relwyskow#Biography

NEWSFLASH - Marc Mercier is retiring from the FFCP and the wrestling business: https://www.facebook.com/ffcatch/posts/pfbid023LQFdaZDDchDrfEJAGcgKJpAoSwg1En4BRLmjVcsE7PGiVdnRvCXhyAktr12Skmbl F.F.C.P. communication Time for me to close this door that opened in 1975. 49 years have passed.. So I'm leaving this universe that was mine for decades. Moving on to the next thing... Goodbye World of Wrestling.

Inviting guest "intellectuals" to cast their lofty judgement on the action seems to have been a longtime part of French TV wrestling. A whole gang of them seem to have come along for the ride for this match from November 1970 involving The Barons (Jeff Kaye and Ian Gilmour) pretending to be Scotsmen (like Gilmour and Finlay did nearly a decade later.) Typically they yap on a lot about quel Spectacle magnifique et gymnastique it all is, but none of them know a single hold, move or countermove to be able to call it in their commentary - nor, I guess, would they ever want their fashionable friends to ever catch them on TV displaying that kind of knowledge.

On the same theme, had to share this great match from the late 80s. Ohtani won't like the finish but what the heck....

Four bouts rather than the usual five due to a main event Rumble won by Joel Redman aka Oliver Grey. Nice clean match between two younger wrestlers IIRC Karol Andrews (that's him in the stripey trunks in the first photo) and Ricky Marsh - Andrews won. Otherwise there was a tag match match and a singles bout, both involving larger heels. Nice to see 1990s/2000s veteran heel Phil Powers in the tag match and Rumble. MC for the second half was Tony Spitfire again - check back earlier in the thread for his great match with Dean Allmark from 2013. Referee is All Star's new young proprietor Joe Allmark, grandson of the late Brian Dixon. MC from the first half was Mike Angus from whose FB these pics are filched. That's him with a streetclothes clad (and very dapper looking) Oliver Grey. Kept an eye out for the kid who posted that video from a year ago but no sign of him.

Another good match from Jordan Breaks, using his namesake's arm submission in combination with a bodyscissors to get the win. Am going to All Star in Dudley on Thursday, will update you all with the action afterwards.

Then and Now - How To Push A Skinny Teenage Kid In Wrestling: How NOT To Push A Skinny Teenage Kid In Wrestling:

RIP Bully Boy/Bruiser Ian Muir:

From last summer:

Funnily enough for a good deal of the C21st the UK has commonly been cited as the only place on the planet where anyone outside of a WWE contract could earn a full time living from pro wrestling. The different TV systems in Europe was a barrier for British, French and all the CWA/VdB home video releases from Germany/Austria to get a foothold in the already crowded American tape trading market. More so than it was a barrier for the imported PWI/WWF on Sky devouring UK cult of Wild Crazy American Wrestling to get someone's American penpal to send some tapes over which could then be transferred and duplicated and passed around. (American territory clips on Reslo and Screensport were another way for footage of American territories to reach Britain.) It was still better than anything any American promotion had for 30 years until SNME came along just four months before the move from Antenne 2 to FR3 (and slightly better than SNME which IIRC began at 2300 and carried into the doze-off hours of graveyard slot land.) Randomday Night's Main Event in France seems to have had a slightly earlier slot. At the time of the move from A2 to FR3, wrestling definitely was being broadcast weekly as we have recordings for consecutive weeks. We know there are other bouts which were screened which people like Bob Alpra have posted but Matt D didn't post. INA, once it was set up and had taken in prints of about 20 years of overseas sales stock, recorded episodes off air (mostly timecoded with the French speaking clock) to fulfill its quota. Meanwhile the real tape archives could well still be with France 2 and France 3 (as A2 and FR3 are known nowadays) just as the BBC and ITV gave some programmes to the National Film Archive in Britain but not the whole of their stock It got very cartoony (like Memphis) and the cartooniness has remained a staple of French wrestling to this day in both WS and the revived FFCP but the quality of the action remained fantastic - particularly as a tag team territory. Gordon & Bordes vs Les Maniaks - if you can keep a straight face at the Maniaks' costumes - is a really good fast paced tag match that would have held up well in the WWF's late 80s hot period of tag wrestling (the Rockers vs the Rougeaus etc). France did have a problem with lighting the venues which look dark and dingy on screen sometimes. Darker gaudy colour schemes for the rings didn't help (this is why the WWF and AWA both ditched the navy blue canvases). The early 80s single camera footage of Axel Dieter's shows in Germany illustrate this point even more. Mike Archer did a much better job in Britain especially from 1985 onwards in terms of lighting and camerawork, especially some very on-point close up roving camerawork at ringside. The quality of French TV production shot up a long way with Eurosport coming into the picture and the big blue rings and brighter lighting on New Catch. In terms of sheer grottiness of the rings etc, however, Memphis and Stampede were both light years further down the tubes than France during that period. Even on the poor quality copies we have nowadays, that grubby old canvas at the Mid South Colosseum looks horrific, like diahorrea-soiled bed linen from a hospital during a cholera outbreak! I'd put it forward as a rival candidate for the centre to the US. Certainly enough of a rival to query the blank Hacksaw Dugganesque ASSUMPTION that the US is where it all revolves around. I'd agree that Japan was another good rival - enough to make that quote in the Aptermags about Terry Gordy in 1989 look incredibly stupid and short sighted.

Thank you. @JNLister see above posts. This is the thread I was telling you about on YouTube.

(How do you tag people in posts?)

Anywhere could seem minor if no information existed about what was going on. I first heard of Hulk Hogan in December 1986 with the trailers for the new look ITV wrestling shows with WWF specials coming in the new year 1987. I first heard of Ric Flair in 1988 reading an imported PWI. Bear in mind Japan had NTSC TV whereas Britain and France had PAL and SECAM so that in itself was an obstacle for tape traders. (Traders the other way brought tapes back from America to satisfy the growing cult of PWI reading, ore-Astra Sky Channel WWF watching crowd, many of whom despised all the clean matches on ITV the same way American smart fans despised Bob Backlund as some sort of offence to gimmickry and crowd working.)

JNLister this is the thread I was telling you about on the comment on YouTube. The overseas sales stuff is a few pages back.

The Saturday afternoon slot was deceptively good because it was on directly in front of the football results without even an advert break to separate them. You only had to tune in a few seconds early to catch the end of Big Daddy's latest exploits and then be hooked enough to tune in that bit earlier each week. (Even most proud anti-wrestling sneerers in Britain admit to having tuned in reach week "Ha! We used to watch that every week before the football results came on. It was sooo fixed!". (Yes but you still watched, didn't you!) Big Daddy was on a rising boom up to 1981 and coasting along 1982-1985. The move to lunchtime was a deliberate effort to sabotage viewing figures so it could be removed and programming perceived by advertising execs to be more attractive to higher income viewers could be out in its place.

It was on ANTENNE 2 !!!!!! How much more high profile could you get in France of that time? Until August 1985 when it got moved to FR3 where it stayed until November 1987. After that, a few early episodes of Eurosport New Catch were screened on TF1 in 1988. France had 3 channels at that point. TF1, Antenne 2 and the FR3 network (a similar set up to ITV but state run, launched Dec 31st 1972). TF1 and A2 were the former 1eme and 2eme Chaine until around 1975 - 2eme went colour in October 1967, TF1 went part time colour in Sept 75 and full time in 1977. All three channels had adverts. A forth channel CANAL+ started in 1984 which was encrypted and you needed to pay for a decoder, and which carried the WWF. We know from the speaking clock time signatures on the INA video recordings on Matt D's YouTube that Le Catch was on a variety of nights of the week usually about 2230 to 2330, the same time of evening as ITV's midweek wrestling show in the UK in the 60s/70s. There is some evidence also on Matt's channel of a Sunday afternoon 1700h slot

We have no viewing figures for France (nor any context) but in 1988 ITV Wrestling on Sat lunchtimes was still averaging about 3 million (down from 5-6 million before the moved to lunchtime). Exponentially, that's double what Raw gets every week. As a proportion of respective national populations, it's something like roughly eleven times the size (3mil/60 mil = 1/20th of the population, 1.5mil/333mil = 1/222nd of the pop). Especially in a country with no cable TV, a prime slot on nationally networked TV is a BIG media window.

Getting back to the general topic of querying America's status as the world epicenter of pro wrestling, Jim Cornette and Brian Last made an interesting point on their podcast this week (Drive Thru episode 326, near the end of the show), pointing out how far in advance the wrestling TV in early 1980s Japan was compared to America at the time and noting how in Japan back then, Wrestling was on national network TV over there, a luxury beyond the dreams of any US territory of the time. To this I can only agree and would point out the high profile TV slots in the UK and France during that same period as similar situations.

By the way, even if it later became a byword for ring anarchy (and a derogatory term for pro wrestling used by non-fans as well as a derogatory term for the American wrestling game used by Mountevans purists like Kent Walton) All In was quite clean no nonsense wrestling at least to start with .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neNToe0DCBY (you'll have to click on the link as it's not letting me embed.)

What was the problem yesterday with the servers? I was in the process posting off this reply when it kept timing out. I finally got it sent off hours later.

And therein lay the problem - Slambang Western wrestling was okay for pre-war smalltown America but just too much for Thirties England. The term "All In" got somewhat scapegoated for the general level of unacceptable violence (No Holds Barred never meant No Tactics Barred) but the trend after the war was to go for a certain level of high class respectability towards one end of the product. It helped protect wrestling from the British equivalents of Maurice Herzog just as much as it assisted in getting cushy gigs such as regular ITV coverage or shows at the Royal Albert Hall. We do have a fair selection of opposition footage from the 1980s - Reslo, Screensport, Jackie Pallo's video - and yes, it does contain a lot of violence that would never have been acceptable on ITV - choking with TV cables, hitting with ringside objects including chairs, ring bells and even PVC road barriers (LOL!) used as makeshift crowd barriers, gimmicks such as cages, chains and ladder matches (especially on Reslo) and PLENTY of fighting outside of the ring (almost as much as on French TV in the late 70s and through the 80s). Even so, they all counterbalance this with a fair amount of clean matches in order to maintain the basic level of sporting credibility and I expect this was true of earlier UK independent wrestling also. Nobody in Britain really regarded it as out-dated - it felt more like how Boxing was presented on TV. Televised Boxing was a lot like how French TV Wrestling was presented - a big marquee match popping up on random nights here and there. ITV Wrestling - especially those final few years under Mike Archer's producership - looks a lot better on screen than pretty much all studio wrestling shows of the later period US territories did. And the one time the WWF experimented with a taping location similar to those used by ITV - that theatre in NY where the first few Monday Night Raws were shot in early 1993 - everyone proclaimed it to be a breath of fresh air.

Regarding referees being shown to be in control of violence. In the above 2KO tag match, blue-eye Tony StClair goes berserk, throws the referee out of the way and mercilessly batters heel Mighty John Quinn with punches. For his pains, StClair - still only on his first public warning - is given a summary DQ. Quinn also gets a third public warning and hence a DQ for pulling the corner pad off once too many times. The two DQs are counted as one fall apiece and the bout is reduced to a singles match for the deciding fall for remaining time, which Naggers wins (on a knockout!). Afterwards StClair is left standing shamefaced in the ring very embarrassed at having let partner Neil Sands down. In any American territory I can think of in that same period, the 1980s, except perhaps for the ref bumps, StClair's fisticuffs with Quinn would be considered good clean wrestling! In fact, I think it's fair to say that would have been considered good clean wrestling in most American territories even in the 1970s! In the UK in 1987 it is only showable on TV as something illegal which not only brings down the severest consequences on the perpetrator but which he himself takes a guilt trip over!

There were heels, yes, but they were in disproportionate short supply in Britain, it wasn't 50/50 like most other places. And yes, a big part of why there was less violence, especially on ITV, was because of the power of TV regulators. Combat sports are, by their very nature, violent but wrestling on British TV was always depicted as a very controlled sort of violence, confined to the designated zone (the ring) and under the control of the referee - who was generally a dominant Max Ward type, unlike Delaporte or Monsoon who were rarities. (Promoting a classy upmarket product was also a good way to keep the Maurice Herzogs of this world at bay, as British wrestling had already learned with the LCC.)

Also, the ending of Kellett/Stuart is another good example of a knockout finish. (In America except for the WWF, Kellett would have been DQd for breach of the Over The Top Rope rule.)