David Mantell

Interesting actual example of this (not relating to Europe) : In 1989 one of the Aptermags did a piece on wrestlers who were "Lost In The Shuffle" (not doing as well as they either were previously or might be expected to be doing.) Terry Gordy at this point was in a very successful tag team with Stan Hansen in Japan and a year or so later would form an even more successful tag team with Steve Williams. This wasn't good enough for the Aptermag writers who claimed that if Gordy didn't drop all this Japanese tag team malarkey and head back to the US "he'll soon be the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question - Who was the third Freebird?"

Bumping this up just to remind people of the main nub of my argument.

Pat Roach certainly was in the right period for having matches kinescoped - for example this one: (at 16:20) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grOxF-sHVF0&t=980s (it's not letting it embed for some reason, never mind) He also made his UK TV debut in 1966 (against Billy Joyce) and had late 60s matches with Billy Robinson, Judo Al Hayes and Steve Veidor among others. Max Crabtree got appointed "matchmaker" (booker) for Best/Wryton around 1975, just about the end of b/w kinescopes but at a time when ITV was still doing this with colour film copies (T.Rex famously appeared on the Bay City Rollers' "Shang A Lang" show in '75 performing "New York City - years later a rather weatherbeaten colour kinescope of this fell into the hands of Bolan's fanclub and got included as the "official promo" of the song on The Ultimate Video Collection in 1992. The master tape copy eventually turned up as an extra on the DVD release of the 1977 Granada TV "Marc" show)

Specifically? I recall you're not a fan of no contest on a refused TKO (a less time consuming alternative to a 1-1 draw.) DQ's were not seen as cheap finishes, they were seen as the heel disgracing him/herself by proving he/she couldn't cleanly compete. Titles were changed on DQs. MCs would shout " (X) ... is DISQUALIFIED!" like an angry schoolteacher sentencing a pupil to punishment, and the heel would rant and rave at the injustice and humiliation.

It didn't eradicate it but it started the shift away from it towards what Puroresu is more famous for. It began to Europify puro.

Jim Ross and Tony Schiovone circa '88 would be winging about Dynamite "betraying his fans" - that's far more marking out. And I stand by my point about out of the ring fighting or ineffective/suspect referees - the broadcasting rules were very strict about those.

There were a considerably higher proportion than in American wrestling and they still occur even now. All Star had them on its show on Screens port and there were plenty on Reslo too. There was a definite imbalance towards "clean wrestlers" - say 70-30. In America it was more 50-50. A lot of heel Vs blue eye bouts started off (and still start off) technical.

Personally I thought he did his best work in clean matches with another similar technician. Didn't seem nonsense to me at all, that he would try and extend the opponent's grip down so that (1) it would loosen the angle of the hammerlock (2) he could then hook his leg in and use it to break the hold and leave the opponent's arm spare and open to attack. Flamboyant way of doing it yes, but it was based on a competitive logic, there is probably a far less showy legit escape that is nonetheless based on the same principles. And yes I know what a real wrestling match looks like:

The IBA had very strict rules about fighting outside of the ring (and also the ref being firmly in charge and not an ineffective wimp like in America much less the quasi heel figures they became in France. Which is why you got tough no nonsense characters like Max Ward as the rule, not the exception like Roger Delaporte and Gorilla Monsoon as a special ref were.)

Inasmuch as before that in the 50s/60s it was a big exercise in jingoism all about honourable Japanese babyfaces vs round eyed Gaijin usually American heels

All Star also went on a tour of Israel in 1987 just a coupleof years after World Class - Mtizi Mueller vs Klondyke Kate and Kendo Nagasaki & Psycho Stevens vs Steve Regal and Dave Taylor, with promoter Brian Dixon refereeing. Here's the whole gang at Ben Gurion Airport.

I'd say the escapes and reversals made it more realistic if anything. When caught in an armbar the British would untwist the arm by rolling on the mat and the French would untwist the arm by leaping up into the flying headscissors position, but both those make more sense to me than what American wrestlers do - nothing, just stand there selling it!

Quite a few of the heels - Stax, Rocco, Kendo's manager George Gillette, Finlay (not in this compilation) hd the gift of the gab. So did Daddy. A lot of people however basically came from the Bob Backlund (when not going crazy) school of interviews. You can't blame them, they'd not been trained with this as part of their skillset. Here's Haystacks doing a snackfood advert to show how he was one of the camera savvy few:

I'd further say that from an American business perspective, British wrestling was "Gym Boy ridden" (and had a TV commentator that supported this and tried to educate his viewers to appreciate wrestling from this position.) Here are some Brits on the mic from the last two years of ITV when promos were suddenty introduced:

Daddy was one particular direction in which promoter Max Crabtree pushed. It was succesful in terms of making him a household name and filling up venues with family audiences but it alienated enough fans and wrestlers to create a gap in the marketplace for an opposition promoter to build a red hot promotion which eventually took over. Kendo, JIm Breaks and Rollerball Rocco were all gifted pure wrestlers (as was Kellett come to that and I would add Adrian Street to that list.) and this was central to their credibility. Breaks especially fans respected his skills even if they hated the guy and liked to throw pacifiers into the ring at him. When he turned seventeen? (Okay there have been a few promising whizzkids who bagged themselves Lightweight and Welterweight titles at that sort of age - Dynamite Kid, Danny Collins, Kid McCoy etc) He turned pro as part of the first wave of intake of Athol Oakley's All In Wrestling in 1930. I'd be sceptical of that piece, it sounds like a generalising journalist spouting the usual cynical cliches ********************************************** British wrestling definitely took things down a different direction with a different philosophy from American Wrestling. This doesnt mean that many of the same promotional techniques weren't tried and they especially lured in the casual public, but there was a backbone of serious wrestling there that gave it a credibility that many of the older generation have found severely lacking in WWE since the 80s. It's an easy pub conversation to have in England, how "that was Proper Wrestling back then, not like this American rubbish they have on now." My general understanding is that inside the business on each side of the Atlantic it was a case of "the grass is greener on the other side." The American locker rooms admired and envied the British for their legit skills in the ring. The British boys (and girls) admired and envied the Americans for their sharper grasp of ring psychology and manipulating a crowd. Looking back on it all these years later, Americans like some of you are aghast at the lack of storytelling in most traditional British matches while Brits like me wonder why on earth there seems to be virtually no defences, counters, reversals - "undressing" of holds as Kent Walton used to put it - in the American game, even in bouts like the '89 Flair/Steamboat series.

Since I've mentioned wrestling in Nigeria- and television there and findng old Doctor Who episodes there - here are some anecdotes from Orig Williams of Reslo fame about promoting in Nigeria and getting the seal of approval of the local ruler the Obong and having to light a stadium show with car lights ... https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=f2g3DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT87&lpg=PT87&dq="OBONG"+"ORIG+wILLIAMS"&source=bl&ots=u7twcgDK5W&sig=ACfU3U0kceziPyMwjy1pVyZ830q72Zf5nQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6mZelj9WCAxXVWEEAHS0fARQQ6AF6BAgIEAM#v=onepage&q="OBONG" "ORIG wILLIAMS"&f=false

Well here's what we know about television in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZBC_TV Doesn't mention British wrestling but does mention WWF Superstars (and Doctor Who!) The Honorary Citizen Haystacks thing happened during Mugabe's rule, presumably some time in the 80s. Possibly the white population had their own segregated wrestling scene. Wrestling was big in apartheid era South Africa (although if anything their wrestling felt a lot like the CWA) and Stax visited the territory: p.s. okay, that makes two places in the world along with France that still had that string thing down the middle of the ropes any time after the 1930s.

Enough for it to be profitable, not enough for them to feel generous enough to properly share the proceeds with The Boys.

Thought. Perhaps Iraq was buying British or French (probably British as Iraq was British Mandate between the wars) kinescopes and that was how Saddam Hussein became a pro wrestling fan and ended up setting up his own wrestling territory in Iraq. You'll notice the very British looking ring.

Yes and it cut both ways and it cut internally within North America and Europe too as I discussed. Getting your footage shown in another territory could cause MURDERS at the next NWA convention. Yes although this may then inspire viewers to set up their own wrestling scenes, build jerry built rings and get local sport-wrestlers to legitimately spar in it for 20min until going to a preplanned finish. This does however create jobs and possible red carpet treatment for the stars of the imported TV when they go out and visit these places.

An interesting side issue is what Japan or America or Australia would have made of European wrestling (other than perhaps 1980s CWA). Japan pretty much remodelled its scene entirely after getting Karl Gotch and Billy Robinson at the turn of the 60s/70s. America however simply didn't get the point of clean sportsmanly babyface matches and lighter weight wrestling - it ran counterintuitive to everything the American fans had been taught to expect (big guys with Personal Issues with each other fighting it out to settle the score). Australia, well, I guess younger fans who only knew Jim Barnett's company which was basically American wrestling imported would have gone the same way as Americans although in the 60s/70s there would have been an older generation whom WoS and Le Catch would have reminded of the earlier, purely Australian wrestling up to the 50s. To view the other side of the coin, ITV and Britain were certainly not ready for Wild Crazy No Holds Barred American Wrestling in the 60s/70s. France was easing up and allowing more out of the ring brawls on TV, but in Britain the IBA kept it all fairly clean and classy. (A few mins of the 1976 Shea Stadium match between The Executioners vs Strongbow and White Wolf, the latter being a familiar face on ITV from about 1969 IIRC and would be back as The Sheik a couple of years later, did find its way onto World of Sport in summer '76 as a warm up for Andre vs Chuck Wepner and Ali vs Inoki.) But if you want to see the cultural divide at work, reread the early posts on the British and French wrestling threads on this forum from before I came along.

And remember, that's just Doctor Who. Wrestling was apparently one of the easier products for ITV's overseas sales agents to flog to these stations.

Nope, BBC and ITV programming was being sent to all over the place on mainland Africa and Asia. Ten years ago, they got a haul of nine Patrick Troughton era Doctor Who episodes back from Nigeria. About the same time they found a couple of missing Morecambe and Wise episodes over there from BBC2 1968 and managed to restore them to colour from chroma dots in the film print (like I reckon the INA should do with a lot of its 1967-1974 stock of French wrestling and probably a load of other Channel 2 output from that period.) A previous batch of six William Hartnell era episodes were also found in Nigeria in the mid 80s. Sierra Leone was still airing the last few Troughton episodes as late as 1976. Other places that bought 60s Doctor Who included Uganda, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Jordan, Iran (under the Shah) and Zambia as well as Barbados and Jamaica. https://broadwcast.org/index.php/William_Hartnell_stories#So_who_bailed_on_Who_first.3F Some Doctor Who episodes eventually screened in Australia were from prints previously used in Singapore. Possibly this was the history of the complete The Tomb of the Cybermen which was found in early 1992.

Why weren't US tapes (officially) sent to Britain, France or GFR/Austria until the mid 80s and Vince? Even more to the point, why weren't tapes and kinescopes of different territories swapped around between them (except maybe the odd NWA World title change match and bits of Shea Stadium 1980) until the mid 80s anti-Vince combines? (To be fair the British and French TV stations never swapped footage with each other - talent yes, but never TV footage) I wouldn't say places like Zimbabwe or Nigeria weren't discerning. They would have had wrestling as a legit folk sport and the kinescopes appearing on TV apparently inspired people to set up their own scenes with their own stars drawn from the cream of local sport-wrestlers. I've already mentioned Stax getting his honorary citizenship from Mugabe. I could also mention Jayne "Klondyke Kate" Porter wrestling in Nigeria in front of 10K. Having said that, Japan bothered to send its own TV crews all the way over to South London to film their boys - and local talent like Johnny Saint vs Jason Cross - at the Fairfield Hall Croydon in early 1996. in fact, they were so impressed by what they saw, they invited Johnny Saint to come back home with them for a big indoor stadium match against Naohiro Hoshikara

As a Doctor Who fan who knows about 1960s missing episodes I know the answer to that. They didn't send out a print to each individual customer. They made a small number of prints and bicycled them around different stations, probably via mail. Often when prints reached the end of their chain they were either destroyed on the spot or else sent back to the point of origin for destruction.(Or they didn't send them back and they end up being found by programme hunters like Phillip Morris of TVE, or they end up being taken home by staff and turn up yonks later in some private film collector's stash.) That's how it was for lots of TV from that era.