David Mantell

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.

I expect by this point things had moved on in those countries to the point where there was more variety in terms of channel options for a start. WCW managed to, if not sell out, then at least reasonably fill out for three nights in December '91 the Olympia in Kensington, London (home of the show jumping tournaments they used to have on BBC2 just before Christmas in days of yore) I myself went to night 3 of 3. They also had shows in Sheffield and Dublin. This was on the basis of 3 months so far of screenings of WCW Pro Wrestling at 1am on a Saturday night plus intermittent runs of rather less up to date tapes in comparable timeslots for the previous 20 months. . I imagine British (and French) wrestling had rather better timeslots in their import countries due to lack of small hours options. I think it was Max Crabtree, again in Garfield's book, who said it sold well because people in a lot of these countries couldn't really relate to a lot of British culture, but that all of humanity can relate to the concept of wrestling.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IXtKAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT79&lpg=PT79&dq="Pat+Roach:+British+wrestling+was+sold+to"&source=bl&ots=La2L6ag37l&sig=ACfU3U3YvtpVwWdX-sr5e7bKZbRz8MKikQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_pN-l39KCAxUfXUEAHfmzDE8Q6AF6BAgNEAM#v=onepage&q="Pat Roach%3A British wrestling was sold to"&f=false

Also, Granada's famous locked away stock of 1960s ITV bouts is on 16mm film. I seem to recall you do posess a few of these, Ohtani.

Pat Roach says in Simon Garfield's book that he was shown a document that he was not supposed to see, listing all the countries that Joint Promotions was getting payments for as a result of overseas sales. We know that (O)RTF was up to something similar because a lot of the 50s and early 60s kinescope prints on Matt D's YouTube channel have captions in Arabic at the start and/or finish, indicating they were intended for overseas sale (most likely to parts of North Africa such as Algeria which France annexed at one point as well as Libya and Tunisia, and also to Syria and Lebanon which were French Mandates after the First World War.) Also, apart from that one lucky surviving tape from Jan '69, the videos on Matt D's channel go colour in 1975 when the INA was set up and could record stuff off air for itself. Anything earlier than that except that one bout is b/w 16mm film so is obviously going to be overseas sales because the only reason a Western TV station broadcasting in colour would make b/w film prints of its early 70s output would be for more backward countries which didn't have colour and/or videotape capabilities yet (famous case in point, Jon Pertwee episodes of Doctor Who). See also the 1972 Vic Faulkner vs Mick McMichael bout on rather grotty b/w film. (ITV later on made colour kinescopes of some mid 70s matches - one print which previously belonged to an airline for inflight films turned up on Ebay a few years ago.)

Geographic yes, population not so much, only about a 5:1 ratio for both the UK and France to America. Population density is MUCH higher in both those two countries than America, especially in the American South where most of these now dead American wrestling territories were operating. Market share even less if you consider there were only 2-4 channels in the UK and 1-3 in France (plus a subscription channel towards the end which carried WWF) during the time period concerned and the signals could be picked up in neighbouring countries (once on holiday in the Hague, Netherlands in 1984 I got a perfect signal for ITV and World of Sport. There was am battle royal on, btw) although a bit trickier with France and the SECAM colour signal which was non compatible with PAL TVs. Again with market reach, you would have to factor in vast overseas sales of kinescope prints.to third world countries. As well as being moneyspinners for promoters, they meant the boys were already draws - and celebs - when they went to these places (Giant Haystacks was made an honorary citizen of Zimbabwe by Mugabe). If we factor in the CWA's core territority of Austria and the former GFR, we're talking a total population of 2/3 that of the USA.

British equivalent would be a show in a single non-syndicated ITV regional franchise with the bloke who did the local news bulletin after ITN's News At Ten hosting it. Non wrestling examples would be Today on Thames TV infamous for the 1976 incident with Bill Grundy and the Sex Pistols or Granada TV's So It Goes music show hosted by future Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, a man now considered a second John Peel but at the time such a second division media shill they got Steve Coogan to play him in the movie. The first couple of years of Tiswas when it was only on in ATV Midlands would be another good non Wrestling example. In other words like I said about the same level as the 1991 Relwskow taping on Grampian/STV or Reslo on S4C which officially covered the same area - Wales- as HTV and BBC (1) Wales, (I say officially because a lot of the south and east of the republic of Ireland could get the signal and Orig Williams was able to take a boatload of wrestlers on tours of small town southern Ireland from the mid 80s to the early 00s doing deal to get halls from the local priests.). I guess the French equivalent would have been a non syndicated broadcast on a single region of FR3 (home of Le Catch from Aug 85 to circa Nov 87.) To be fair to Memphis TV, the interview set on the wrestling show looked passably like the set on Countdown with Richard Whitely on Channel 4 although studio wrestling in front of two rows of fans always made an Outside Broadcast of a house show in a town hall, leisure centre or civic theatre look slick and polished by comparison. Consider how even the WWF was prepared to stoop to using that ITV kind of venue - a theatre with some seat removed to make room for the ring and placed on the stage (now banned in the UK for health/safety reasons) and other seats turned to face the ring- for the very first RAW in 1993. In Britain, cable TV was a way of having Sky TV on the quiet so you could watch WWF - or New Catch on Eurosport - without having a ruddy great vulgar Astra satellite dish on your front wall for the neighbours to mutter about.Until the early 2010s analogue switch off, anything less than the by then 5 free to air analogue terrestrial TV stations just wasn't proper national TV.

About the best US TV wrestling in the years between DuMont and SNME was about the level of Reslo or the 1990/1993 Relwyskow tapings for Grampian/STV. The ITV and (O)RTF/Antenne 2 deals were light years ahead of anything any one American promoter had during that time and they had vast reach even to other continents with sale of kinescope prints of matches to dozens of third world countries. I've read a history of pre-CWA GFR/Austria a few months back - the VDB was about the biggest of the bunch but it was a tangled web.

No, I was thinking of the more professionally shot German stuff with multicams and a hardcam which started at an incredibly early stage given the wider evolution of the home video industry. (That's 12 July not 7th Dec btw - sergje1 uses British-style dates on his channel)

The problem with WCW Australia in this debate was that Barnett treated it as an adjunct of American wrestling. It would be like me trying to make the argument for Britain based chiefly on SummerSlam '92.

Anyway, to summarise, Northwest Europe in the 1960/1970s/early 1980s had: higher profile TV (and other media eg TVTimes) windows for wrestling greater public respectability for wrestling (esp Britain) in the case of Germany, more heavily interwoven into the fabric of traditional culture. than North America during the same period and this has lead to: the survival in 2023 of more traditional old school wrestling cultures (3 versus 1 - 2 if you count Puerto Rico)

I take it we're talking about Jim Barnett's Australian WCW of 1964-1978 (which he folded to spend more time and effort on Georgia) rather than 1920s-1950s when Australia had its OWN wrestling - George Penchef, Alan Pinfold etc

The business model in the UK and I believe France also was based on intensity of touring, not single big dates. 6000 shows per year, weekly residencies in over 30 cities.

I think he was a reputation mark rather than a belt mark. He knew about Lou Thesz obviously from Thesz's visit in the late '50s- and Assirati's (unapproved by promoters) grandstanding challenge to Thesz at the Royal Albert Hall and fancied his chances against Thesz in a "smoker" public shoot match, a win in which would establish Robinson as top shooter on the planet. He was certainly enough of a belt mark to want to get Billy Joyce to job the British and European Heavyweight titles to him - which Joyce reportedly only agreed to do once Robinson could beat him on the mat in Riley's Gym.

Having said that, I think Billy Robinson's initial motive for going to North America was a naive and youthful desire to use his vast shoot skills to double cross his way to a major American version of a world title - consider how the first thing he did in Stampede pretty much was to double cross Archie Gouldie in an eliminator match for a shot at Dory Funk Jr - and thanks to having a sympathetic Stu Hart as the promoter he got away with it.

I'd say that the territory era, or at least the 30 year gap between the end of the 40s/50s American TV wrestling boom and Vince getting the WWF onto MTV and NBC represented an extended dip period for wrestling's public profile in Amerca at a time when it was certainly much higher in Britain and for a fair while in France also. Consider how the ITV Golden Age and the NWA territories era were actually concurrent!