David Mantell

ICWA did go on in their press articles about being "Americanisé" and not old fashioned French wrestling like their competitors. They sounded a lot like the French equivalent of the FWA or all the other New School promotions in Britain who llike to bang on about how the "World of Sport Style" (sic) is "antiquated" and generally old hat and generally Britishoillard (to adapt your word franchouillard from a couple of pages back) and they are going to replace it with modern wild American Wrestling Bigger Bettter Badder etc etc etc. These seem to be a Europe-wide phenomenon eg GWF in Germany.

Everything got very gimmicky and cartoony under Delaporte in the late 70s/80s- in wrestling terms you could call France the Memphis of Europe (as in the Gulas/Jarrett style of cartoony gimmicks) and that seems to have affected the post terrestrial TV era of French wrestling. The likes of Cybernic Machine are an evolution of the likes of Les Pihrannas and Les Maniaks and Mambo Le Primativ. There are probably smaller promotions which are more faithful throwbacks to 1960s Catch, in fact I probably posted some in the 2006 videos on page 21 of the thread, and those are the equivalent of John Freemantle's Premier Promotions in the UK. Wrestling Stars are clear the All Star (post mid 1990s) of France.

Just been through History of WWE and came across the following which I think was what put me off adding any more shows to that section: WWF @ Toulon, France – Zenith Omega – August 5, 1993 Tito Santana vs. the Predator Brutus Beefcake vs. Terry Taylor Bam Bam Bigelow vs. Tatanka Owen Hart vs. Papa Shango Jim Duggan vs. Bastion Booger WWF Tag Team Champions Rick & Scott Steiner vs. the Headshrinkers Hulk Hogan vs. WWF World Champion Yokozuna That would have been the penultimate Hogan appearance of his entire WWF 1983-1993 babyface run (before Sheffield England the next day.)

Thanks for the tipoff on the second New Catch run. I would still class FFCP and Wrestling Stars as being Old School as much as I would say the same for present day All Star and Rumble promotions in the UK, although they have clearly absorbed some American influences in the name of "family entertainment" like said UK promotions have done. Perhaps I shall rephrase that bit slightly. I thought about mentioning the 1993 WWF show but then thought there might be LOTS more shows over the years to add. If that was the only one then I shall add it.

Probably the nearest thing there's ever been to an art-house Wrestling promotional video: Images of Nagasaki by Paul Yates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeidAfPyQsg EDIT: Sorry, It's just highlights, the proper thing is a good 10-15min long and well worth the watch if it ever gets posted anywhere.

Wot I wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_wrestling_in_France Feedback appreciated.

Good title match from 1993 - World Heavy Middleweight Championship Chic Cullen (defending World champion, the same title Rocco won back from Yamada in my above post) Vs Danny Collins (challenger, reigning British champion and World champion in the weight division below, Middleweight, since beating Owen Hart for the vacant title two years earlier at the same venue.) Cullen would go on to hold his title until retiring in 2002; the following year he and Rollerball Rocco held a tournament for a new champion, won by Bryan Danielson. Collins would hold onto both his titles until 1996 when- by then Dirty Dan Collins- he vacated the World Middleweight title (Rumble Promotions held a tournament won by a young James Mason) and then gave up the British H-Mid title after beating Alan Kilby for the British Light Heavyweight title - Kilby got it back in 1997.

Another good bout recently, my favourite Jordan Breaks versus Lewis Mayhew who was Nino Bryant's opponent in the match to create a new British Lightweight champion in 2021

A facetious sports journalist and emblematic figure of Stade 2, Daniel Cazal joined the show in 1977 where he brought his humor and offbeat tone for nearly 15 years. He notably marked the history of Stage 2 by inventing a sport: the wheel bar. A discipline, completely barred and unidentified, to which he regularly devoted a subject. Since the retirement of Daniel Cazal in 1991, the wheel bar has fallen somewhat into oblivion but its creator, steeped in humor, keeps the secret hope of seeing it return one day or another to the heart of the news.

Interestingly, French Wikipedia specifies Friday night as being the timeslot of choice for Le Catch on Couderc's article: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Couderc#Catch During the 1960s , on Friday evenings, he commentated on major televised wrestling evenings, live from the Élysée-Montmartre and the Wagram hall . It was the time of famous wrestlers like L'Ange Blanc or Le Executioner de Béthune 18 . Roger's thunderous and lively comments – flamboyant, indignant or hilarious – delight viewers. “Technically,” writes Lorient wrestler Jean Corne , “he knows nothing about wrestling. He makes us forget this deficiency with a very southern ease. His thing is partiality […] And when Couderc takes up the cause of the good guys against the bad guys, we believe it 19 . " THEJanuary 20, 1961, he himself gets involved in fighting against an aggressive spectator 20 . How long did this last for as a timeslot? (I suppose I could do my own research on this and go through all the dates on MattD's 1960s videos and check what day of the week they were.) Obviously by the late 70s this had been ditched in favour of any random evening of the week and the occasional Sunday afternoon.

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc37UPvelZQ This was the Cazal piece in question I posted earlier - unforunately the link could not be embedded because www.youtube.com does not allow embedding of that video. Bah. There's a fellow presenter singing Cazal's praises (I can't quite catch what he says) and I think your imaginary sport gets a mention.

Here is a couple of nights earlier in Aldershot, with veteran TV-era MC Lee Bamber (see various points earlier in the thread for more discussion about him. )

This was All Star's previous show from Dudley in February. I'm probably somewhere in the crowd but haven't spotted myself yet. Last time I met Brian Dixon before his death, as you can see he was in a wheelchair but still pretty cheerful.

Main event last night was an 8 man Elimination "Royal Rumble Rules" (four a side, elimination by over the top rope, first team wiped out loses) match pitting the World Riot Squad (Niwa, Henchmen, Cannonball Grizzly who looked like a cross between Scrubber Daly and old time US wrestler Black Bart) Vs the All Star's (Joel "Oliver Grey" Redma , Dylan Roberts, Micky Long and Kris Dekker) - needless to say the blue-eyes won and sent the kiddy-dominated crowd home happy. These seem to be catching on in old school promotions as Rumble did the same match type as a grand finale two weeks ago at their last YouTube recording at Ditton and posted the match last night while I was out at the show:

Went to Dudley Town Hall this evening for my first All Star show since the death of Brian Dixon earlier this year. No clean matches tonight but some good technical wrestling between Dylan Roberts and Ringo Ryan, the latter returned to the UK after several years in Australia and whom I recall as a promising bratty young heel in the early/mid 2010s. Also former NXT man Jack Starz pulled off a neat Johnny Saint "lady of the lake" sequence in his losing effort to Welsh strongman heel Caden Lay. The big news as printed in the full colour All Star programme is that Tony Spitfire whom I posted a video of having a classic British clean match with Dean Allmark in 2013 is now a heel, rebranded as the Loudmouth and taking verbal shots at audience members. Not that there was much evidence of this tonight as he was working as MC, doing the introductions in a blokily polite Johnny Vaughan sort of way Superheavyweight tag team The Henchmen were on the bill (accompanied by a partner who was called Cannonball Grisly but clearly was not Paul Neu.) Forty years ago the Henchies would have been obvious cannon fodder for Big Daddy, nowadays they remind me of 1970s opposition heel team The Klonkykes (Jake made it onto ITV against Count Bartelli in 1976 and Bill made it onto French TV Vs Dave "Batman " Larsen in 1973. Together, they were the subject of a docu on BBC2 on the brothers, footage from which appeared in legendary sitcom Til Death Us Do Part on Alf Garnett's TV screen, saving the Beeb from having to pay ITV for footage.)

I found a YouTube bio piece onn Cazal which I posted a couple of pages back where another TV pundit calls him urbanely witty or somesuch. I guess an example of this being him calling a ringside chair Mammouth Siki uses to get back in the ring against Daniel Schmid "L'escalier de service" like as if the ring was a posh hotel or something. Couderc was apparently a different kettle of fish, his thing was to be wildly partial to Les Bons. When he got sacked for having sided with the students in May 68, he got a job with Swiss radio commenting on Rugby and similarly was wildly partial towards the French team to the point where one national team manager called him the the "sixteenth man of the XV (fifteen-strong national Rugby side) of France".

Well there was traditionally a lot of flow back and forth between all three territories - I would liken Scrubber Daly Vs Kid McCoy or Danny Collins and John Harvey to the 1978 Pete Roberts Vs Dave Blond match in French TV. That was still just about French wrestling. it cut the other way of course - Jean Corne, Khader Hassouni, an unusually well-behaved Jacky Richard, Le Grand Vladimir, Jean Paul Auvert, Marc Mercier and Indio Guajaro (as Jacques Le Jacques) all appeared on TV as earlier in time did Le Petit Prince, Jean Ferre etc. Flesh Gordon did do Reslo even if not ITV.

I imagine there is probably some truth in what Gordon is saying - some of the worst snobbery against wrestling in the British media came from the rest of IT. Sport who felt their coverage of serious Athletics and top flight Football suffered from the association with wrestling with "serious" sports fans boycotting WoS and, although the wrestling itself scored well in ratings, the rest of the show suffered from the inclusion of wrestling. Dickie Davies claimed to not stand it, although that didn't stop him presenting two DVDs of it in the mid Noughties. Earlier in the thread we discussed the mutiny that occurred among RTF staff in 1958 after one of their number broke kayfabe on air, so they viewed being disrespectful towards wrestling as being a key part of their journalistic freedom.Hence the snide sarcastic attitude of many French commentators including Daniel Cazal. (Apparently though he tended to poke fun and be "urbanely witty" about everything he covered.). Has he ever done any interviews about his time as commentator? By the way, judging from the speaking clock tracks on the INA videos on Matt D's channel, the typical timeslot in the late 70s and 80s was 10pm to 11pm on a variety of evenings although there seem to have been a few screenings on Sundays at about 5pm.

AHA!!!! So that solves the mystery of why no one can remember when French wrestling ended on TV - when FR3 and Jean Pradinas' production team finally threw in the towel, Le Catch simply slunk back to its original home at the station long ago known as RTF 1er Chaine and no one really noticed it had been away. Admittedly also, in the case of British Wrestling Greg Dyke chose to make a big announcement of the pulling of the plug at a major press conference at some big international TV fair in Switzerland whereas French TV simply passed the parcel from Antenne 2 to FR3 back to TF1 and eventually whatever stations Eurostars aired on.It never really got scrapped until waaaay later.

By the way, what exactly did TF1 have to do with Eurosport New Catch? Their logo is all over the tapings!

Just to show you all how popular Danny Collins was in France - check out how over he is with this French crowd: Notice how he can rev up the crowd to RIOT level even with a speech in a (to them) foreign language with a strong regional accent (SW/Bristolian)

Regarding the subject of Primes, it seems from the commentary on that 1978 Siki-Schmid match that audience members would hand these cash sums as tips to the MC in exchange for getting their smartarse comments read out to the live audience and the viewers at home.

I thought the EWF was a collaboration of several promoters including Orig Williams - the EWF name smacks of him viz. the BWF. A lot of UK wrestlers - Danny Collins, the Superflies, Doc Dean, Owen Hart, Colonel Brody, Kid McCoy, Scrubber Daly participated in the Eurosport TV tapings - of the above only Danny had really made a name for himself in France with summer tours in the late 80s defending the Euro Welterweight title in France and Northern Spain for Delaporte (it's just bad luck of the draw he was not on FR3 in front of Jean Pradinas's cameras AFAIK). The rest were imported seemingly fresh from the Dixon-Orig axis. You could be right about the FEC connection, I'd like to know more about Eurostars and the TV deal I recall them having.

for example: Compare that ^^^ to the sports venue in 1978 France in the video. Actually this venue looks sort of similar but still more modern and less Sixties Brutalist:

Another classic that I thought we had discuused got a vlog from Wrestle Me Here is the bout under discussion: