David Mantell

On the subject of Prince Zéfy, nice compilation video from about a year ago, including footage from New Catch.

And like Joynson, Ben(jamin) Stone can be a pretty good blue-eye too - he could have a great match, either as heel or blue-eye with Jordan Breaks. I'm thinking of adding him to my list with Breaks and Nino Bryant of fresh young Trad Btit talent. Incidentally, the venue for that match is an old ITV venue. Nowadays it's called The Spotlight, Hoddesdon but back in the late 1980s it was called BRoxbourne Leisure Centre:

A couple more good matches from the same Rumble show. Not so much a scientific match (although there's some) but more a hard-hitting Rocco vs Marty Jones type affair: Also the two younger Bryant Brothers had quite a good largely scientific tag team match recently: Sorry it's not letting me embed. I will see if I can fix it later. Fixed it now.

From the "Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe" thread, replying to Ohtani's Jacket. Rumble MC (and promoter) Steve Barker recently used this tactic when heel Shenwoo was DQd

Impressed by the heel in this Benjamin Stone, good 60s70s style bruiser like Jim Hussey or Roy Bull Davies or even Colin Joynson in heel mode as the boot droog half of The Dangermen with smug Steve Haggerty in '72 (I think their bout Vs "Hornets" Dane Curtis and a teenage Marty Jones has already been posted on here). Nice to see KM Lane relying more on escaping/technical skill and less on high flying high spots. For those of you wondering about ASW South, it's an OVW-style training school/developmental territory that Oliver Grey (Joel Redman) has been running in the West Country (southwest England) for Joe Allmark and his grandad the late Brian Dixon these last couple of years. Occasionally LEGENDS like James Mason turn up to their trainee shows. (and yes, that's the same Ben Stone refereeing that second bout)

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.)