David Mantell

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:

Another thing that needs explaining - the system of bonuses - "primes" - that were given out to wrestlers over the course of a match, something that seems to have hit its peak in the late '70s. There seems to have been quite a lot of these Primes handed out to both men - and the referee - in this match. How did this work? What were the rules about it? How did it start? Why was it apparently quietly done away with some time after? ************************************************************ By the way, if anyone has a bad word to say about the public sports hall venues Rumble in England uses for some of its 2020s Youtube Channel videos (shot at family accessible Matinee shows at public Leisure Centres.), I don't want to hear them anymore after looking at the SHABBY 1970s baseball court of a civic sports hall with its plastered-and-painted blue walls at which this August 1978 bout was taped. Fortunately when ITV had to film at a place like this, they would darken the lights except for the ring, so it could look like anywhere, the ring as a splash of light and colour among the murk. Jean Pradinas who directed most of the Antenne 2/FR3 matches in the 1980s used the same trick, with maybe the odd baseball hoop visible in the gloom. This place - I thought from the big window it was a temporarily converted swimming pool or "baths hall" as they were known in Britain, uintil I remembered this was screened in August so probably filmed any time over the summer of 1978 in France when swimming pools would be in demand. In any case France is the home of the floating ring so they would have done one of those shows if it was a pool.

>(which aired lived on TV) Any word on what sort of TV? Terestrial, satellite, local, national, international? Wrestling Stars' website at http://www.catch.fr is still up but it seems to be more aimed at town officials to get them to book a show than to punters to get them to attend one - "Let Flesh Gordon Bring Catch To Your Town". Still would like a neutral explanation of the FFCP/Mercier vs WS/Gordon/Richard dispute - something a bit more informative than "See the other lot? it's THEIR fault! They're thugs and crooks! Don't talk to them or we won't tlak to you!" Richard mentions some tax threshold Mercier senior (Guy) got the authorities to level which made business harder for independents. They say is was just a scam to deny them business, Mercier Junior replies that his dad did what he did to keep scumbags like the other lot out. (Bear in mind this is the same Guy Mericer that was in on inventing ideas like it being OK for good guys to beat up the referee.) As I said earlier, it all seems very "six to one, half-a-dozen to the other" but if anyone has any clues, it will help us understand whuy they seem more interested in destroying each other than battling both WWE and the Americanised ICWA (French equivalent of LDN/FWA/UWA etc in England or GWF in Germany).

I've done a quick search of the thread and not found anything so far on Rocco regaining the World Heavy Middleweight title from Fuji Yamada on ITV 1987 but there's been a good Vlog post from WrestleMe about the match. One interesting idea they pick up on is the patriotic hometown Brit Rocco as villain against Japanese blue eye Yamada even with both men carrying their flags. (Actually this HAS been done in America with Mr Saito Vs Larry Zybysko in 1990 in the dying AWA) For those not familiar with the full bout:

A reference to the double turn at GAB '91- the moment Luger went into that move was the precise moment when both Luger and Windham's attitudes were adjusted!

Okay -Prince Zefy seems to think it was under the Eurostars banner in that interview quote I posted above, but anyway *shrug*

So when exactly did IWSF/WS come into existence and what exactly is Eurostars, both in itself and in relation to WS? Cagematch says Eurostars started in 1992 and on the evidence of both the Macedonia footage and my memories of visiting their website back in the day. This is their FB: https://www.facebook.com/eurostarswrestling Last show on there was 12 months ago in Bruges but then again, John Freemantle's Premier Promotions still functions despite not using its FB in nearly a decade. Oh yes and they're from Belgium (as Kent Walton said of the Masked Marauders)

I think this was the tour party Orig Williams mentioned in his memoirs, including one lady wrestler who had to wrestle a male wrestler in drag with various body parts gaffer-taped away out of sight after the other lady wrestler failed to show up at Heathrow Airport for the flight out.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040624152254/http://www.eurostars.be/novzef2.htm "Former East-Block countries have surprised me to be so enthousiast. E.g. our tour in Macedonia was much more succesful than I could have ever thought." - Prince Zéfy, November 2002.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050204001106/http://www.eurostars.be/ Finland too, apparently.

If Wrestling Stars/Eurostars has/had some kind of TV show (as I recall was implied on their old website back in the day) then they could well have been selling episodes abroad to foreign channels whose viewers were following the exploits of Flesh Gordon, Scott Ryder etc. A lot of the 1950s French kinescopes on Matt D's channel have Arabic captions on them so I guess RTF were selling prints to the former colonies in North Africa (most obviously Algeria and Tunisia) and the former French Mandates in Syria/Lebanon. Sinilarly. Pat Roach mentions in Simon Garfield's book being shown a document listing 30 countries ITV's British wrestling was being sold to, probably also as b/w kinescopes like the Vic Faulkner/Mick McMichael bout from 1972..

Greece of course was a wrestling Territory unto itself before finally sputtering out in 1991 (you can see some Sept '87 footage on page 19 of the British Wrestling thead.) All Star in Britain did tours of Israel in the late 80s and the Gulf States in the early 90s (I've got an old magazine with some great photos of Blondie Barrett and Kashmir Singh in the ring together in what looks like it could be any hall in Britain except the front row are all wearing haed-dresses and white robes.) So maybe it's not so odd for a succesful West European old school promotion to do a tour like that. What's eyecatching is the high production values of the TV and the big, mostly child audience. Which suggests that there was some sort of TV show (maybe some relative of Eurostars in Belgium? - I'm not clear exactly what their setup was) exporting episodes out there just as ITV and (O)RTF both used to do in the 50s/60s hence the b/w film prints from the era both in the locked Granada archive and the uploaded INA films. Whatever the current state of old school British/French/German wrestling, all three are in considerably better condition than any old time US/Canadian territory you care to mention (obvious exception Capitol/WWWF/WWF which now lives on as WWE)