David Mantell

Hair vs Hair match December 1967 - Couderc confrms that it's broadcast on Channel 2 at 0:20 so it seems it had already made the move in time for the switch to colour in October that year. Probably got moved across when Channel 2 started in 1964.

I see the subject of the two Marquises has been addressed before. Same butler Paul double-barrel though.

I stand corrected - apprently this was a different wrestler doing the Marquis gimmick, the original bearded version Marquis Eduardo. Jacky Richard replaced him in the gimmick the following year 1985. This is Jacky Richard doing the gimmick: Which then begs the question - who was "Eduardo" ? One of those things we really need a native French fan to explain. Afterthought - it LOOKS a lot like British wrestler Barry "Rex Strong" Sherman, but I think he'd put on a lot more weight by this point - his stint as the masked Samurai for Joint Promotion (no relation to Le Samurai of late 70s French Catch) was 2-3 years after Marquis Eduardo and he was quite flabby by that point.

New video on Matt D's channel: 25th February 1984 Black Shadow vs Angelito (joined in progress) Marquis Jacky Richard vs Georges Cohen Flesh Gordon & Walter Bordes vs Les Maniaks (Different match from the one on August 18th 1985)

Unsurprisingly, "Ho Cette Arbitre" (originally "Oh Cette Arbitre De Merde") originally comes from Football (as in soccer, not as in what we call "American Football") - see also "Allez les rouges/ verts/ bleus /jaunes" and also the Big Daddy fans chant of "Easy, easy" in the UK. https://www.jeuxvideo.com/forums/1-20-15439950-804-0-1-0-topic-olympique-lyonnais.htm I suspect a lot of standard American fan chants such as " Go (babyface) go" and "(Heel) SUCKS!!!" similarly had their origins in other sports like (American) Football and Baseball.

Talking of "HO CETTE ARBITRE!!!" French WWF fans got a hearty chant of it going against Andre's pal Tim White at this WWF show in Paris October 7th 1988 at the 5:15 mark. Needless to say, Gorilla and Bobby were left nonplussed ...

https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2011/04/17/1061443-catch-flesh-gordon-bientot-a-boe.html An earlier article from 2011. "Gentleman Grizzly" in the photo is of couse Paul Neu, known in other parts of Europe as Cannonball Grizzly (CWA) Raging Bull (Reslo) and American Avalanche (All Star going back to 1992 two years before John Tenta became Avalance in WCW)

2018 interview here with Flesh Gordon: https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2018/09/13/2868085-la-star-du-catch-flesh-gordon-a-montauban-samedi.html Auto translation:

There's a bit of a career retrospective of him here - no mention of Le Catch though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc37UPvelZQ When Roger Couderc dropped dead in the middle of a rugby tournament in 1984, it was Cazal who broke the news to the public:

Here's the full match - there are actually three versions on Youtube, a Matt D one, a Bob Alpra one and an ABCCatch one. I opted for the last on as it seems to be the best picture quality and have the most footage at the start Actually the audience seem less aggrieved with Jacky Richard and more with referee Michel Saulnier who gets a hell of a bad time from the crowd, not just the regular "HO CETTE ARBITRE" but at 18:31 a much nastier sounding chant that gets Saulnier seriously upset and standing on the middle rope shouting abuse back at them. It goes something like "L'Arbitre, ouiseaux, c'est --------aux" blanked sections are totally unintelligble, if anyone could decipher the exact full chant that would be great, even if it's something seriously rude. Commetator Daniel Cazal (later on apparently a respectable tennis commentator on Antenne 2's successor France 2's sports package show Stade 2) doesn't seem to want to spell it out, he just says "L'arbitre etcetera" Odd that kids should be showing up in such numbers given that we know from the speaking clocks on Matt D's videos that Le Catch mostly got transmitted at around 2200h/2300h in the late evening. They would have made good Big Daddy fans if Shirley had taken the cross channel ferry now and then, and probably many of them did go on to become Des Petits Hulkamaniacs over the next 4-6 years as private subscription channel Canal Plus arrived witht the WWF on board and soon took off. Angry Grandmas, of course, have been a worldwide cliché of wrestling audiences on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1940s and the days of Hatpin Mary. Cazal seems to take quite a lot of relish in poking fun at this particular one at 14:04 - "Bravo Madame - Vouz avez un sense de la justice et de la regularité dans le catch qui vous honore"

Well it says 83 so I expect it was from 1983 - Sept 3rd to be exact Just spotted this while flicking through. Sorry to nitpick but ...

It's got Dusty's pawprints on it - the chase, not the triumph!!! (crossref Cody in recent months.) 10 months later Simmons got the belt, with Dusty there, from another Harley Race managed champion.

No he was SUPPOSED to be like that, portraying the heel champion in trouble. The babyface romps it, gets an easy first fall, a bunch of near 2-0s, flukes losing an equalizer, get a bunch more near second falls then SUDDENLY the heel champ pulls the ace out of the hole by getting Simmons to shoulder himself on the post outside the ring to set up the piledriver win. Afterwards as the defeated Simmons is screaming on his back in the ring, a bloody and disheveled but triumphant Luger holds up the belt above his head as he marches from ringside - "If you think I look a mess, you should see the other guy!" It's his finest moment, in its own way as champ-like as all those nice photos Apter took Aug '91 of Luger with the belt or the Lex/Race/Hughes group promos on Worldwide etc. I wish Luger had stayed on and had all Vader's title reigns and he could have been the one Simmons beat at the end of the '92 Bash tour to win the belt.

If anything it was more a local alternative to C(iz)arny speak. Most UK wrestlers tended to use cockney rhyming slang if they needed to code a conversation in the presence of outsiders. Polari is mainly associated with LBGTQ+ culture and many people from that subculture are keen to preserve it as part of their heritage.

As you can see, there was quite a long series of Finlay vs Collins matches, starting in about 1986 with an absolute squashing of Collins and climaxing in 1989 with Collins beating Finlay for the British HeavyMiddleweight title. The 2012 match pitting an older Dirty Dan against Finlay JR, from a fan appreciation show at Croydon was something of a coda to this. There was a final blowoff to all these years of Finlay pounding Collins and then Collins pounding on Finlay's son in Finlay's retirement match in Germany, Christmas 2012.

Something I forgot to post -Apart from Nino Bryant, my other favourite young wrestler working the Traditional British style and having great clean technical matches is Jordan Breaks: As the ring name suggest (and the programme page above implies) he is heavily influenced by Mike "Flash" Jordan and Jim Breaks (minus the crybaby heel act). He even does the Breaks Special (and Johnny Saint's "Lady of the Lake" and "Russ Abbott" sequences and the Surfboard too.) Here he is in action from just before the pandemic, from that most thoroughly old school of old school promotions Premier And here's a different match with Jordan Breaks from late 2021 with commentary from Lee Bamber! It's from a New School promotion, WrestleForce, but don't let that put you off, they have a very technical (apart from a few forearms and one aerial spot to ringside near the very end) clean bout that Kent Walton would have approved of:

RIP to Adnan Al Qaisi lead babyface in Saddam Hussein's state-run, gunpoint-booked Iraq wrestling promotion in the 1970s. One of two pro wrestling territories in the Middle East along with Rafael Halperin's promotion in Israel in the 60s/70s. Andre the Giant and George Gordienko both jobbed to Adnan because Saddam threatened to shoot them if they didn't. This time it was Ian Campbell: Adnan on his way to defeating Andre with the Saddam Shot Threat:

(if that embed doesn't work, the link is https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsbju5 )

It's worth pointing out that Marc Mercier also (1) got old (2) faced his share of gimmicky opponents. This is from 2003:

Have just been put in mind of Jim Cornette saying how old time fans would protect the business so as to force the promoters' hands to also take it seriously and continue to provide them with good quality matches. I expect there was an element of this at work with Kent Walton - as a professional fan and as a sports journalist - also.

Rock N Wrestling Connection

Stuff I missed earlier: The actual word Kent Walton used was "swazzy". I'm sure Princess Paula had her fans but apart from odd bits of flamboyance like her Native American headdress, she did not really do the whole glamour thing like American valets/ manageresses (such as Elizabeth, Sherri, Missy Hyatt, Precious, Sunshine, Dark Journey) did, nor did any other female sidekicks (the only two I know of were Jeannie Clark, the future Lady Blosson, as then-boyfriend Chris Adams' second one time on TV in 1979 and Sharkey Ward having a similarly "ethnic" "princess" in his corner for a 1980 Big Daddy tag) until Monika came along. To some extent she paved the way for Saraya (senior) in 1992 on Reslo with her vamp/ganster's moll image. Monika Markwart was Drew McDonald's life partner and common law wife until his death from cancer in 2015. She reportedly still lives in his hometown of Perth & Kinross in Scotland. I asked Drew about her on his website messageboard in 2002 and he said that she was "living in England and still a heel in real life." Bless <3 For this first match, Monika wore a rather dodgy looking female military uniform in black and white, ucomfortably close to SS female uniform! For subesequent appearances she wore a black dress and a red summer hat. A shot of her slapping Big Daddy on his behind while he was sat in the ring corner was incorporated into the title sequence for the wrestling during the final year 1988. Bill Clarke as King Kendo was getting quite a lot of Daddy tags around late '87 - he was King Kong Kirk's tag partner the night Kirk died in the ring in August 1987 at the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome (also the site of the filming of the Pallo's 1981 video, some of the matches from which Ohtani has reviewed.) This was basically Max Crabtree's response to the real Kendo Nagasaki becoming Brian Dixon's flagship at a time when All Star were not only now on ITV but actually on the point of overtaking Joint as dominant promotion. Having Big Daddy squash King Kendo like he could never squash Kendo Nagasaki was Max C's equivalent of Vince doing the whole Huckster vs Nacho Man thing in early '96.

Okay, eight pages later I'm finally up to date with everything I wanted to post. Hope this has all been some use, giving the native perspective of someone whose ground floor thinking on pro wrestling was shaped by this territory. Thanks for reading, look forward to any feedback.

Okay, I seem to have caught up with myself on page 19 now. Just to polish this off, here are some promised favourite examples of the Great British Clean match alive and well in the 2010s and 2020s All Star typically puts a clean bout on as bout number 4 of a 5 bout bill. Here is a typical example from Oct 2013. One drawback to the lack of rounds is that in order to pace themselves, the wrestlers have to have clapping breaks to lead the fans in cheering. Being the C21st versions of the good sportsmanly tehcnical blue eyes, Dean Allmark and Tony Spitfire encourage the fans to cheer each other. An even better example here from the same months (the same day according to an error Dean input into his Youtube account.) Notice James Mason appears to be a little riled about this - usually if it was somewhere like Rhyl or a holiday camp, he would turn heel by the end of the match, setting up a grudge rematch with little technical wrestling. Possibly that was being saved for the rounds match proposed at the end which never occurred. This should have been the World Of Sport The Next Generation match at that second TWC Skydome show instead of that ridiculous comedy wth Colt Cabana: John Freemantle's Premier Promotions adheres stricly to full blown Mountevans Rules. Naturally they have plenty of clean matches such as this from 2017: Also Rumble Promotions, Steve Barkers old 1990s company was revived after the pandemic and reactivated the British Lightweight Championship, won by Nino Bryant. He is still defending the title on Rumble shows in 2023, but here is his 2021 title win.

The full tape of the broadcast exists Kinescope print actually, 16mm black & white. Tapes were expensive and got reused at that point.