David Mantell

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)

I guess I'll take your word for it (it would explain the period-costume spectator extras on FR3's La Derniere Manchette at a time when A2 was still screening matches.) Non-relevance however can be a relative matter. In the UK 1988 the standalone Sat lunchtime Wrestling show was doing 3 million. That's about double what RAW does in America each Monday night these days!

This was a thing in France going back donkey's years, back to the 70s in fact. Oddly enough I had the exact same idea when I was little, one night asleep in bed where I dreamed that there was a swimming pool in next doors' garden (there wasn't but never mind) and there was a wrestling ring in it and today there was going to be a show of Water Wrestling!

The same could in theory be said for WWF on Sky which you actually needed a satellite dish for (at a time when there was a lot of snobbery around about how vulgar it was to have such an appliance installed.) Yet the WWF (and to some extent WCW) was not only scoring similar houses 1989 onwards in the UK but actually held the second coming of WrestleMania III less than 4 years after Greg Dyke cancelled the Sat afternoon ITV slot.

Still sceptical - this sounds like what a lot of "experts" will tell you about Big Daddy (or the WWF) having "killed off" the British scene that I have a ticket to go see in Dudley Town Hall a week on Saturday (28th Oct) and that I can wax lyrical about the boom period that came from the first five years or so after the end of TV. At times,Old School French wrestling seems to have been doing even better than the Old SChool British scene (big well-budgeted TV tapings etc) and like the UK scene I know it's still out there to this day (although blighted by the whole ridiculous blood feud between Mercier/FFCP and Richard/Gordon/WS. ) I'd still like to hear the views of a French fan that lived through - and grew up with - this period of France as a wrestling territory.

Brian Crabtree does this in the 1992 Battle of the Brits VHS (later reissued as a series of 2 DVD volumes) where he pretends that the MC is not him even though the whole of Britain knew who they guy in the red and blue glittery blazer was.

Yes, I've seen that match before and to be honest both those gimmicks had been done far more brazenly on ITV in England even though it wouldn't screen womens' matches (although Antenne 2 had female wrestling on as early as the late 70s.)- As mentioned on the British Wrestling thread, Drew McDonald's manager Dr Monika Kaiser wore actual(-ish) Nazi Frau uniform for her first TV appearance in the corner of Drew as The Masked Spoiler (tagging with notorious Kendo Nagasaki ripoff King Kendo in a decidedly Axis Powers themed heel team against a Churchillian Big Daddy). Fit Finlay's manager and sometime lady wrestler Princess Paula Valdez (the person British - and Germans - over a certain age are more likely to cite rather than Hornswoggle a Trivial Pursuit question about who was Finlay;'s sidekick) wore a full and loudly coloured Native American head-dress that was one of the main standout pieces of flamboyancy in 80s British wrestling.

Just to get up to date, here is Wrestling Stars just a year ago in the post pandemic era in 2022 in Brionne, looking very much like a typical All Star show in England but with the same blue ropes and pads of that 2010 six man tag. Another match where the heels win by DQ, mainly after the bumped ref unfairly blames Les Bons. Nice to see that chants of Oh Cette Arbitre Aux chiottes l'arbitre live on in France in the 2020s.

Of course, things weren't entirely that abrupt in the UK either, aside from Brits on Eurosport, Reslo carried on to 1995 and there were local tapings for Scottish ITV in 1990 + 1993, various straight to video shows and TV docus. So some of the footage here may be French equivalents of these later UK broadcasts. Also it's funny how the French move from A2 to FR3 was almost concurrent with the British ending of WoS and its replacement with the Wrestling standalone show about a month or two later than the French switch.

This is from 2010, Domino was British (and is now sadly dead), I saw him live a fair few times in England at All Star shows in Leamington Spa and Bedworth in the late Noughties Flesh is in his final phase with the bald head and moustache, Scott Rider appears to have shrunk somewhat. Hugo Perez (presumably named in honour of Hugo Chavez) is actually the same guy that uploaded the Swiss and Macedonian bouts. Some of this footage is stamped with Eurostars, Wrestling Stars' Belgian wing/affiliate/somesuch. The ring has American style individual corner pads like FFCP were doing at this point and All Star in the UK since 2004ish all also seem to go in for a lot

This looks to be from around the same period as the Flesh Gordon Vs Horatio the Pirate match from 2 pages ago - notably leading the crowd on in cheers is a public Warning offence like in that previous bout - but the production is a lot better esp the lighting, whoever filmed this they could have shown 1970s/1980s A2 and FR3 a few tricks. Nice heel win to spice things up. Zefy hasn't aged much by this point.I gather he won that World title in 2005 (Mis Lourdes = Mid Heavyweight. Possibly a successor to Marty Jones's old title in England which he lost to Johnny South in April 99.) BVD some of you may remember from Global in Texas in the early 90s. Cybernic Machine I posted a clip of him earlier on facing an elderly Marc Mercier which is dead strange given the hostility between Wrestling Stars and FFCP.

The odd one is this (which I think I posted before but can't find right now. ( EDIT: Serj1e also posted it to his channel.). Richard is still Le Marquis not yet Monsieur Jacky and has a horseshoe of hair, enough for Paul Butard de whathisname to comb now and again and his physique hasn't entirely collapsed yet. Flesh isn't quite the fresh faced tag partner of Walter Borders anymore but he's noticeably lighter than on his Eurosport/Relo matches. The channel owner thinks it's Eurosport but the ring makes it look more like a late period FR3 broadcast than the EWF

I was going to write back about the Swiss thing, yes I figured afterwards you meant the Zefy Vs Monsieur Jacky bout, not the tag match from Macedonia. The only oddity about the singles match was Richard doing the Monsieur Jacky gimmick which I always thought was inspired by Mister McMahon and an allusion to Richard being part-owner of the IWSF/WS in real life. However late on that Macedonian match is, they've got a good house, mostly of kids who are really into it, so it seems they were doing good businesses. I guess "franchouillard" means parochially French. I don't have a problem with that, us Brits are a lot less embarrassed about our proletarian culture anyway. Canal + started in 1984 and the WWF did its first Euro house show in Paris Aug 87, the same month as the last INA video on Matt D's channel (Karl Von Kramer Vs Ted Hughes in a lurid orange ring on FR3.) I think the idea that it got washed away by WWF is as much a myth as the same supposedly happening to old school British Wrestling. It lost regular TV (less abruptly than in the UK) but carried on to the present while the TV faded away - or did it properly?

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ811z1HQb3mVjMNSAv9ffhNaInRd83O0 This bout from 11th August '85 shows the A2 station ident at the start: The next bout from 18th August 1985 says FR3 Dijon in the end credits All bouts on the playlist after that are from one or another FR3 region. So clearly the middle of Aug 85 is when the Antenne 2 to FR3 move took place.

Also Flesh Gordon's hair is in MUCH better shape in 1992 on Welsh TV "Reslo" than the above match. Plus, Jacky Richard has had time to rebrand from Marquise Richards to Monsieur Jacky in the interim. It can't be said for certain how quick off the mark the commentators were with their FMW comments.

As discussed earlier on, as far as can be told from Matt D's videos from the INA, it moved from A2 to FR3 in about August 1985 (prior to this FR3 did the rather strange show Le Dernier Manchette in '84.) The last video on Matt's channel is from Aug '87 and the last known listing of Le Catch in Tele Guide is from November that year, about 13 months before The Final Bell on ITV in the UK.

Did French Wrestling ever actually get cancelled?. This must be C21st but everything about the production screams 1980s broadcast on Antenne 2 - vintage ring, urbanely cynical commentator. Crowd is good too, comparable to an 80s French TV taping. I wonder why it was filmed?

Late Nineties/ early Noughties. IWSF on tour internationally in FYR Macedonia - I guess that's Macedonian the MC is speaking. Flesh hasn't yet got his bald head, tache and paunch although he's got a W hairline like he's Road Warrior Animal. Jacky Richard in his final phase as Monsieur Jacky the evil heel Commissioner in shirt, tie and braces, looking like the head of George Steele on the body of IRS after too many fry-ups for breakfast on the road. Zefy still in his prime. Scott Rider, Flesh's nemesis, the French Giant Haystacks in a kilt. Ring looks like a relic from the TV days. I believe there's some more on that YouTube channel, will check it out.

Another great modern classic from Jordon Breaks from just over a week ago (Fri 6th Oct). Stewart Shephard is very much the heel, but don't let that put you off - apart from one brief flurry of forearms around the 9 minute mark, it's technical wrestling all the way with Shephard also showing off a few good tricks of his own. It's Rumble, so pray excuse the dreadful commentary by Aaron Nix.

They seem to have allowed a lot of stuff that would never swing in the UK. As discussed above, the British referees had to be in charge and in authority at all times. The wimpy ineffective American referees would have been unacceptable on ITV let alone the quasi-heel French referees. They allowed womens' matches on French TV which ITV never did (although it was shown on Reslo on S4C and on various news bulletins and BBC2 Arena docu Raging Belles.) Lengthy ringside fight sequences were ten a penny on Antenne 2 but even short ones were banned from ITV. As discussed, the main ethos of the ITV shows and Kent Walton was to produce upmarket classy wrestling (leaving askde Daddy tags and the odd other comedy bout) that would stop problems like the 1961 attempt by Maurice Herzog to cancel the wrestling on French TV. Britain was lucky to have a commentator like Kent Walton who took the art of the clean scientific match seriously and tried to preach this to his viewers. France's wrestling business was lumbered with the likes of Daniel Cazal who (presumably because of the 1958 dispute) seemed to think it was a test of their journalistic freedom that they be allowed to poke fun at Le Catch.

I guess French TV had looser standards than the IBA. Hence the strap matches and fighting outside the ring.

It's a pity because Michel Saunier was such a good classy lightweight wrestler whereas Delaporte who was one of the most notorious heels became a tough guy trooubleshooter no nonsense ref like MaxWard in England or Gorilla Monsoon in the late 70s WWWF. This whole quasi-heel referee thing seems to have started in about 1977 - Guy Mercier was making it okay for Les Bons to beat up on the ref.

Unfortunately on this one from October 1967 - just about 3 weeks after 2eme Chaine went colour, Couderc says to camera at 0:12 that this is broadcast on "le Premier Chaine" - Channel 1, still in b/w This would seem to indicate that matches continued to be broadcast for some time on both channels including after 2eme went colour. This means (1) a long slog of listening out on over a hundred matches 1964-1974 for what channel they were broadcast on to determine the general pattern - unless anyone has all the transmission details written down - (2) at least some bouts post October 1967 would have been on Channel 1 therefore in black and white originally therefore no chroma dots on those specific film prints. Still at least we know some of those matches were in colour and we do have one actual colour VT from Jan '69 (see further back in thread).

Harry Sefton and Jordan Breaks had another bout in 2022 for New School promotion South London Wrestling