Les Kellett

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[Exposer]

OJ got anything on Les Kellett?

[ohtani's jacket]

Kellett was a comedy worker and one of the biggest stars of the 60s and 70s. He was all smiles on screen but a bit of a prick backstage. He was notoriously hard (hard meaning tough), and according to Adrian Street liked to take real bumps during his bouts. There's only a dozen or so Kellett matches on tape and that includes matches held by private collectors. The footage we have is from the tale end of his career in the early-to-mid 70s. There's nothing available from the 60s as of yet. The British style of comedy wrestling is somewhat unique in that the workers are always talking to someone -- the ref, their opponent, the crowd, the commentator -- and making wise cracks. They poke fun at a lot of British wrestling conventions like the Mountevans rules, and the way Walton covers up for it in kayfabe terms is explaining that the wrestlers are intentionally "playing to the galleries." The best Kellett match you watch is the first one because of how different he is, but I do like his matches with Bobby Barnes as you've got this hard Yorkshireman going up against an exotico. I wouldn't vote for him w/out more footage, but he's one of the great characters of British wrestling and I know Matt has more to say about his timing, reactions and visual humour.

[Matt D]

I like to have as much context as possible in situations like this. To me, the issue isn't that I haven't seen more Kellett but that I haven't seen more British comedy in general, because I'm not entirely sure how brilliant he was and how brilliant the style itself was. That said, on some level I see a vote for him as a vote for the style in general. That he has a number of matches where he's not different, but where the specific things he does ARE stands out to me after seeing, for instance, dozens of comedy midget matches where they do much the same things.

 

Even if the 5-6 matches I've seen is the sum of what he does, and I feel fairly certain it's not, that'd be impressive to me on some level.

 

Am I voting for him? I don't know, but he may be the best I've ever seen at a specific thing. He's the world's funniest Crusher basically.

[Exposer]

He sounds fun. It doesn't sound like he has enough footage for me to vote for him, but I am interested. "The world's funniest Crusher" sounds amazing for some reason.

[Jetlag]

For my money Kellett is an amazing character and a guy you have to see once in your lifetime but you have be pretty into that showman style of wrestling to put him anywhere near a Top 100. He could put on a pretty brutal match at times, picture 2000s Kikuchi except without the serious matches on tape. He has about as much of a case as Mitsuo Momota.

[ohtani's jacket]

I forgot that there's some 60s footage of him in the Granada TV documentary The Wrestlers:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55EgYoYaQU8

 

The bloke he's wrestling is "Jumping" Jim Hussey, the father of Mark "Rollerball" Rocco. The other match featured is Billy Robinson vs. Roy "Bull" Davis, father of Skull Murphy. There's also a segment where Robinson is teaching some young fellas in Riley's gym and one of the onlookers looks a lot like a young Marty Jones.

[mmcoor]

one of the few comedy wrestlers that actually makes me laugh out loud