Catch TV in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Monaco (1950s-1960s)

[David Mantell]

@Robert S - German/Austrian fans can get quite agitated at improper use of the term "CWA"- like labelling the whole of traditional/Old School British Wrestling as "World Of Sport". 

At the time of the Inoki tour the promotion was still called the IBV (established 1973) and owned by one Nico Selenkowitsch.  The Inoki tour was, I believe the work of the older rival VDB.  The initials CWA first became part of German/Austrian wrestling lore in summer 1978 when Don Leo Johnathan arrived in the territory with the Canadian Wrestling Association World Heavyweight Championship and lost it to Otto Wanz (Otto having previously been interim champion during a tour of South Africa the previous summer in between local top babyface Jan Wilkins and the said DLJ). Roland Bock's title win over Inoki in November was supposed to set him up as a rival World champion to Otto. FFWD to 1987, Otto and Peter Wilhelm held a coup against Selenkowitsch and take over the IBV,renaming both it and Otto's title the CATCH Wrestling Association.  

An old time German fan writes:

Quote

"I want to get something off my chest here, I hope this is the right place in the Euro forum. I have been involved with wrestling/catch-hugging in Europe for almost 40 years now, especially the scene and tournaments in Germany and Austria, which I have researched extensively and time-consuming. It has bothered me for a long time that everything that happens in Austria/Germany is automatically attributed to the CWA. A well-known data site even goes back to 1972, which is utter bullshit. The CWA as an organized association that held events under its banner did not exist before 1988, event 87. But then only in Austria in Graz and from 89 onwards in Vienna. Before that, if you look at the CWA there was a title. In 1977 (not 73 as often says on the internet), Otto won the rights to a CWA title that Jan Wilkens had previously held in South Africa. There was also no tournament, as is always mentioned here. Otto passed the title on to Don Leo. Here, too, the date of September 1, 1977, is incorrect; I doubt there was even a fight. The reason was that it was obviously better for Wanz to win the title from a champion in his hometown than to come home with a belt that no one knows how, where, and especially against whom he "won" it. DLJ got a good payday, and from 1978 onward Otto called himself the CWA World Champion. Back then, however, it was still called the "Canadian Wrestling Association" (it didn't exist, but whatever). Otto defended the title at home at his shows, which he had organized since 1972, primarily in Bremen, where Nico Selenkowitsch saw potential in Otto and built him up as a top European heavyweight champion. This was also evident in Otto's 1978 World Championship title, which was contested in a tournament in Bremen against Nico of the IBV (International Professional Wrestlers Federation). The success proved everyone right, Otto thrilled the crowds and Nico was able to fill the halls. The events were always run under the IBV, however, and CWA only came into play on the final evening, when Otto received a share of each spectator in addition to his fee. When Nico stepped down in 1987, more or less due to intrigues involving new management at the Bremen town hall and other sideways movements, Otto took over together with Peter William. The same thing happened in Vienna. After the 1988 tournament, Heinrich Kaiser (who did not organize CWA for the VDB) was ousted, and Wanz and William took over the waltz city as well. Hanover also belonged to Kaiser and the VDB until 1990. Then, in 1991, a discotheque owner named Jürgen Windolph took over, also for the VDB. However, it was only for one year, then Paul Violka came along and now the CWA with Peter William. Wanz was never an organizer in Hanover. Sure, he got his percentage for the name, but he had no say, only William did. Cities like Karlsruhe, Hamburg and others were never CWA territory. It annoys me that I have been educating people for years and then again,As in this case, various sites like Twitter, sorry, X, or YouTube simply refer to everything as CWA. But it isn't. Anyone who's interested can read it. Most people don't care; they'll just stick with CWA."

 

[Jetlag]

So I actually emailed the Swiss and Monaco TV archive about this stuff...

Swiss archivers said they don't have them archived because the reels were purchased from elsewhere. So that confirms the suspicion from earlier, that these were probably French bouts purchased for Swiss TV.

Monaco archive said they had some reels but they degraded while in storage and ended up unusable. Apparently they have 1 20 minute match that can be viewed on their premises but that's it, and they didn't specify what it was. Otherwise just newsreel type clips.

Bummer, but makes me appreciate the French archiving effort more.

[Phil Lions]

Thanks for reaching out and looking into it!

Meanwhile, I've been researching the Luxembourg TV listings and have become convinced all of the footage in Luxembourg/Switzerland/Monaco was indeed coming from France. The Swiss archive's response further confirms it. And man, Luxembourg had a lot of catch on TV. Two times per week for a decade plus. I'm up to 1970 in the research. I'll share the findings once I'm done.

[David Mantell]

6 hours ago, Phil Lions said:

Thanks for reaching out and looking into it!

Meanwhile, I've been researching the Luxembourg TV listings and have become convinced all of the footage in Luxembourg/Switzerland/Monaco was indeed coming from France. The Swiss archive's response further confirms it. And man, Luxembourg had a lot of catch on TV. Two times per week for a decade plus. I'm up to 1970 in the research. I'll share the findings once I'm done.

Most of all these channels' signal reach seems to be inside France. Télé Monte Carlo especially smacks of its true remit having been a glorified private sector competitor to (O)RTF, broadcasting into France from bordering Francophone territory.

Most of the French b/w films prior to INA's launch in 1975 appear to have been brought in in bulk from ORTF's overseas sales department. If we only knew what arrangements INA made for ongoing 819 line b/w content on TF1 once it was launched, we might be able to track down that 1975 Johnny Saint match.

If TMC and the Luxembourg and Romardy channels were just screening French TV footage, they could have acquired kinescopes from the same overseas sales department that generated the prints the INA now hold. If so, most likely they all used one print per broadcast and bicycled each print between them.(as we discussed a couple of years ago, this was how overseas TV sales worked back then)

Well done on contacting the archives @Jetlag.  Has anyone been able to track down that full Roland Bock documentary from which the mid/late 70s 16mm colour clips come?  They're all watermarked SWR which apparently is this station:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Südwestrundfunk

[Phil Lions]

I've updated the original post with my findings on Luxembourg. The key points:

- Catch aired on TV in Luxembourg from 1956 to 1972.
- For the majority of that period it was airing on TV twice a week so overall Luxembourg had way more catch on TV than France did.
- Catch had fixed time slots in Luxembourg, which is something it never really had in France.
- This is true for both Switzerland and Luxembourg (and probably for Monaco too): sometimes the matches that were airing in these countries were filmed two or even three years prior. It wasn't always current footage.

[David Mantell]

On 10/3/2025 at 1:27 AM, David Mantell said:

Has anyone been able to track down that full Roland Bock documentary from which the mid/late 70s 16mm colour clips come?  They're all watermarked SWR which apparently is this station:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Südwestrundfunk

@Jetlag - Any idea what "Der sportliche Held" was?

 

[David Mantell]

Anyway, talking of Switzerland I just recalled that THIS took place there in the mid 90s:

 

 

[David Mantell]

Bob Plantin recentely commented on the Luxembourg shows:

Téléluxembourg  ,  venaient  filmer  des  matchs 
en  France  en  toute  discrétion...........
Les  lutteurs  n ' étant  pas  informés  _ 
ya  pas de  petites  économies..........

FB auto translate to English:

Teleuxembourg, came to film matches
In France in all discretion...
Wrestlers not being informed _
There are no small savings..........

He also posted a TV listings cutting (along with a seemingly irrelevant pic - other than that he was Plantin's opponent on that broadcast -  of a young Paul Lagache)

[David Mantell]

On 9/14/2025 at 12:09 PM, Phil Lions said:

- November 12, 1964 (at 22:00): Pierre Lagache vs. Bob Plantin with commentary by Jean Renaux

This one, I presume

[Phil Lions]

I've updated the original post a little bit with some new research regarding Monaco. So here's a couple of fun stats:

Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1954: 2 or 3
Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1955: 9 or 10
Catch TV broadcasts in Monaco in 1955: 30

In short, Monaco was the first place to start broadcasting French catch on a pretty regular basis. It wasn't until 1957 that France would start doing a similar number of broadcasts per year, and overall only a handful of years in the history of catch on French TV would reach those kinds of numbers.

[David Mantell]

18 hours ago, Phil Lions said:

I've updated the original post a little bit with some new research regarding Monaco. So here's a couple of fun stats:

Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1954: 2 or 3
Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1955: 9 or 10
Catch TV broadcasts in Monaco in 1955: 30

In short, Monaco was the first place to start broadcasting French catch on a pretty regular basis. It wasn't until 1957 that France would start doing a similar number of broadcasts per year, and overall only a handful of years in the history of catch on French TV would reach those kinds of numbers.

Télé Monte Carlo was a private sector broadcaster, ORTF a state run corporation.  No surprises there.  (Ditto ITV vs BBC).

I expect that, like ITV under Lew Grade, TMC was heavily modelled on American commercial networks (from during the TV wrestling boom of the late 40s/early 50s.)

Consider also how TF! suddenly caught the wrestling bug again about a year after its 1987 privatisation.  And what good bedfellows Vince McMahon and Rupert Murdoch made for 3 decades.

[ohtani's jacket]

22 hours ago, Phil Lions said:

I've updated the original post a little bit with some new research regarding Monaco. So here's a couple of fun stats:

Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1954: 2 or 3
Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1955: 9 or 10
Catch TV broadcasts in Monaco in 1955: 30

In short, Monaco was the first place to start broadcasting French catch on a pretty regular basis. It wasn't until 1957 that France would start doing a similar number of broadcasts per year, and overall only a handful of years in the history of catch on French TV would reach those kinds of numbers.

Where was Monaco getting the footage from?

[David Mantell]

28 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

Where was Monaco getting the footage from?

Either French promoters were doing shows in Monte Carlo or else they were crossing into France to broadcast matches from nearby places like Cap D'Ailles.  Either way, presumably live.

We've already heard from Bob Plantin about how Téléluxembourg worked, just turning up to film odd house shows - possibly notifying promoters, apparently not wrestlers though.

[Phil Lions]

4 hours ago, ohtani's jacket said:

Where was Monaco getting the footage from?

France. Now some of this is an educated conjecture on my part, but based on everything I've read I believe this is how things worked and France was the sole source. The catch footage that aired in France was only a portion of what was actually filmed and most of the footage was airing outside of France in countries where catch was broadcast on TV on a much more regular basis compared to France (i.e. Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco).

[David Mantell]

11 minutes ago, Phil Lions said:

4 hours ago, ohtani's jacket said:

Where was Monaco getting the footage from?

France. 

After the ORTF broadcasts began, were they just screening overseas sales kinescopes of ORTF's wrestling broadcasts or did they send their own crews out to film matches themselves? (like Reslo visiting the German tournaments).

If the former, what was the situation before the ORTF bouts started screening? 

I assume it wasn't just a screening of the clips off pre-1956 news broadcasts (would they, if compiled together, result in a show of satisfactory length?).

[Phil Lions]

58 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

After the ORTF broadcasts began, were they just screening overseas sales kinescopes of ORTF's wrestling broadcasts or did they send their own crews out to film matches themselves? (like Reslo visiting the German tournaments).

If the former, what was the situation before the ORTF bouts started screening? 

I assume it wasn't just a screening of the clips off pre-1956 news broadcasts (would they, if compiled together, result in a show of satisfactory length?).

Not sure about the first part. It definitely wasn't the footage from the news.

[ohtani's jacket]

It seems strange that they were filming matches that didn't air on French television unless they were unused. I wonder if they had commentary. Do you think it was 30 original matches or repeats? 

[David Mantell]

3 hours ago, Phil Lions said:

Not sure about the first part.

OJ asked where the footage was from and you replied France. By that, did you mean it was recycled ORTF footage or that TMC went to France to shoot it?

[Phil Lions]

43 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

It seems strange that they were filming matches that didn't air on French television unless they were unused. I wonder if they had commentary. Do you think it was 30 original matches or repeats? 

I think it was probably original unaired matches, but hard to say for sure without knowing exactly what matches aired each week.

There was definitely commentary. Sometimes the TV listings would mention the commentator. In the case of Monaco in 1955 there's three names mentioned and off the top of my head I don't recognize either one of them as someone who did catch commentary for French TV (although I could be wrong about that) so it seems it was a different commentary crew altogether.
 

15 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

OJ asked where the footage was from and you replied France. By that, did you mean it was recycled ORTF footage or that TMC went to France to shoot it?

Again, I'm not sure about that. By that I mean I don't know if RTF taped the footage and then sold it or if TMC worked out a deal to come in and shoot it themselves. My best guess is the former, but I'm just guessing.

 

[David Mantell]

21 hours ago, Phil Lions said:

if RTF taped the footage and then sold it or if TMC worked out a deal to come in and shoot it themselves.

If the former, it would have been kinescope films, not taped as such.

If the latter it would have been a live screening 

At least in the mid 50s, it would, with both the above.