by Carrie Dunn
Promotions on television
It is odd that in recent years TV really hasn’t worked out for British wrestling companies. Indeed, some people within the world of wrestling will tell you that the industry needs a regular high-profile television slot before it can claim any kind of true revival and before any promotions can claim themselves to be a genuine success.
So, as Elliott suggests, promotions have been working towards securing television coverage and appealing to the mainstream, harking back to the heyday of World of Sport, and yet none of them have as yet managed any long-term link-ups.
Wrestlers know very well that mainstream TV appearances will be the only way they increase their fame level, and so sometimes you find them popping up in the most unlikely of places.
Marty Scurll went one better than YouTube videos, making himself a minor celebrity through his appearance on dating show Take Me Out in January 2012. He still seems a little bewildered by the media interest, which was bolstered by a plethora of lurid headlines about the contestants’ activities off-camera.
“I thought that maybe I’d get recognised by a couple of people,” he says. “But I’m going out and loads of people recognise me, and want pictures, and they’re talking to me on Twitter…”
He thinks back. “The first two or three months was crazy,” he concludes.
The contestants in this series have had much more media attention than those on the previous two; with immense understatement, Scurll confesses: “I didn’t think it’d blow up in the way it has.”
His appearance on Take Me Out also included a classic rib from his friend Jimmy Havoc, who recorded a deadpan VT revealing to the world that Scurll is a massive fan of boy-bands. “The entire show is trying to stitch you up! I had no idea that was coming!” he laughs.
He says that most of the wrestlers on the scene were supportive at the time. “I didn’t really get ribbed about it – everyone thought it was quite funny! I’m glad I did it, it was a good experience.”
He said at the time, though, it wasn’t an experience he was planning to repeat – “unless the TV show is a wrestling show!”
Well, quite. The latest slot for British wrestlers on national television has been TNA’s British Boot Camp, a six-part series which began on Challenge TV on New Year’s Day 2013 – and starred Scurll, the Blossom Twins, and eventual winner Rockstar Spud. The concept was to “search for a UK superstar” as the quartet were billed as battling it out for a single TNA contract, and headed to the US to be trained by high-profile coaches, including Hulk Hogan and British legend Rollerball Rocco.
Of course, it wasn’t a contest per se. This was a ‘reality TV’ show – yes, just as planned and as scripted as any of the other programmes from the genre, such as Made In Chelsea or The Only Way Is Essex – but in the typical TNA style, where the wrestlers seem to be filmed covertly as they interact with each other out of the ring while furthering the in-ring storylines.
The feedback from the series has been good – with non-wrestling fans attracted to the soap opera-esque storylining and the character progression that you would expect in this kind of mini-series, and wrestling fans enjoying the chance to see people they’re familiar with heading for the big time.
Ben Auld of Southside Wrestling knows both male contestants well – both have worked for him regularly. Though Rockstar Spud – a diminutive character with a raging ego – might seem peculiarly British with his leather-jacket-wearing, sunglasses-sporting, karaoke-spewing, wannabe antics, Auld thinks his uniqueness will appeal to a big worldwide audience.
“I think in some ways Marty is the odd one out, because they can get someone as good as Marty probably – who’s a really good wrestler – who’s already in America into there for the same money,” he says. “There’s only one Rockstar Spud. He could transform that [character] into what TNA would want to use. I remember watching a match where he got in the face of Abyss and got the s*** kicked out of him, he’s so good at making people not like him. I actually think he’s the smartest, cleverest guy in the UK. I seriously do. When I started promoting, straight away on my list, number one, who I wanted to work with, without a shadow of a doubt, more than anyone, was Spud.
“Much as people think he’s an idiot and he acts an idiot, he’s not really. He’s very, very clever, and he gets the business, he really, really does get the business. I’d say there’s probably only a few people in the country who get the business so much. He just knows. He can tell you exactly how a crowd will react, he knows how to make them react in any way he wants, eating out of the palm of his hand.
“The last show I did, do you know how long his match lasted? Fifteen seconds at the most. It was one of the pops of the night when he got pinned. He went out there and gobbed off at the crowd for ten minutes, gobbed off at his opponent, and then got rolled up. I had some of the other wrestlers going: ‘Man, I come in and put a shift in for you, and you pay Spud what I get paid.’ You don’t understand, do you? You don’t understand that he gets the same reaction as you without doing it. He’ll go and film a promo and put it all over Twitter, and get people interested in his match. You don’t do any of that. I think the guy’s a genius, I really do.
“But I think a lot of both of them. I hope [all four of them] do make it and do well out there. I hope that’s what happens because I think that’ll be good for British wrestling.”
Wrestling is also good fodder for behind-the-scenes television documentaries. Faking It, featuring the wrestlers of Hammerlock, remains the best-known UK documentary about the scene, but almost ten years later, Channel 4 produced another programme – Fighting With My Family, featuring the Knight family.
It was initially intended to track the progress of the whole clan, but ended up following their teenage daughter Saraya-Jade, known on the UK scene as Britani Knight, as she transformed into WWE Diva Paige. The programme showed her leaving behind her parents Ricky and Julia, aka Sweet Saraya, but also her older brother Zak Zodiac, who was at the same WWE try-outs but was told to shape up before they would consider signing him.
As the focus was firmly on the next generation of Knights, Sweet Saraya’s own stellar wrestling career didn’t get mentioned too much, but even so, she still managed to sneak a SHIMMER-logoed t-shirt into shot, reminding us all that she was their champion.
Zak, meanwhile, came across as slightly bitter and jealous, complaining that getting signed by WWE is easier for girls – when his self-pitying monologues were juxtaposed with his teenage sister relocating alone to the other side of the world and crying with homesickness and desperation to fulfil her dad’s dream for her, it was hard to feel too sorry for him.
“Having been up there a few times, it was a very accurate portrayal of the family,” says Rhia O’Reilly. “They’re a bit chaotic but they love each other very deeply.”
Though this show was a one-off, the producers have been muttering about potentially making a series in the future. The Knights would seem ideal material for some kind of docusoap – they are honest, they are eccentric, they are outspoken but what keeps them compelling is their love for each other – and of course, it’s all set against the backdrop of the fascinating labyrinth of the British wrestling scene.
In-ring and on-screen
Though there has been little British in-ring action on television recently, some promotions are now beginning to buck the trend, and going one step further than just putting out their own show DVDs, and are putting together episodic TV shows, either for their own websites or in some cases for national TV channels.
“Independents both here and globally tend to be a lot more fun to watch, with fans that are not just there because their dad’s a fan, or brother’s a fan, or whatever: the fans that go pay their hard-earned money and expect to have a good time and to see some top-quality action,” says wrestling fan Sean Walford.
“I’ve found the promotions don’t really tend to run storyline as much: they’re not constrained by time on promos or on advertising, so they
can tell the guys to have a solid 25 to 30-minute match – and they can do one heck of a job. The fans that tend to go to these shows are mostly hardcore wrestling fans and they go to these shows to witness good wrestling. Most are the type that like to chant and shout constantly which I feel gets through to the wrestlers in the ring and makes them perform even better. They’re cheaper [than WWE or TNA] too and you will often find an ex-talent from one of the big two, which is always a nice addition!”
“There are a couple of promotions I’ve kept an eye on: I’ve heard a lot about IPW as they generally seem to mix UK and well-known international talent which is a good draw as it is an easier way of getting used to the UK talent,” says Rob Poulloin. “I’ve also followed a bit of Southside as they are more local to me, living in Leicester.”
However, Poulloin’s also found himself watching UK wrestling on television more recently thanks to those promotions putting together their own shows to air.
“And I have watched a few promotions on MyChannel: one being Insane Championship Wrestling which despite being over-the-top has some good talent – I mainly watched it to see how good Noam Dar was after hearing rave reviews.”
Over-the-top is rather an understatement, as can be guessed from the promotion’s name. Based in Glasgow, and probably the most successful current Scottish-based promotion, ICW’s intent is to appeal to an adult audience, with everything that implies from extreme violence (and bloodshed) to terrifying stunts to bad language.
So that’s why ICW’s move to episodic TV shows on a Sky digital channel caused a bit of a stir in UK circles. This wasn’t just a camcorder in a half-empty sports hall – this was a production with storylines and vignettes.
Founder Mark Dallas wanted to lure back in adults who had been wrestling fans in their younger years but had fallen out of love with the mainstream products.
“My goal was to have a product where the wrestling was great, but also everything was aimed at adults,” he explains. “I thought there was a huge gap in the market.”
Dallas had a five-year plan to secure television coverage, but achieved it in half the time. Taking advice from Rob Cage, one of his roster, who worked in television, he intended to run ICW’s TV series as an internet-only feature running parallel to the live shows – as he describes it, “a wee show...just something to watch so you could follow it” – but then was overtaken by events when executives from MyChannel got in touch. They had already been airing shows produced by the promotion UK Wrestling, which were more family-oriented, and clearly thought that ICW could fill a gap in their scheduling.
“Out of the blue, completely out of the blue, I got an e-mail – right away I thought it was a wind-up,” says Dallas. “We never even pursued it – they came to us. It was right out of the blue. To this day I do not know how they found out about us.”
Dallas told the channel team about the principles behind his promotion, with its clearly-delineated good guys and bad guys, and its focus on the over-18s market. They were very keen to secure a link-up as soon as possible using the footage ICW were already producing.
“They said if you’re making a show online, why don’t you do this, and we’ll put it on TV,” he says. “They said: ‘Obviously the quality’s not that great, so we’ll give you a spot at one in the morning, and if you can gradually improve the camera quality and the sound quality, all these things, we’ll treat it as a work in progress.’”
ICW slotted into that 1am spot and attracted good ratings, meaning that MyChannel made the deal permanent, repeating the show throughout the week. However, Dallas found his promotion off air in mid-2012 when MyChannel made a massive scheduling error. The wrestling content was most definitely post-watershed, what with the adult language and the violence on show – but early in the morning of 6 May, MyChannel, for some reason, ended up airing an ICW programme.
Dallas and his team were horrified at this mistake, describing it in a media release as “ridiculous”, and maintained: “We did everything the channel asked us to do from day one, we made it clear we were aimed at an adult market and we at all times stuck to the guidelines given to us by the channel.”
Hauled up before regulator Ofcom, MyChannel admitted that they had made a mistake. Although they usually showed ICW after the watershed – at 1am on Saturdays, 9.30pm on Tuesdays, and 1am on Wednesdays – this 5am screening was due to human error. They claimed that on 6 May, the programme should have been broadcast at a new time of 3am but ended up going out two hours later – just about the time when parents are rising with their small children.
And thus MyChannel’s proposed ameliorative solution was to broadcast an apology – and to remove ICW from its schedules altogether. Dallas was disappointed that the channel had not communicated the severity of the problem to him, suggesting in a public statement that he had been “strung along”.
Since then, ICW have continued to produce YouTube clips, and also been the focus of a documentary, The British Wrestler, created by the global magazine Vice. At the moment, though, there are no intentions for them to return to mainstream television.
Though other promotions have mooted plans to secure their own TV slots, nothing at the time of writing has been confirmed. Ben Auld of Southside Wrestling is one promoter who has no interest in getting his promotion on the small screen.
“With us, I’m not looking at a TV deal or anything like that,” he admits. “I love British wrestling, and I believe Southside are capable of doing it but I don’t believe I’ve got the time myself to make it possible for us to do it. If I had done it, I’d want to do it well. I don’t believe I’d have the time.”
The closest British wrestling has come to a decent TV profile in recent years was probably The Fight Network (previously branded as The Wrestling Channel), which ran for four years from 2004 under the ownership of Sean Herbert, airing programmes on a Freeview digital channel that encompassed MMA and boxing as well as professional wrestling.
It relied on using imports and archive shows, but did have a small amount of original programming, and LDN promoter Sanjay Bagga was heavily involved in organizing the talent and card for these shows, having worked with Herbert previously.
“I had an event in Romford that was sold out with people paying to stand, and someone had put pics on the internet of a huge crowd,” recalls Bagga. “He sent me an e-mail to congratulate me and invited me to TWC HQ in London, at Dolphin TV; and after a few hours of negotiations I signed a contract to the channel to produce weekly television.”
The idea behind LDN’s involvement was that the old archive repeats of World of Sport had been drawing huge audiences – the highest drawing show on the channel, suspected Bagga at the time, suggesting that these programmes were doing even better than the brand-new content from TNA.
“They were looking for a modern-day version of the British stuff,” he says.
And it was moderately popular in its time. “It was a ground-breaking channel in fairness,” says Joe Boothman, who was a teenager when he was addicted to the programming. “If I was ever bored on the weekends, after school or during the school holidays I used to watch the channel all day. It opened up a whole new vision of wrestling to me and most probably many others at my age too.
“We were used to the WCW and WWE shows but this was different. If that channel was still on today and was still free I would certainly watch it over the WWE as there was less of these corny, rubbish and boring promos and storylines. It was straight to the point and that point was providing unrivalled entertainment for wrestling fans. I will always hold that channel responsible for keeping my faith in wrestling in the 21st century.”
Yet Boothman was an exception. Bagga’s suspicions were right – the old-style British wrestling was incredibly popular, but the new material wasn’t. The Wrestling Channel transformed into The Fight Network, allowing the schedulers to include MMA programming as well as adult material post-watershed, all in order to stay afloat.
Even so, wrestling for the came
ra is an art form that many still neglect. It is easy to pose for photographers’ shots – “I’m a DVD cover whore!” jokes Darrell Allen – but making the most of being filmed live is much trickier.
Most promotions now produce their own DVDs of previous shows to sell, but that doesn’t mean their wrestlers are performing for the audience watching on television. Instead, they are, understandably, performing just for the crowd there in the room, because they’re very rarely given any training in working for the TV cameras.
Majik picked up everything he knows about wrestling for the cameras from his experience on Transatlantic Wrestling Challenge. The show’s producers gave him guidance as they progressed through the series, but he admits that he didn’t make the most of it at the time.
“Their advice was mostly not put to use due to age and nerves, but reflected on and applied since,” he says. However, he wonders if now he is too aware of cameras filming him when he’s in the ring – “to the detriment of the live audience, unfortunately”.
“One thing I always try and do, if I know the show is being filmed for DVD, I always try and get on camera,” admits Phil Ward – never shy of the limelight as the evil Warden. “The first FPW show, actually, there’s someone holding a camera right in front of me, and I’m like ‘get out of my face!’ and pushed it out of the way. That’s a great moment. That’s been on every single promo for that show since then, and I knew it would, because I was the only one who’d worked to the camera. You forget there’s an even bigger crowd, potentially, through that little lens – it’s so easy to forget that.”
One point he does make is that even though shows are filmed, they’re not necessarily filmed by professionals – more like wannabe professional wrestlers.