by Carrie Dunn
“There are very few real cameramen, who don’t know that you should get real close when someone’s in a submission hold, and watch them selling as much as they can,” he says. “Even though they’re wrestlers, so they should know it, they don’t really know the positions they should be in. To me that’s criminal. I’d rather have a real good production team and some OK wrestlers than great wrestlers and a s***ty production team because one benefits the crowd that are there, and the other benefits the crowd that’s at home, which is really a much larger share.
“If you’re a wrestler, you should know roughly what’s going to happen next when you’re watching a match because you’ve made the story and all the rest of it, but they don’t use experienced wrestlers either, they use the trainees, because ‘trainee’ really means ‘free help’ these days. This is the problem. They don’t want to spend the money. They’d rather get some trainee to do it, and say ‘oh, well, if you do it and help out then you’ll get further in the business’, and then they wonder why they can’t sell any DVDs.
“It’s because they’re filmed by someone who doesn’t have a clue what they’re doing. Well, is it really that expensive to pay someone with a camera who knows what they’re doing when they point it and all the rest of it? Not really, because it’s an investment. You’re not paying just for the fun of it. If you’re filming it, it’s an investment. If you’re not willing to make it look good, don’t bother filming it. What benefit does it have? There’s no benefit.”
Ward is keen for more “television people” to become involved with British wrestling to make the product much more media-friendly, and it’s possible that the first step was taken in 2012 with a fortnightly wrestling magazine show.
WrestletalkTV hit national television screens in August 2012, making the step up from an internet-only YouTube show to a Sunday night, 11pm slot on Challenge, straight after TNA Impact. Presented by radio star Joel Ross, it also features Daily Star journalist Patrick Lennon as a pundit and roving interviewer.
Unsurprisingly, this is another of Alex Shane’s projects. He is the producer and the show’s creator, and has been urging promotions across the country to give the project their support.
“I think the problem is in British wrestling there’s not many people with vision,” says Shane. “People say ‘oh, we need TV’, but I think I’m one of the first people who came up with a method to get on TV, which was training the guys how to do TV from YouTube, and getting the guys mainstream exposure on a regular basis so they’ve got some TV; you can say they’ve done a BBC Asia documentary, or they’ve just done a four-pager in the Daily Star, and using that to get an inkling in people’s heads that there is something going on, and then producing something that is a TV show, even if it is piggybacking on the American success.
“A lot of people just go: ‘Oh, TV’s what we need.’ If we need it, why are you not coming up with a method to get it? I spoke to one company the other day, I asked if they wanted to be a sponsor on WrestleTalkTV, and they said no, we’re going to save our money, because we’re going to make our own TV show and put it on MyChannel, so we don’t need your thing.
“I told them I understand, but how do you think you’re going to get 200,000 wrestling fans to know that you’re on MyChannel? Put it on after Impact. In the end, somebody else took it, because what we were offering it for was so cheap, it was half the price of a full-page advert in PowerSlam and would get ten times the people, probably.
“The guys in Britain, they just don’t get it. They’d rather spend that money on a MyChannel show, but you’ve got to send people to it, just having it isn’t like book it and they will come, it’s not like whack it on TV and then people will watch it – you have to promote it.”
Yet the reaction has been mixed. Viewers have been critical of the show’s production values, suggesting that they have not been improved sufficiently for television.
“Let’s face it, it’s an internet show and it still looks like one,” says one viewer.
“I was really disappointed with the quality of the production,” admits another British-based fan. “Nothing on national television should have such terrible resolution and sound quality. It really distracted me from paying attention to the show. The fact that it looked so low-rent fed into the notion that wrestling equals unprofessional, for me.”
Perhaps more importantly for the show’s long-term future, viewers have also criticised its content. Its intent is to cover the British scene combined with the big American promotions WWE and TNA, but that encompasses a wide range of knowledge and commitment to wrestling fandom. So that means that captions spring up on screen explaining wrestling jargon or giving a brief biography of someone mentioned in an interview.
“I think the show can’t decide who its audience is,” says a fan. “This is not a show that’s going to convert someone new to wrestling. I suspect only fans are going to watch. So I don’t think we need screen wipes telling us who Vince McMahon is, for goodness sake. A good interviewer should be able to work those facts into the conversation if they’re needed. It reminded me of when the BBC show the Superbowl and the commentators explain what a field goal is, while all the fans are watching or listening to the intelligent commentary on Sky Sports.”
Shane suggests that WrestleTalkTV’s intention is to produce an hour-long show that is 25 per cent focused on WWE, 25 per cent on TNA, 25 per cent on British wrestling, and 25 per cent ‘other’, such as Ring of Honor. He admits, though, that most viewers will be interested in the American content, and thus that balance has to be carefully maintained.
“I’d like to say there’s a formula, but there really isn’t,” he admits. “If we get given a good guest we’ll take it. We’ve had to work with Sky compliance; basically everything has to be editorially justified.”
One of the most controversial elements has been ‘The Botch Box’ – a section where the presenter and panel watch and mostly laugh at footage of a wrestler making a mistake (and usually incurring a nasty injury). This hasn’t gone down well with fans or, unsurprisingly, with wrestlers themselves.
“I hate ‘botch of the week’ as I can’t see why they would essentially take the p*** out of the industry they are trying to support,” says one viewer.
A British-based wrestler agrees: “I hate the botch box segment. I don’t see the purpose it serves and beyond that I find the actual box frustrating. Why on earth does he get this little box out, put a DVD in it and then put it back in the drawer? Argh! It’s been said elsewhere but I’d rather see wrestler of the week or a move or finisher of the week rather than a botch.”
Shane thinks that were he not involved with WrestleTalkTV, the show would get much less criticism. “The smart fans hate me,” he happily admits. “I am the Joseph Stalin of smart fans of British wrestling. It’s got to the point now where in wrestling people will say: ‘Did you see that comment that the people made about you?’ They’ll say ‘oh, it’s terrible’, but then they won’t defend me.”
He also puts a lot of the flak down to the anonymity offered by the internet, meaning that people can post on social media and on fan forums without identifying themselves by name. “As soon as you meet a lot of these people, you will no longer be upset. Some guy will come up to you who has probably never spoken to a member of the opposite sex in their lives – I’m not saying all smart fans, I’m saying generally the most vocal ones – and they’re frustrated with their own lives, and they feel that their brain for wrestling should make them the head of a wrestling company.
“Because they’ve got that frustration, that insecurity, they’ve got no platform to vent it, so the fan forums are their wrestling ring, and because they don’t attach a picture to it, there’s anonymity, which is an amazing thing, wow, but also even when you’ve got anonymity, it’s like prank phonecalling. Just because someone doesn’t know it’s you, it doesn’t make it right to call them up and tell them they’re a d*** – I don’t get it.
“What happens is yo
u’ll meet this person, they’ll come up and they’ll be like: ‘Oh, Alex, can I have an autograph please?’ And I’ll be: ‘Yeah, who should I make it to?’ And they’ll say ‘Graham’ and I’ll say: ‘Graham who?’ And they’ll say ‘Graham Simpleton’ and I’ll say: ‘Not the same Graham Simpleton that’s so-and-so on the fan forum?’ And they drop. They’ll say: ‘How did you know that?’ And I’ll say ‘because I check your profiles after’ and they’ll say ‘oh, I was only joking’ and I’ll say: “That’s alright, don’t worry about it, do you want this personalised?’ They’ll walk away and I’m really nice to them, I never flip out.
“I used to go on forums ten years ago and have real rants at these people, but then you see them, and you go: ‘I thought you were Brad Pitt with Bill Gates’s bank balance, and you’ve said all this s*** about me and I’ve just seen you.’ The reason I get it more than most people is because what is my skill? When I did my MySpace profile it said ‘occupation’ and I put ‘walking contradiction’ – it’s still up there now, actually – because I didn’t know what it was. Instead of spending their energy doing something constructive, they’re spending it on a forum deconstructing stuff, and ultimately, unless you work in a car wrecker’s, doing deconstruction is not what’s going to create anything constructive in your life. So you’ve just got to disconnect.”
And yet Shane also admits that the voices of wrestling fans cannot easily be ignored, because people inside and outside the business pay attention to what’s being said by the people who buy show tickets and merchandise.
“I do believe in freedom of speech, but sometimes I also believe in a bit of responsibility to a point as well,” he says. “The whole thing of everybody having a voice is definitely a good thing, but there’s also a point when you’ve got to realise that voice can damage the business. I work with TV companies quite a lot; they come to me and say we’re going to do a feature on wrestling, so we looked on the fan forums to see what shows there are, and that’s the first thing they see [the critical forum threads], so it does have a detrimental effect to outsiders; actually, their frustrations are now damaging. It is negative.”
And, as Shane hints, on a scene as comparatively small as the UK’s, complaining and in-fighting can easily have a detrimental effect very quickly. It’s no wonder, really, that for many of the best British wrestlers, working overseas remains the goal.
Chapter 14:
Brits abroad – the UK wrestlers travelling the world
NO matter how sound the training in the UK and how improved the promotions are, wrestlers inevitably want to travel the world; and many want to further their skills – and earn a wage – elsewhere. Japan, for example, is still a big draw for many of the younger wrestlers, like Lion Kid, who are focused primarily on their ring work rather than their showmanship.
Not only has he wrestled all around the UK and Europe, but he also spent three months in the DragonGate Dojo after his debut for the promotion in 2010 – the first foreign student there.
“Getting taken to Japan was an amazing experience for me and definitely one I would be very honoured to repeat sometime in the future,” he says. “After my match at the second DragonGate tour in 2010, I was approached by the DragonGate office and they offered me the chance to go out to Japan and train at their Dojo following the tour – I actually left just days after the tour to fly to Osaka. I am so grateful I was given the opportunity to be their first foreign attendee at the much-respected Dojo; it was a huge honour for me. I was there for three months, which was the maximum my visa would let me, but in reality would have loved to stay longer.
“When I was there, most of the wrestlers and students spoke a good amount of English so the language barrier wasn’t huge. I studied the culture in small part before going, mostly the etiquette side, as I always wanted to be as respectful as possible.
“But to be honest, I found it best just to observe their way of doing things and mimicking it, or if I was unsure I just asked someone politely. They were very understanding when it came to cultural differences and were happy to educate me and I am very glad they did. The whole trip was an amazing experience.”
Prince Fergal Devitt might have initially made his name in the UK as part of Hammerlock, but he has since gained worldwide fame through his work in Japan.
“I was on a three-month holiday in America which happened to coincide with the annual NWA wrestling convention in Nashville,” he recalls. “I had a match on the show where Dave Marquez of the Inoki Dojo in LA saw me and invited me to train with them. After a couple of months of training there, I was offered a chance to go and train in Tokyo for three months. Seven years on and I’m still here!
“I’ve no idea why they seem to like me – I think I was fortunate to be brought into the Japanese system as one of their own, and not presented as a new foreign star, which I wasn’t. So I started at the very bottom of the ladder and slowly worked my way up.”
Where does he most like wrestling? “That is such a hard question. I could say at home in Ireland in front of my family and friends, or back in the UK as the Irish villain – but if I’m honest with myself I feel most at home in front of the New Japan fans.”
Zack Sabre Jr is another who is establishing a reputation in Japan. By the end of 2012 he had already spent three separate spells out there, all lasting three visa-restricted months, working with the Pro-Wrestling NOAH promotion, and he has also wrestled for American companies as well as others around the world.
He got his chance to wrestle in Japan via his booking on the NOAH European tour in 2011. The previous year, he had wrestled at IPW:UK against Yoshinobu Kanamaru for the GHC Junior title, but despite impressing onlookers nothing came of it. Then in 2011, he was put up against two of their top names, KENTA (in a distressingly hard-kicking match for the squeamish) and Taiji Ishimori.
“That was definitely a test to see how I could hang with their best guys and how that would work out, and those shows went really well,” he says. “The week afterwards, the Japanese office contacted the UK office with the invitation that they wanted me to come out there. It all happened so quickly. The shows happened towards the end of May and I was in Japan for the start of July. It was literally a case of sorting out the visas and all the paperwork, and I was in Japan.”
Since the start of his wrestling career, Sabre had been watching Japanese matches, and found himself fascinated by the culture. He thinks that gave him a bit of a head-start when it came to settling in.
“It wasn’t completely alien to me as it was something that I was interested in, although it’s still no preparation for being there in Tokyo,” he says. He also decided to throw himself wholeheartedly into everything Japan had to offer, and thinks that helped with enjoying his time there.
“There wasn’t a moment when I wasn’t over the moon to be in Japan. I loved it. I made an effort to try everything I was offered and explore every town that we were in. If any of the guys asked if I wanted to go out anywhere, I’d always go out. I tried my best at the language even though I’m a terrible linguist. I’ve managed to pick up more Japanese than I’ve ever picked up of any other language. Wrestling is a universal language within its own sub-culture anyway, and lots of Japanese guys understand English words. The Japanese language imports quite a lot of words, particularly for foreign things. Like, ‘television’ is ‘television’ but they pronounce it ‘terivee’.
“The only difficult thing is when Japanese imports foreign words, they shorten them, so ‘supermarket’ is ‘super’. It’s not incredibly difficult to work out. It’s almost like the Japanese have their own version of Cockney rhyming slang, so ‘sandwich’ is ‘sandwichie’ which can sometimes be ‘wichie’. Do I want a wichie? No, I’m all right, thanks. And there’s like spaghetti sandwiches, and all sorts of things. Japanese food is wonderful, but they get a bit confused with Western-style items.
“For breakfast, there will be like weiner-style sausages sometimes – I don’t really want cocktail sausages for
breakfast. The Japanese-style set breakfast is rice, miso soup, grilled fish, pickles, and there’s always eggs and toast and stuff to eat over there.
“Sometimes you’re baffled by some of the things in this modern Asian country, with the Japanglish and the shop signs – some of the shop signs are hilarious. Because of the trips, I’ve been there for three months, you get so settled.
“Maybe it’s a different experience for someone who’s there touring, but as you are essentially living there, when you’re not touring you get so relaxed into everything, and when I went back for the second trip it felt like I’d been there much longer than just four months when I was a month in to my second trip. But maybe part of that is because I’ve always wanted to be there so much that it feels natural for me to be there. I’ve had my fair share of Lost in Translation-style conversations, and watching television adverts not even understanding.
“I understand what they’re advertising,” he hastens to add. “I just don’t understand why it exists, like curry apple sweets, and giant robots outside shopping centres, and grown men reading comic books everywhere, and people walking round in cosplay costumes.”
Having completed his third tour of Japan in late 2012, he now feels relatively settled there. “Lots of wrestlers now say they want to tour Japan, but I’m sure it’s just to tick off a list and move on. For me, my dream is not only to have a career in Japan but be a success over there. It wasn’t really my concern to go out and have five-star matches on my first couple of trips because that wasn’t what was expected of me. I’m early on in the card, I’m being taken in as one of their young guys, so for me it’s important to establish myself as being different and being someone that they should invest in.
“So I really concentrated on the European style, or European aspect of my style, and trying to stand out and be unique and impress the office and the wrestlers all really got behind that and liked that I can have a unique style.”