You’ll have to excuse the absence of a Raw review this week as the good people at SKY television here in the UK experienced a temporary fault for fifteen minutes of the show and this lag knocked the active adverts out of time with the proper commercial breaks and the broadcast was littered with red dots and car advert pop-ups (UK viewers will know what I mean). For someone who’s been recording and taking the commercials out of both Raw and Smackdown since they started here in the UK this is a small disaster to my tape collection. Granted, I can record the show when it is repeated on Thursday and the show was of sufficient content (except for Benoit’s juice) that it shouldn’t be subjected to the vagaries of SKY’s draconian censorship ideals but I still find myself in a suitably psychotic enough frame of mind that to review the show would be to belittle my annoyance at the situation. Anyway, my review would be incomplete with regard to the missing minutes so I won’t bother this week.
It appears as though we have some time to kill.
How are you?
I’m fine, thanks for asking. I’m recovering from a cold, should be back to normal in a few days.
Look, this isn’t going to work. I usually write just over fifteen hundred words, I can’t make small talk for another one thousand, two hundred and seventy words (give or take a few), I’ll go mad. I’ll tell you what, I’ll do something I vowed not to do when I started writing my columns and I’ll tell you a bit about myself. Not the really good stuff, just the boring bits. At least this way you’ll be able to insult me properly when you send me an email (Me? A loser??). How about some background information to start with?
I was born in 1971 in a rough area of North London (is there any other kind?). I grew up in both London and a small village called Reading (which soon became a small city called Reading) and I excelled at many subjects in school (detention, truancy, spitting on the headmaster). Unfortunately I left school with the equivalent qualifications required to get a good job as a laboratory rat but I was saved when my parents bought a hotel in the south west of Scotland. I then made the fatal mistake of meeting the woman of my dreams and becoming happy which killed any ambition I may have had to live the single life and travel the world acting like a complete and utter whore. I was married in 1994 and I haven’t looked back since (primarily because if I do she’ll take all the money out of my pockets). I decided to restart my education, enrolling in computer courses and writing freelance art reviews and columns for a local newspaper but my efforts at rejuvenation were curtailed when I fell off a ladder (not during a wrestling match) and developed Rheumatoid Arthritis from the resulting injuries. On a good day, my tablets do enough of a job that I appear to be perfectly normal (physically speaking) but my bad days could be a lot better. I’m the bass player and main songwriter in a band but none of us are twenty anymore and the desire to become superstars is rapidly falling a poor second to other priorities. I spend my time thesedays writing, playing music and watching sport as a replacement for not being able to play anymore. I have a suspicious beard, two left feet (neither of which are mine) and an addiction to nothing.
My first introduction to pro-wrestling was the World of Sport shows on Saturday afternoons during the late 70’s, early 80’s. Not understanding the nature of wrestling it was more of an oddity than anything else and a good excuse to turn the tv off and go outside (no computer games for us – man, do I feel old). Professional wrestling then disappeared in the UK for several years until the early 90’s when WCW was broadcasting on a free-to-air terrestrial channel and the WWF was on the still new SKY network which at the time was perceived as a novelty, a luxury or an embarrassment depending on your perspective.
Sid Vicious was the first thing that I noticed. I liked that he was announced as coming from “Wherever he darn well pleases” and he looked insane, the sweat pouring from his frighteningly tight blonde perm. Okay, the show was only an hour of squash matches but I got to know guys like Vader, Ricky Steamboat, 2 Cold Scorpio, Bobby Eaton, Ron Simmons and Rick Rude. You could tell Sting was the real star of the show but he rarely appeared on the broadcast and it suffered as a result.
When I started dating the woman who was to become my wife, I’d noticed that she had SKY at her house and during one visit I saw a promo for an upcoming WWF programme. I was amazed at how colourful and bright it looked compared to WCW. Everything seemed to be so theatrical and over the top and the crowds were bigger and noisier. I also saw Jake Roberts slap Miss Elizabeth, now that kind of thing didn’t happen in WCW. The following show, Jake encouraged his snake to bite Randy Savage in the shoulder and they seemed to take great pleasure in showing you the fangs going into his flesh; over and over again. What the hell kind of product was this? I loved it! It was another two years before my family got a SKY satellite dish installed, the week after Wrestlemania IX to be precise, and I started recording the good bits from the tv shows that weekend (the first thing on tape one is Sherri Martel cutting a promo on Luna Vachon). Raw eventually became a regular feature on SKY (I think the first UK Raw main event was British Bulldog against Undertaker in ’94 or ‘95) and they also picked up Smackdown later than it started in the states due to contractual discussions.
To their credit SKY have treated the WWE with a certain amount of respect, surprising when you consider the volume of complaints that they get because it appears on a ‘sports’ channel. My main gripe is that the programmers at SKY still view wrestling as a child’s interest and censor it accordingly. If any of you can remember when Debra received the ‘bloodbath’ from The Brood, SKY edited out this act completely despite it obviously being red paint dropping from the ceiling and not blood. And I still haven’t seen Trish Stratus stripping to her underwear and barking like a dog (not that I want to look at that kind of thing). This censorious practice has now been superseded by the live Raw broadcasts (if they work correctly) but Smackdown is still subject to the editor’s blade, even when it is shown as late as midnight. For any American reader who marvels at how the vast majority of WWE supercards are free for UK fans (only four or five out of twelve are PPV) remember to take into account that you don’t have to pay a $200 television licence fee whether you watch the damn BBC or not.
I’ve been to four live WWE events. One in Glasgow, Scotland (the main event was Bret Hart against Owen Hart) and three at the Manchester Evening News arena, including the Raw taping last year. In fact, if anyone has a video copy of that event, I’m the guy in the black and white shirt during the opening ‘pyro and cheering’ who’s arguing with a yellow-jacketed usher seen from behind looking towards the Titantron. I wont be going to the post-Wrestlemania live events here in the UK this time but I’m hoping that I might be making the trip to Chicago for Wrestlemania 22 next year, if things go to plan and we can get tickets. Now that would be a long column.
I’ve got wrestling tapes in my collection from WWE, WCW, ECW, USWA, SMW, CZW, CCW, AJPW, NJPW, GAEA, FWA, ROH, FMW and some interesting MMA stuff but my most prized tape is the IWA King of Death Match Tournament in which Cactus Jack beat Terry Funk in the final contest, a study in horror of which Hollywood would be proud if it had the balls to make it. I’m a big fan of Mick Foley and I believe the best wrestler of all time to be the Dynamite Kid Tommy Billington, who was one half of the British Bulldogs tag team with Davey Boy Smith. I like to think that there’s a place for all types of wrestling in the world, you just pick the ones you want to see and let other people enjoy the stuff you don’t. I hate censorship, religious zeal and political correctness and I’m not that fond of chocolate – but then we can’t all agree on everything.
I enjoy writing these columns and I’ve found renewed enthusiasm for the business in reading your emails and comments regarding my opinions. I’ve also been lucky enough to meet my best friend through these wrestling columns, someone I’ve never actually met but I will. I hope you’ll let me know if my writing becomes unchallenging or placative, for my part I’ll do my best to continue to be abrasive and honest. Not quite up there with Jerry Maguire’s mission statement but at least it’s something.
Hopefully you’ve found something interesting in this column and be assured that my Raw review will return next week, unless the UK signal goes down again. Christ knows what I’ll talk about then. I might tell you the story of how I cracked my skull during a game of chess. Then again, don’t ask.
Lee
