When Wrestling Was Golden: Grapples, Grunts and Grannies (2012)

Pretty Good

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Professional wrestling really took off in the United Kingdom as a music-hall entertainment, with the impresario Charles B. Cochran presenting George Hackenschmidt in a series of exhibition bouts against specially selected opponents. In the Fifties the sport was taken over by a cartel - Joint Promotions - which virtually ran the entire show and obtained a long-running television contact with ITV that ran for thirty-three years until 1988. Wrestling still just about survives as a spectator sport, but it is now a niche interest, as opposed to the late Sixties, when televised bouts could attract audiences of 10-million plus viewers.Linda Sands' documentary highlights the contribution made by some familiar wrestling faces - Mick McManus, Jackie (Mr. TV) Pallo, Big Daddy and Kendo Nagasaki among them - but ignores other well-known figures such as Les Kellett. All of them enjoyed long careers beginning in the Forties and continuing for two, even three decades. Although they expended a lot of energy by putting their bodies on the line in the ring, they were at the mercy of Joint Promotions, which actively fixed bouts in advance so as to secure maximum publicity. In the light of recent events in many sports, where spot-fixing has become commonplace, this doesn't seem a particularly heinous crime, but it was this kind of strategy that prevented wrestling from ever being accepted as a de facto sport, rather than a mix of sport and entertainment.The program claims, wrongly in my opinion, that wrestling was an essentially working-class entertainment. It wasn't; on the contrary, its regular audience (for televised as well as live bouts) was cross-class, with people from all socio-economic backgrounds enjoying the chance to let their hair down by hissing, booing, or even assaulting the fighters on occasions. The atmosphere in most venues resembled that of a bull-fight, with audiences egging on their favorite matadors to chalk up yet another win. The fact that they didn't (with villains like McManus continually winning instead), only served to increase audience interest further.Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this documentary is the equivocal way in which some of the interviewees - notably referee/ promoter Brian Crabtree (brother of Big Daddy aka Shirley Crabtree) - address the question of whether the sport was fixed or not. Perhaps it was; but it provided great entertainment for legions of viewers for many a long year.

I always had a love/hate relationship with British wrestling. It was on at World of Sport, bang on at 4:00 pm on a Saturday afternoon. We had a mix of boring, bad wrestling time and time again. However on the odd occasion you will get someone exciting or interesting. Someone mysterious such as Kendo Nagasaki or dynamic such as Kung Fu or the plain belly flops of Big Daddy.As a young lad I used to go to see Wrestling shows on holiday in a seaside resort. They all used to turn up, Tony St Clair, Klondyke Kate, Les Kellett, The Mighty Quinn are just a few big wrestlers who would come to town in the morning and leave early the next day for the next venue.This documentary was a celebration of British wrestling, its rise and fall and looked at some of the top wrestlers and their famous feuds especially with the bad guys the crowds loved to hate.When wrestling lost its television spot and with the rise of US Wrestling it fell from grace, bad news for young, up and coming wrestlers.There is plenty of footage that brings nostalgia, a reminder of some old faces many of whom are no longer with us. An interesting thought, a lot of the British wrestlers seemed to have lived to a ripe old age, they might have had bad joints etc but compare this to the WWE wrestlers who are lucky to reach the age of 60.

A nostalgic look at the development of British professional wrestling from the start of the twentieth century to the point in the 1960s when it was the most popular indoor sport in the country. Black and white archive footage is interwoven with interviews with those involved in the business, and the programme takes its direction from the mesmerising www.wrestlingheritage.co.uk website whose authors both appear as interviewees. The centrepiece is some enthralling coverage of the feud between London bad boys, Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo. Some of the dangers and mysteries of professional wrestling are revealed, but many more are left shrouded in a secrecy that still exists in the twenty-first century.