British Beat – British Wrestling on ITV

By: John Lister | Posted: Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 12:16 pm.

Wrestling on ITV and football were always closely linked:
with broadcasting restrictions banning live coverage of domestic games on a
Saturday afternoon (a policy which remains in force today), fans would tune in
just before 4pm for half-time scores and at 4.45pm for the final results.
Wrestling fitted between these two slots for 25 years and in later years football
scores would be updated in the corner of the screen. The slot partially
explains why wrestling had such a strong female following: many wives watched
the show while their husbands attended live football matches.

In the World of Sport era, the FA Cup Final (a football/soccer
match) was Britain’s
biggest annual sporting event and a close equivalent to the Superbowl in the US.
As a standalone game at the end of the season it was (and is) a rare exception
to the Saturday afternoon blackout. Wrestling would be bumped to early
lunchtime, airing immediately before ITV’s lengthy coverage of both the game
and the pre-match build-up.

With the increased viewing audience, promoters soon began
billing this as the biggest televised show of the year, often featuring the
type of ‘dream matches’ traditionally reserved for live events. Throughout the
1960s (and in 1971) the show would air live, in most cases from Brent
Town Hall, a London
venue around a mile from Wembley Stadium, which hosted the Cup Final.

The two most famous Cup Final Day matches came in 1963 and
1965 with Jackie Pallo against Mick McManus, a battle of the two leading ring
villains of the day. The legend, oft-repeated by the pair, was that the matches
drew higher ratings than the Cup Final. While there are no specific figures
available to confirm or deny this, it seems particularly unlikely.

In both of these years, the football match aired on both BBC
and ITV. Indeed, in 1963 these were the only two channels broadcasting (BBC 2
launched in 1964), meaning we are asked to believe the wrestling, with opposing
programming, actually drew more viewers than the most important match of the
country’s favourite sport airing unopposed. It’s worth bearing in mind that the
TV Times listing magazine reported an average of eight million for wrestling’s
regular Saturday afternoon slot that year, while audiences of 20 million or
more were not uncommon for the Cup Final in that era.

There are two possible explanations for this ‘statistic’
(beyond it being pure fiction). The wrestling on ITV may well have drawn more
viewers than BBC in the same slot (which was airing build-up to and analysis of
the football). Alternatively, it’s very conceivable that the wrestling outdrew
ITV’s own coverage of the football: this isn’t as great an achievement as it
might seem as BBC would reportedly outdraw ITV by anywhere between 2-1 and 5-1
on these head-to-head broadcasts.

While such stars as Bert Royal and Vic Faulkner, Billy Robinson,
Adrian Street, George Kidd, Les Kellett and Kendo Nagasaki all appeared in the
slot, McManus was the undisputed king of the Cup Final day broadcasts,
appearing on 14 of the 15 broadcasts between 1963 and 1978 (there was no
wrestling in 1976). At this point the mantle handed over to Big Daddy, whose
tag matches aired on eight of the next nine shows. Perhaps the most bizarre
pairing saw him team with Kwik Kick Lee, otherwise known as Akira Maeda; the
Japanese grappler would, a couple of years later, popularise the ‘shoot-style’
UWF promotion after becoming dejected at the gimmickry and lack of legitimate
skills he found in opponents on a WWF tour.

Although Joint Promotions lost its monopoly control of the
wrestling TV contract at the end of 1986, it did provide the last Cup Final day
broadcast the following year with a single match featuring Greg Valentine
(Daddy’s nephew rather than the US grappler) and a battle royale.

CATEGORIES:Wrestling