Too big for his boots 1: UK TV starts showing British Wrestling

Strangeness abounds in the world of TV Wrestling in the UK.

Impact got involved with world of Sport shortly before getting a UK TV deal for impact wrestling with spike tv - a channel 5 substation.

Mexican Wrestling is showing up on free TV in the uk, as AAA gives an air date on freeview channel frontrunner.

I've not seen anything of NGW on made in Tyne and Wear for quite some time, and apparently WAW is still airing on mustard TV (ok, it's a repeat, but it's British Wrestling on TV).

WWE have a UK division that are sitting on some of the best talent in the UK, putting three of them on regular NXT programming  and the odd one to put those three over every now and again. Apart from that there have been 3 UK division programmes and four live shows (the initial tournament and the epic studios shows which were padded out with 205 live talent)

So here is the state of play as is. In the UK, we have national and regional over the air TV networks in abundance. We have IPTV with more free stuff. We have multiple free to air satellite channels, some that show caravan maintenance programmes for hours on end. You know what we haven't got? On any of it?

A regular nationally screened British Wrestling show on over the air TV.

We have free to air Mexican lucha libre shows and American Wrestling shows, but none from our own country - a country where Wrestling is booming.

ITV were keen to get World of Sport back as a brand, unfortunately their tapings went south - ticket sales were cited by outside sources to be the issue, but the involvement of impact wrestling showed its face again - by face I mean eyes and nose, because the mouth certainly didn't make an appearance for quite a while, and when it did everyone was told it was due to contracts etc.

Here's an idea - you have studios all over the country equipped with on site and outside broadcast equipment.

ITV - realistically, what would it take for you to just remove impact from the management team and start over.

Contract 8 wrestlers, contract a booker. You have TV people you can use for continuity/ring announcing - Dave Brown in Memphis was a newscaster.

Commentators you can borrow, other talent you can borrow/bring in for short runs from other promotions after all, you're a TV show not a promotion. By all means you can expand on this later, but this is a starting point.

Two night tapings in either your studios or town halls, or a mixture of two (promos, hype videos etc) etc around the UK in the form of standard Wrestling shows (as they will appear to the punters/audience)

Use your training/apprenticeship/local college/university community links for video, audio, lighting, runners, you know, all the stuff you need people to learn how to do for regular programming when they finish their courses and apply for jobs. It'll give them a fast paced work environment and good experience to be able to work on pretty much anything else later in there careers.

Run a show in each region first, 8 man tournament style - use your regional news areas as the territories, that's where the kit is and hopefully your apprenticeship programmes. Run one of them as a two nighter.

Your 8 contracted wrestlers win the regional tournaments and go on to do the second night in the chosen territory for the British title.

Quick booking tip at this point, make sure the contracted talent you stick in each regional leg of the tournament are regulars to somewhere near the region or its going to take some of the unpredictability out of it.

Take the videos, and compile them into a set of pilot episodes that follow the tournament, switching between regions from a central studio so that a decent variety of wrestlers from all over appear across the shows. That way, even if casual fan A in Eastbourne is watching for the guy they've seen on a poster in the newsagent window, they see the wrestler from Fort William who properly impresses him, and they've got a reason to tune back in again if he's going to be on etc.

First couple of weeks, watch the feedback from Twitter and Facebook, see who's impressing, listen to the viewers

Run another show in each of the region's you didn't run the final in (you don't run the initial ones as a two nighter when the tournament winners aren't going to be there the following night) Get the library built up so you can chop together another couple of episodes for just after the tournament is done to give you time to book for continuity.

Get footage from other promotions, let other promotions titles appear on the programme, let yours appear on theirs, let a local guy win it, let another of your contracted guys win it back later or at the next regional show. exchange TV time advertising promotions local shows for advertising the tapings at local shows. Don't run it as a promotion per se, run it as a showcase of British wrestlers incorporating a title scene so that there's something for other wrestlers to aim for. Easy enough storyline prop to start with.

Now I understand that this sounds completely barmy to anyone that's been in the business in the short form explanation, but if you're serious about having your own nationally screened British Wrestling show, and you're not willing to let an already established promotion, or set of promotions host these for you (or the Knights and Len Davies, or Alex Shane's​trident vision media setup), you're going to have to put some work in and make it inclusive in appeal bloody quickly.

So let's see how this would pan out. For the purposes of this, the ITV regions used will be:

Central

STV (Scotland)

Border / Tyne Tees

Granada (including isle of man)

YTV Yorkshire (Lincoln is in this catchment area as well - hey, ITV made the borders, not me)

Anglia

London/Meridian

West country/West/Wales

Now, Ireland, I've not mentioned yet - there's a good reason for this, and all will become clear later on.

The tapings go ahead as detailed above. Your first two hour show has a central commentary team in a studio. Green screen a production room in the background or something - stay away from cheesy graphics involving massive turnbuckles, silly typeface text, etc it's not the 80s or 90s any more.

It's 2 hrs on ITV, so it's actually 90 min. A mixture of full as-live matches and match highlights go out on air for the first two  weeks. Each region gets one full match (1st round in a tournament is normally a 10 min time limit, isn't it?). You've got 4 matches per area to choose from. Here's the kicker, you stick all the matches from round 1 up on the ITV hub with video packages on the wrestlers, and of course adverts between the matches. Also, you're going to want links to promotions where you can see the participants wrestle live. Gotta get that revenue in and make a good start at working with real promotions - after all, you're a TV show advertising British Wrestling, not a real working promotion.

Use a hashtag, use Facebook, get feedback. After week 1, see who's impressing, see who's matches are getting the most views and making the most buzz. Use that to choose the full matches on week 2. If it's someone that's gone out of the tournament get them on the odd live show, while you're building the library. Tell people where they're going to be in the near future if they want to see them live, both in a world of sport showcase show and in other UK promotions.

Round 1 gets done with. Round 2 keeps the same format just with a couple more full matches.

By the time you've got this from tape to air the non tournament shows (or at least some of them) should have been taped.

Were on to week 5 on air by this point, and you've got the 8 regional finals to show. Time to start giving some more promo time to your core for after the matches.

Week 6 - the matches from night 2 of the tournament.

Week 7 - the direction from here is dictated by what you have in the can, what other promotions have sent you, and what the viewers want. You can either stick with the footage from all territories cut together with the central commentary team, or send out your guys to the other territories in a cycle to move to a format where matches from local talent (keeping an eye on the feedback) factoring in your core guys are featured.

Basically do what Vince did with "all American Wrestling" back in the territory days, just don't try to take over completely, because we love British Wrestling as it is, we'd just love to see more of it and more people to be able to see it.

It seems a bit contrived, but there are options. The easiest way to do it of course would be to just back a promotion. Pay them to chuck a few intro video packages together and perhaps organise help with production for video, but as for the show and the booking, let one of the groups that's been doing it for a few years handle it. And possibly think about tying it into world of sport but changing the name of the show, because you've tied that to impact wrestling, which is still pretty toxic, and the recent debacle isn't going to help you get anything off the ground.

Oh and Ireland? Cut together format week 10, matches in two of the territories are interrupted by Irish wrestlers, who are disgruntled at not being included at the initial tournament and demand to be recognised and used as a territory.