Power Struggle
Prefectural Gymnasium, Osaka
5th November 2016
About a week ago here in my home country of the United Kingdom (not merely England) there was a taping of another attempt at rebooting the old ITV wrestling show known to most as World of Sport (though of course World of Sport was the name of a sports show of which wrestling was one of many delightful cultural strands alongside football, hockey, lacrosse, motorsport, and weird stunts like jumping over barrels. For some reason World of Sport has become synonymous with the wrestling alone). The previous attempt I sort of remember in the early part of the previous decade, where ITV2 (to my overseas readers, ITV is one of the original 5 channels UK viewers received on the basic package of the analogue era. It is mostly entirely filled to the brim with steaming hot piss. ITV2 is even worse) took over the FWA or maybe IWA:UK promotion, one of the ones that had Alex Shane and that Hammerlock guy who trained Devitt, and tried to tack on the old aesthetics of rounds and slightly camp grappling to the modern style of jumping and flipping and leaping. Needless to say it was a miserable failure on several levels (bored commentator roped in from real sports duty, set that looked like a bouncy castle, tiny joke ring) and cancelled so quickly that I can barely find trace of its existence online to the point where I feel I may have dreamed it.
Regardless of the success of the new show (and I wish it well) the producers of the new show have drawn a firm line in the sand that I applaud. Here is someone on reddit who wrote out as a short one-act play of an interaction that they saw as a problem that is, to my mind, a big plus: |
| The way we were |
