ITV versus Vince McMahon
- cepmurphywrites
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
By Gary Oswald.
Few fandoms have embraced the ‘what if’ scenario to the extent of professional wrestling fans. If, for instance, you search on YouTube for “what if pro wrestling” you will find not only specialised channels talking about AH scenarios, you'll find the largest Wrestling youtubers also doing it. This isn't the case with football, political, musical, or book discussion.
Wrestling, I think, naturally lends itself to this kind of discussion, the likes of “what if this wrestler had signed to this company in this year?”, because it is both scripted and so more predictable than real sports but also more at the mercy of external events than films or TV. Wrestlers by the nature of their work are much more likely to get injured and so force a change of plans. Due to that and because so much of wrestling is about crowd control, the live audience’s reactions often lead to plans being changed. If your bad guy gets cheered or your hero gets booed, you have to change your plans; and if your villain gets injured, they will likely to be cheered on their return by fans who are pleased to see them again. This makes it more volatile than a lot of fictional media and so it's easier to imagine AH scenarios from it.
So it is something of a surprise that we've never done wrestling AH on this blog before. So, let's correct that now.
Professional wrestling in the UK had its glory days in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the ITV Saturday afternoon programme World of Sports. Sports programming was popular on TV because it was exempt from the restrictions on broadcasting hours that other programming was held under until 1972. Prior to that year, ITV was only allowed 50 hours a week of non-sports TV shows but could run as much sport as they liked. But the BBC had exclusive rights for a lot of mainstream sports like cricket and football, so World of Sports increasingly became the home of minority sports. Hockey, netball, lacrosse, water skiing, snooker, darts, show jumping, golf, cycling, ten pin bowling, go karting, speedway, and motor racing were shown, displaying them to a British audience that hadn't often encountered them before. The British craze for ten pin bowling is often credited to World of Sports.
And a full 45 minutes of that show every week was devoted to showing wrestling matches, mostly put on by Joint Promotions. This would later become ITV Wrestling in 1985 after World of Sports was cancelled as it was one of the most popular segments, drawing audiences of around 10 million a week. The wrestlers involved became genuine household names in the UK in a way no other British wrestler ever has, to the point that they can be mentioned in a comedy show from 2025 and people will get the reference.
The most famous of the men, the main characters of the TV show, were Shirley Crabtree (Big Daddy) and Martin Ruane (Giant Haystacks), who were mostly known for their sheer size and power. They would be teamed up with, and pitted against, quicker and smaller men who they could throw around. These included the master of the dark arts Kendo Nagasaki, a Japanese character who always wore a mask because he was played by a white man called Peter Thornley.
To be fair, I said the show was popular, I never said it had aged well.
It also included the likes of Fit Finlay, Steven Regal, Davie Boy Smith, and the Dynamite Kid, who all went on to break into American, Canadian, and Japanese wrestling where there was more money and prestige. They also did that because there was a ceiling for them at Joint Promotions, where Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks were the big stars but weren’t famous outside the UK. Big Daddy never wrestled in North America and while Haystacks' own career took him to Japan and Canada, his stint in America (with WCW as Loch Ness) was cut short after he was diagnosed with leukaemia. You ask an American wrestling fan which of the names I have mentioned they remember, it'll probably be Regal and Smith rather than Nagasaki, Daddy, and Haystacks.
And the British wrestling scene as an independent phenomenon was dying by the late 80s. ITV Wrestling was in a worse time slot than World of Sport and wasn't a part of larger programming so ratings declined. In 1987, British TV began to show the much slicker American product for the first time, something which made Joint Promotions’ look worse in comparison and in 1988 Greg Dyke axed ITV Wrestling entirely. The promotion still did local shows but it wasn't on TV and the best wrestlers, as discussed above, either retired or went abroad.
WCW and WWF (later WWE), the two largest American promotions, both had deals to be on British TV during the 1990s, WCW on ITV and then Channel 5, and WWF on Sky. This was the wrestling that I grew up with and it had no major British stars. Wrestling still existed in the UK in the form of local promotions that played breweries and other venues and later filmed their shows for YouTube and subscription channels like Triller TV, but they were not on mainstream TV. British wrestlers have made it to the USA but no one since 1985 has ever reached the level of stardom within the UK as Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. Getting another Saturday afternoon free show, which no wrestling promotion since has ever got, has become the great white hope of British wrestling.
Which is why when in 2016 ITV began talking about a new show called World of Sport Wrestling, there was much excitement. This was to be a show of the best of British wrestlers from the various local promotions, produced by TNA, a secondary American promotion which had always enjoyed a decent support in the UK thanks to airing on the free to air satellite channel Challenge (while Sky One needed to be paid for).
The first episode aired in December 2016, with more due to come in May 2017, but they were delayed thanks to behind-the-scenes problems, only eventually airing in July 2018. However this had alerted WWE, at this point the uncontested biggest promotion in the world, to the possibility of a rival emerging in the UK. The result was a WWE tournament of British independent wrestlers that aired in January 2017 on the WWE Network, followed by the show WWE NXT UK. It started in October 2018 but crucially saw dozens of the best of British wrestlers signed up to WWE contracts where they could not compete for either WOS or TNA nor compete in shows with wrestlers that did. The contracts were much bigger money than the local promotions could offer (though they would be lowered once the competition was dead), and WOS Wrestling was still a new thing without a loyal following on ITV.
As a result the prime of the British wrestling scene was taken out of ITV's grasp.
After eleven episodes ITV cancelled the show in 2018 and instead agreed a deal with new American promotion AEW to show their wrestling, on a time delay and in a late-night slot. NXT UK ran for 4 years from 2018 to 2022 on the WWE Network until it was cancelled, being run essentially at a loss as a way of bringing in British talent and giving them training so the best (such as Pete Dunne and Tyler Bate) could be introduced to the American shows. The wrestlers either went back to working independents in the UK or made it into the big American or Japanese promotions, much as the best British wrestlers have always had to do. The "Britwres" independent scene still exists but has still never produced anything for free TV or that is capable of standing up to the big foreign promotions, and it was shook hugely by the 2020 COVID pandemic which forced them to shut down live shows for a year.
So this is a classic what if: What if WWE didn't see a threat in WOS Wrestling, didn't sign up all their talent, and allowed ITV to both get their own roster and the people that NXT UK did?
Those two shows combined gives you a list of names which includes Australia's Rhea Ripley and Toni Storm, Austria's Gunter, and the Brit Will Ospreay, four of the biggest current stars in American wrestling, who all could have been instead performing on ITV for 10 million fans like in the good old days. After all, if that wasn't a possibility why did WWE act so quickly to stop it?
Except that was never going to happen.
The 10 million viewers in the good old days were due to a TV system where there were three channels. Nothing gets those numbers in the current climate. The first episode of WOS Wrestling got 1.25 million viewers and the eleventh episode got 200,000. That massive drop in viewership is why it was cancelled. There simply isn't a potential wrestling audience of 10 million people in the UK in 2018. AEW, with a popular product in America, only ever got around 100 to 200 thousand views in the UK (though it is in a bad slot and not live).
But there is a potential audience of 1 million and NXT UK, and the contracts they signed their stars to, very much weakened that product. Possibly with the NXT stars added to it the audience is bigger.
But, well, if we look again at those names above, Rhea Ripley was wrestling exclusively in Australia before signing to WWE. She was put into WWE's UK show but she would never have joined WOS. Same with Gunther. WWE could beef up their TV show with other wrestlers in a way ITV never could, WOS Wrestling is never going to have as good a roster as NXT UK (which I remind you was also cancelled due to low ratings, though that was mostly because it didn't air on a major channel in the UK). And the money and exposure is still going to be better abroad. Is 500,000 people on ITV enough to stop Ospreay going to Japan or Storm going to the USA when millions globally watch those products?
There is also the ticking time bomb of Covid. Say no NXT UK means WOS Wrestling isn't cancelled in 2018 and gets renewed for 2019 and 2020. Wrestling thrives on live audiences and will be hit badly by the lockdown.
It will also be hit badly by something else that happened in 2020. Speaking Out, a MeToo style movement, emerged that year with a growing number of accusations of abuse by male wrestlers against female wrestlers. Some of the best-known British wrestlers were named and multiple promotions were accused of running an unsafe environment. A surviving WOS Wrestling is going to see that scandal amplified. If you compare a list of potential talent for WOS and people accused during the Speaking Out movement, you see a lot of the same names.
If WOS Wrestling survives 2018, it's hard to see it ever getting past 2020.
But let’s say it gets those two years. What is the consequence of that?
Well the Speaking Out movement is a much bigger deal if there has been an ITV show for three years with some of these people. This might see the regulating body for British professional wrestling recommended by Parliament in the wake of Speaking Out actually come into being.
Another obvious consequence is that ITV don't do a deal with AEW instead. AEW therefore isn't aired on free British TV and is unable to do such numbers on its two UK trips, selling over 72,000 tickets in 2023 and over 45,000 in 2024, comfortably AEW's two biggest gate numbers. This changes their priorities and product.
Another is individual wrestlers have different careers. Joe Hendry, one of the stars of WOS, probably gets his chance in USA earlier if he has more time on TV. TNA, where he is World Champion as of the time of writing, probably sign him earlier if he's getting over on a show they are co-producing.
None of this is insignificant. But the idea that ITV was poised to bring back the golden age of Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks before WWE spiked it is nonsense.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.