WWE - WEIRD WONDERFUL ENTERTAINMENT (WWE in General)

Member Name: DJBorley

Product:	WWE in General
Date:	25/10/03 (453 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can be great fun., Different to a normal soap

Disadvantages: Can be slow going., Not always family entertainment.

As a kid, Saturday afternoons were spent watching ITV, waiting for Channel 4;s Worzel Gummage to start. I wasn;t a great football fan as a kid, but one of the few memories I have of my dad is watching wrestling with him. Now, anybody over the age of twenty will remember wrestling on ITV as big, fat, overweight guys, dressed in tights, generally plodding around the ring to chants of "Easy! Easy!" Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks ruled the roost, and wrestling was portrayed as being real.

Fast forward to 2003. Wrestling is now more poplar than ever, mainly thanks to Vince McMahon's WWE - World Wrestling Entertainment. For those who have never heard of it, WWE started life as the World Wide Wrestling Federation - WWWF. This was amended to a much easier abbreviation to say - WWF - World Wrestling Federation, before entering into a long court battle with the World Wildlife Fund as to who could use the initials, before settling on WWE a short while back.

The mid-80's saw wrestling take the step from backwater sports to prime-time TV. Hulk Hogan was the leading light of the industry, and led the WWF to new heights. Still portrayed as wrestling, and after several years of boring similarity, viewers started to switch off and the WWF did what they could to revitalise the wrestling world. It was in the late 80's that the UK started to tune in to the WWF, thanks to the newly launched Sky satellite, which was showing wrestling each weekend on it's main channel, as well as the then-quarterly Main Events.

Although a fairly new product in the UK, especially the way that the WWF packaged itself compared to the older wrestling we had all been used to, it wasn't long before the new stars started to become boring. What had started as an exciting industry for me in 1989, when I was 11, now struck me as very boring by 1992, when I was 14.

Several years passed, football became my main passion and all thoughts of the WWF were f
orgotten. The occasional menti
on in the UK press promoting a tour, and news snippets of the ongoing battle with the World Wildlife Fund meant that I could never completely ignore the industry, though it was no longer something that I went out of my way to watch - Primarily because it was being shown on Saturday and Sunday mornings when I was still in bed nursing a hangover, or at nights when I had what I lovingly look back on and remember as a "social life".

Then, in 1999, a major story made the news. In a stunt that went wrong, a wrestler called Owen Hart plummeted to his death at a live show. This provoked a morbid curiosity in me, and I tuned in the following week to see what the WWF had to say on its programming. It was interesting - a lot of frank, open interviews from visibly upset superstars, interspersed with the occasional match. I won't lie and say that I was hooked, but I did notice a difference between the program I saw now, and the ones that I had left behind in my teens.

A few months later, my social life changed dramatically - Mel was expecting our first baby, and in an effort to cut down on outgoings, I started to reduce the time I spent away from Mel. This meant that I had time at the weekends that I wasn't used to, and so, as there was generally nothing else on TV at the time, I started watching WWF again. Mel isn't too keen to admit this, but she had watched it with previous boyfriends, and was fairly knowledgeable as to what was going on.

I was surprised. Gone was the wrestling that I had been used to, and in had come a refreshing honesty. Although the matches were still being sold by the commentators as real, the whole program had a "soap opera" approach. There were plots, characters, sub-plots, relationships and dramas. The focus was naturally on the action in the ring, but most of the crowd that was in attendance was hooked on the action - the high-flying, acrobatic moves, and the
risks taken - and although it was still portrayed as "real", it was now referred to as "sports entertainment". What I hadn't realised was that the industry had changed tack again, and was now being more honest. They didn't care if you believed that the wrestling action was real, or if you knew that the results of matches were pre-determined. What they cared about was that you watched it, and enjoyed what you saw.

Now, four years later, it's still the same. I watch it as regularly as I can, and consider it to be very good television a lot of the time. You can see stories develop, and as long as you take everything with a pinch of salt, it's still too easy to become engrossed in what is going on in and out of the ring. Yes, results are pre-determined, and yes, most matches are, in small ways at least, planned out. However, watch closely and you'll get a grudging respect for the wrestlers. How can you jump twenty foot from the top of a ladder without hurting yourself? It's been done many, many times. When you see a wrestler get hit over the head with a chair, it's obviously fake, right? Not entirely. Yes, being hit with a chair has a certain skill whereas you can minimize the impact of a blow. It still connects though, and even if it's only thin steel, it's going to hurt! Lastly, what about the cuts and blood that often shows in a match? I used to think that this was somehow stage blood. Thinking about it, I've no idea how they could make a "wound" that would bleed so profusely. Then I discovered the secret. When a wrestler received a shot from a chair, when the cameras were focussed on something else, the wrestler, or the referee (who is trained in advanced first aid) would get out a concealed razor and actually make a cut. The cuts are real, though not inflicted as they are portrayed.

To sum up, WWE is good viewing. If you can get past the fact that this is not wrestling, and vie
w it as an over the top soap, you can get addicted. The plotlines range from good to bad, happy to sad, enthralling to just plain weird, and though some things shown could not even begin to be described as family television, the WWE tends to learn from it's mistakes and doesn't repeat them.

The wrestlers themselves are mostly bulked up brutes and masculine females, though there are a few that look out of place - a couple of gorgeous girls, and a runt of a man. Some of the moves that are done are breathtaking, and although most things are predetermined, there will be several occasions when your breath is taken away through the sheer ability, attitude and craziness shown by some wrestlers.

Laugh if you will, but at least give it a go. You may come away thinking that the whole thing is crap. You WILL come away with a grudging respect for those that sacrifice their bodies in the name of entertainment! As I say, WWE is probably best described as throwaway TV, like most soaps are, but it can also be compulsive viewing. From lesbians to gay marriages, weddings to funerals and concerts mid-show, the WWE has some strange plotlines. Give it a go - You might like it, and if you do... I promise I won't tell anyone!

WWE Raw - Sky Sports - Friday evenings, varying start times, but normally sometime after 9pm
WWE Smackdown! - Sky Sports - Saturday evenings, varying start times, but normally sometime after 9pm
WWE.com - For the official website

*****

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