Professional wrestling in the United Kingdom spans over 100 years but became popular when the then new Independent Television station - ITV began showing it in 1955 firstly on Saturday afternoons and then also in a late night mid week slot. It was at its peak of popularity when the television show World of Sport was launched in the mid-1960s, making household names out of Mick McManus, Count Bartelli, Giant Haystacks, Jackie Pallo, Big Daddy, Steve Veidor, and Kendo Nagasaki. The sport remained a mainstay of British culture until World of Sport's cancellation and then finally as a stand alone programme until 1988. Despite the end of ITV coverage, a largely untelevised live circuit - with some promotions featuring the traditional British style of professional wrestling and others more fashioned after the contemporary American independent scene - survives and indeed thrives in this territory to the present day.
Famous quotes containing the words professional, wrestling, united and/or kingdom:
“The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet this is his very being.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“I suddenly realized that the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die.”
—John Reed (1887–1920)