BomberPat

I think a match has to hold up on its own merits. Warrior and Savage is fantastic, and the build does so much to make it so, but it would be a good match without that build, while a bad match with good build remains a bad match. The ideal for me is that someone who has never seen wrestling before should be able to follow the story of the match, should understand why the wrestlers do what they do, and they should understand who the face and the heel are, ideally before the bell has even rung. But that also requires seeing a "match" as curtain-to-curtain rather than bell-to-bell; the entrances are part of the match, the aftermath is part of the match, the reunion with Elizabeth is part of Warrior vs. Savage, and to rate the match without it is to miss the point. Televised wrestling obviously has the advantage of being able to give you a snazzy video package explaining the story up until now (and often cherry-picking that story to make it better; I've often said that WWE are better at booking a Wrestlemania highlight package than they are at booking a Wrestlemania), and of having a commentary team to (if they're doing their job properly) guide you through the story and explain how everything works, and generally all the other supplementary stuff and bells and whistles, so they can get a bit more involved than a little local indie can - I can always tell when an indie show is trying to book as if they had television, and it never works. I agree on lasting impression mattering, though. My most important metric is "did it work in the room?", and after that it's, "will it stick with you?". There have been so many five star matches in the last few years that I forgot about by the end of the week, while there are less critically acclaimed matches that have stuck with me for 20+ years.

A comedy writer I follow said that after the news about Brand aired on TV, he was going through the next ad break thinking "predator, predator, predator" for half of the voiceovers. I'm not going to pretend to any secret knowledge, and it's not a conversation I've had with the few people I know in stand-up, but you hear enough to know that, similar to indie wrestling, there are private conversations and messages along the lines of "don't accept a lift from this guy", "don't let him get you in a room alone". I don't know enough about the Baby Reindeer thing, but my impression was that it could well be a producer/promoter more than a working comic.

I agree broadly on too many long matches; there are two competing main event styles at the moment, one is the Omega/Ospreay epic and one is the Roman Reigns melodrama, and they both tend to hinge on being longer than they need to be if you're not one of the very specific group of people who can really make them work. I don't think it's a short attention span thing - I actually think that "short attention spans because of social media" is a misguided idea of how people consume media, because it doesn't take into account that people will sit and stream an entire series of a TV show in one sitting, or watch a four or five hour YouTube or Twitch stream, or that the majority of the highest grossing films this decade are well north of two hours in length. I just think you should approach every wrestling match on every show by asking "what is this for?", and strip away anything that doesn't serve that question - the example that comes most readily to mind is Will Ospreay returning from injury to have a competitive match with Blake Christian; that match was only 7 or 8 minutes, but I don't think it did anything for either man. For me it's less matches and more show lengths. People rag on AEW all the time for it, though if I'm paying for a pay-per-view from a company that employs many of the best wrestlers in the world, and practically all the best wrestlers in North America, then I'm not really going to complain about getting a lot for my money - helps that I rarely watch them live, so can take my time with them, though. I'm more thinking indie shows - your show doesn't need to have ten matches, particularly when six of them are functionally the same as each other. Less is more. Give me 4-6 matches where each one offers me something different to the others.

Again, though, it's mad to think that someone even had the opportunity to have that run of genuinely good main event matches almost twenty years into a run that featured an ungodly amount of bad matches, bad angles and bad promos, and after he was one of the worst drawing champions and Wrestlemania headliners they ever had. His career is a long, long run of being given second chances that another wrestler - especially an early '90s gimmick worker - would never have been granted.

It's interesting that the people who seem to have most immediately seen right through his tough guy act were Tracy Smothers and Brian Pillman, both of whom knew him pre-WWF; he had a reputation in WCW, apparently, for being a bit of a wet blanket, never travelling with the boys, and so on, none of which really matters, but is a real contrast to the "conscious of the WWE" locker room leader schtick he laid on thick later on. Like a lot of older wrestlers, he's done the "if MMA existed when I started out, I'd have done that rather than wrestling" spiel - but like you say, it's not like he couldn't have been a fighter; he was never a boxer, or an amateur wrestler, never to my knowledge did any martial arts training, he was a college basketball player. If I'm writing alternate history, and Mark Calloway is off the table, Barry Windham is my guy for the Undertaker gimmick, leaning more into the original presentation of it as a Wild West vibe. I think it's a mix of things - I don't think Calloway gets over without the Undertaker gimmick, but I also suspect nobody else gets over with the gimmick. I can't think of anybody else who wrestled at such a high level for such a long time that, even by the standards of cartoonish '90s dross, had so few good matches to show for it - and so many actively dreadful ones. I don't think there's another wrestler who has ever been afforded more opportunities, when anyone else would have been binned off. My criticism of Triple H is that if his role was as The Guy To Wrestle The Top Guy, or as a gatekeeper heel to make new stars, then it's a damning indictment that you can list the stars he made on one hand, and the same goes for the number of people who had their best match against him - for The Undertaker, for years his role was as the guy to establish new monster heels and giants by working against them, and the vast majority of those opponents never amounted to anything, disappeared without a trace, or had actively bad matches with 'Taker. Even the ones who made it and stuck around - Yokozuna, Kane, Big Show - none of them did their best work with Undertaker.

the thing about Triple H is that his best performances - against Daniel Bryan, against Ronda Rousey, and against Cactus Jack - are when he recognises that his role is to bump and sell and back off and generally be a heel, knowing he's out of his depth and can't win a fair fight. In the build to the Daniel Bryan match, he takes a bump off a baseball slide from Brie Bella that's bigger than anything he ever gave Cena or Orton! A bad wrestler is one thing, but there's nothing more frustrating than seeing the evidence that a wrestler can get it, and constantly chooses not to. Even as a semi-retired authority figure, he still had to make sure everyone knew he was the toughest, coolest, funniest guy in the room.

So it's not just Mongolian chops; this is from a CHIKARA show, and the story I was told is that Bryce Remsburg told Okada that Barnesville, the tiny village the show was held in, loved Giant Baba, so that any Japanese wrestler who worked there should do a ton of Baba's moves and wrestle as much like him as possible to win the crowd over. That's why he's really trying to play to the crowd while just doing big overhand head chops.

I think the question remains as to whether there's mileage in this Nick Wayne act after the Jericho feud; I hope there is, but we still need to see him interacting with other wrestlers on the show.

I was surprised they did both Blood & Guts matches on the same show, I had assumed the women's one would be taped for Collision, but it's the Jericho Cruise live Collision rather than taped this week - I wonder if when they first booked the venue for B&G they hadn't got everything in place to know they could definitely do a live show from the cruise? Just guesswork. I would say the problem isn't so much the lack of pinfalls, it's years of western wrestling teaching audiences that to submit is a cowardly act, combined with wrestlers wanting to get creative but being pretty limited in what they can actually achieve - babyfaces (and some heels) don't want to quit because it shows weakness, so you have this overreliance on big gimmicky reasons for somebody to give up. That's at least the third time, probably more that I'm forgetting, that they've had a wrestler quit to "save" someone else rather than because they were actually forced to submit, and that's a narrative beat that always requires slowing things down and making room for some amateur dramatics rather than just letting the wrestlers fight. The finish worked for the women's match because it was just a war of attrition, until eventually somebody couldn't take any more. I assume in this case it is leading to a Copeland/Ospreay programme, but I don't think that programme needs it - you can get to what I assume is the same "my career was almost ended because of the risks I took, I'm trying to stop the same thing from happening to you" justification from Copeland any number of ways (I'd have Ospreay acknowledge that it's Cope's retirement run, offer him up a title shot, and Cope take exception to being seen as a charity case and get increasingly hostile towards Will), and they did the same "babyface quits to save someone else" finish with Toni and Mina in the women's match last year, so they should be more sparing with it.

Okada becoming a full-blown Memphis style stooge heel while still being one of the best big match wrestlers in the world has been brilliant to watch. The one thing I didn't like about his act was the overreliance on him saying "bitch" - aside from the misogyny of it (and that if it was going to be Okada's catchphrase, they should have stopped everyone else on the show from saying it, apart from Thekla), it was one of those typically wrestling things where somebody does something spontaneous, unexpected, and funny, then it gets hammered into the ground as a routine. Him largely swapping that out for "FAMILY" as his catchphrase has been a massive improvement.

I watched Godzilla Minus Zero at the IMAX last night - first time seeing anything in IMAX, so that was fun. I was the low man of my group, everyone else absolutely loved it. I thought it was good, but obviously not a patch on Minus One - how could it be? - and a bit clunky in places. The plot seemed to revolve entirely around someone saying they had a plan, then not telling you what the plan was, so half the film was characters flying around in planes while someone barked orders over a walkie-talkie to another group of people to do something that hadn't been explained to the audience. The first film did such a good job of threading the needle of Godzilla as a metaphor for the nuclear bomb, and dealing with survivor's guilt, post-war reconstruction, and trauma in general, without ever feeling silly for it, and I don't think this one nailed those themes at all, they just had a lot of characters saying them out loud repeatedly. The human element was so strong in Minus One, and so weak and hackneyed in this one, with some absolutely preposterous acting from Min Tanaka at one point, that it's a good thing that the monster designs were really strong, and that it was visually interesting enough to make up for it. Some fucking dreadful CGI crows, though, it briefly turned into Birdemic for a couple of minutes.

I'd add Shawn into the mix there. The day that Shawn Michaels walked out citing an "unsafe working environment" after his fight with Bret, he was supposed to wrestle Brian Pillman on RAW, and that match never happened - they were never even opposite sides of a tag, never in a battle royal, never shared the ring at all. You've got arguably the defining high-flyer babyfaces of WWF and WCW in the early years of the decade, both turning into generational coked up nutters a few years later - taking that and interweaving it with the history between Bret, Shawn, Pillman, and Austin would have been magic.

I thought the women's match was far better than the men's; it felt more of a brawl, grittier, and more organic, while the men's had too many pauses for everyone to stare dramatically at each other, too much of everybody having to get their shit in. I suspect there might be an Adam Copeland grumpy veteran run coming - if not a full-blown heel turn, then at least working more heelish against Ospreay and maybe Darby. Ospreay was definitely selling frustration at him costing their team the match, and Cope's promo at the top of the show about how he was the only one looking out for the wellbeing of the younger wrestlers made me think that this might be leading to him doing something like the anti-hardcore Cactus Jack thing, of being angry at guys like Ospreay and Darby for not having learned the lessons from his career. Foley being involved in that segment, and Cope wearing the gear from their Street Fight, all plays into it too.

Blackmore's Night are absolute dogshit, in fairness, and I say that as someone who was into them as a weird teenager. The last couple of years I've got really back into folk music in a big way - collectively the Carthy/Waterson family probably make up half of my most listened to artists of the last two years - but I do tend to shy away from the more fiddle-dee-dee hey-nonny-nonny side of it all, and lean more towards old workers' songs and protest music.

I can't imagine how it could be anything else, surely? They're not having Grayson Waller pin Punk, and I can't see them putting the NXT belt on Punk either - all that does is push the problem down the line of how they book anyone in NXT to beat him for it. It's going to be a Kevin Owens run-in for a DQ finish, I'd have thought.

I never played Spiders, but I have a lot of affection for it as my baseline for what a rock/alternative club was, and for many daft nights out there every time I went back to Hull. And, obviously, for being able to get a pint for under two quid. My older brother went there as a teenager some 30+ years ago, and the prices must have barely crept up in all that time.

Years ago, one of my best mates started seeing my ex - no hard feelings, it was Jersey, it's a small social circle, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who hadn't dated around their social circle, particularly once you got into the music scene and "alternative" types. It's a wonder if it ever happened, though, because the first night he went back to hers he passed out drunk, then got up in the middle of the night, opened her wardrobe and started pissing in it. She woke up, caught him in the act and asked him what he was doing, and apparently he mumbled, "it's alright, Pat said it's okay" as he stopped and stumbled back to bed.

A 36 year old vs a 48 year old for the developmental belt, really showcasing the future of the business there.

For work experience, I was in the stockroom at HMV. It was quite a small shop, and part of a larger department store. The main stockroom was upstairs, with boxes of stuff to get prepped and ready to put out on the shop floor, and then there was a larger storeroom downstairs, with overstock, and weirder stuff that wasn't selling - it was a bit of a labyrinth to get there, involving two separate lifts, or physically leaving the building, walking to the end of the block, and accessing it via the back of the whole department store. I was sent down there to get a couple of palettes of stuff, all loaded up on this rickety trolley, coming up to my shoulders. I navigate it around all the corners and corridors to get to the lift...and then don't realise that the knackered old lift doesn't stop flush with the floor. Wheel the trolley forwards, it catches on the fractionally higher bit of the lift, and everything just tips forward into the lift, scattering CDs and DVDs everywhere. As I move the trolley out of the way to try and get into the lift and start trying to fix it, the lift door closes, because someone upstairs in the poshest bit of the department store has pressed the call button.

lest anyone think it's an exclusively male-dominated field, my ex briefly lived in a house share with an actress who has done proper big films and telly, who was once caught pissing in the kitchen sink.

I wasn't really thinking of the Speed Title! I was thinking of the High Speed Title in NEO and STARDOM, which is a belt with a 10-minute time limit, two out of three falls, and a 10 count on the outside rather than the usual Japanese 20 count. It's something I've thought that, if I were to ever book a full-time wrestling promotion, I would probably introduce a version of, because I think once you get beyond one or two singles belts, anything that follows should have a distinct identity beyond it being just another title. I don't think I ever watched any matches for WWE's version, but I suspect that they were just short matches wrestled exactly the same as any other WWE TV match, when the point of any stipulation should be to show how it changes the psychology of the match, and forces people to wrestle differently. I think AEW would do a much better job with something like that than WWE could - I'm not suggesting AEW necessarily should introduce this title (and certainly not in addition to the belts they already have), just that it's worth thinking of ways championships could serve distinct purposes in ways that AEW's titles currently don't. Similarly, something like CHIKARA's Young Lion's Cup, for wrestlers under 25. Titles with restrictions or qualifiers to make them something unique. Incidentally, I completely agree with everything @Carbomb said about the X-Division - it's very kayfabe-breaking to say "it's about no limits", but then have a clear idea of what constitutes an "X-Division wrestler"; it's coming within a breadth of saying "It's for the flippy boys" without actually saying it. I always think about this every time I see bad faith arguments about AEW having too many titles. AEW has five men's singles titles, the tag and trios, and then two women's singles titles and the tag. Yes, you sometimes see ROH, NJPW or CMLL titles showing up as well, but I think that's increasingly rare - Bandido hasn't been carrying the ROH belt around him with him during his current Trios programme at all. In WWE, you've got four main roster men's singles titles, two sets of men's tag titles, four women's singles titles and the women's tag titles. So the only category in which AEW have more belts than WWE is men's singles belts, and I'd say WWE having two separate World Championships makes that one pretty equal. There's then an additional two men's and women's singles titles and a tag title in NXT (for comparison's sake, let's contrast that to three men's belts, three women's belts, a tag and a trios for ROH), a men's and women's title in EVOLVE, and a men's and women's WWE ID Championship, and then the AAA Mega Title has been featured on RAW, La Catalina wrestled on RAW as AAA Reina de Reinas champion, Rey Fenix is regular defending the AAA Cruiserweight Title on WWE TV, The War Raiders were defending the AAA Tag Titles on Smackdown. Weird that WWE don't seem to get the same criticisms as AEW over that.

It's absolutely about delineation. I don't know what distinguishes the National, TNT, and International Title, or why, in kayfabe, any wrestler would choose to challenge for one of those belts over the others. That's a bigger problem than there just being too many belts in general. I also, as I make clear most weeks (as AEW tends to give me reason to), hate a champion challenging for a different title. I think it devalues a title belt if, the moment you win it, you start going after another title rather than defending the one you have. That issue would come up less if there were more distinctions between the titles. It also devalues someone like Kenny Omega or Mercedes Moné doing a belt collector gimmick if they're not the only champion on the show who's carrying multiple titles. I think titles from other promotions can be additive, but too often are just too much window dressing. Around Forbidden Door, absolutely we should see the other promotions' title belts. But if it's a random midcard match where someone with minimal standing in AEW happens to have a title from CMLL, I don't think it does either company any favours to draw attention to that. I'd just like to see title belts given more identity. The TNT Title is often, unofficially, an "open challenge" belt - challengers aren't having to win eliminators or number one contenders matches to get a shot, and the champion tends to defend against all-comers on TV most weeks, and treating it like a de facto TV Title in that respect helps create some separation, particularly with it being named after a TV network in the first place. The Continental Title has its own set of rules, so at least that's something. Rather than introducing belts like a National Title that's indistinguishable from the International Title, I think titles that guarantee a certain type of match would perhaps be more beneficial. ROH still has the Pure Title, and given the choice I would swap one of the AEW singles titles for the Pure belt or something like it; a specific set of rules that favours technical wrestling, I would maybe even go stricter than the Pure belt and introduce rounds as well. It means you know you're getting a different pace of wrestling to the rest of the card, and it's a place to showcase wrestlers and styles that might otherwise go under-appreciated. Similarly, a "High Speed" belt (but with a better name) that's for a matches with a 10 minute time limit (or even less). Introduce it with a series of matches that are really fast and frantic, between high flyers and luchadores, almost early X-Division style of "video game wrestling" - just constant move after move after move, escalating until someone eventually wins - but then once it's established, start to change it up; have a big bruiser like Mark Davis challenge for it, and start winning just by flattening people in record time. Have a cowardly heel win it and just keep stalling and trying to run down the clock.

I love Psycho II. It's preposterous, and the ending is unintentionally hilarious, but Anthony Perkins is incredible. He manages to make Norman Bates a genuinely sympathetic character, someone you're actively rooting for, without betraying the character.

Did a movie night for Halloween... Ghost Shark This was shit, obviously. Sci-Fi Channel original that does what it says on the tin. Magic ghost shark can manifest in any body of water, so you get moments where a shark eats someone from a bucket, or manifests inside a glass of water and then bursts out of the person drinking it. It's stupid. It's a shark movie, so there's a mayor more concerned with election than ghost sharks, and a Quint that nobody takes seriously until it's too late, only the Quint is obsessed with ghosts rather than sharks. There's a point where the ghost shark chases the protagonists, but it can't fit through a tight gap and is snapping at them just out of reach, despite the entire space they're in being soaked, covered in rain and puddles, and they're wet through, and we've already learned that the shark can appear in any water it chooses. It also does the thing of all bad shark movies, where a shark is treated like some kind of giant aquatic knife, just cutting people in half by swimming through them. To its credit, this is just pre-Sharknado, so it's before the Sci-Fi Channel stuff started getting a bit too cute and self-aware, so it's just a stupid bad film without trying to wink at the audience about it. Longlegs Missed this when it came out. Thought it was bang average, and the third act really loses its way. I remember a lot of the hype and chatter around this being that it was really interesting and creative and uniquely weird, and I didn't get any of that from it. Nicolas Cage is doing probably his worst kind of wacky acting in this, and it's rare that I say this, but I felt he detracted from the film more than he added to it. It tried to be too many things at once; modern horror, supernatural, Satanic Panic, FBI procedural, and just didn't really pull off any of them as a result. It was fine, but I didn't get the hype at all, and I'm glad I didn't watch it when everyone was banging on about it, because I would have been more disappointed. The Backrooms I went in with pretty minimal expectations, as "film based on internet creepypasta stuff" isn't ticking any of my boxes, though I do like a good bit of liminal space creepiness. I thought it was visually interesting, but fell apart the longer it went on. The found footage-style stuff earlier on was the best part, and I'd have liked to have seen a version of this film pulled together from nothing but handheld camcorder and CCTV footage. The longer it went, the more clear it became that they couldn't figure out how to escalate a narrative about a creepy space without it becoming more generic horror, and at times that meant it felt like watching someone play a horror video game - it stopped being about the space itself being the source of the horror, and became "protagonist is chased by scary monster".

I really can't work out how I feel about this show. I thought the actual anti-gambling documentary content was very well put together, the right combination of hard-hitting human interest stories and good science about how gambling companies keep you on the hook. That's really important stuff to put on TV, though it would be nice to see Channel 4 put their money where their mouth is and not have those same companies advertising on their channel. I just don't know if the whole bait and switch trickeroo of it all was worth the effort. Would a well-marketed hard-hitting Channel 4 documentary have attracted a significantly smaller audience than acting as if there was a weird one-off Bradley Walsh quiz show airing at 9pm on a Sunday? If the point was to trick people into thinking they were watching a real quiz show, the production was way off, and if the point was that they did that intentionally to make you know it's not legit so you're just watching it waiting for the reveal, then surely it didn't work as a bait and switch anyway? They could have still done the quiz show as the set-up for the live audience, and threaded that through a documentary to underpin the psychology element, I don't really think it achieved anything by showing a full half hour or however long it was of a phony quiz show that never quite landed - to then bring out the real guy it was based on and say, "this is the real Rhys, this is his story"...I don't think that really worked, because the game show setting had to change his circumstances and his story so much that it didn't really land the point it was making.