Celebrity Wrestling: The Loudest TV Show… Ever

Celebrity Wresting has established itself in the Saturday night ITV lineup. Established itself as the most breathtakingly inane spectacle TV has ever seen, that is.

If you haven’t seen it, you really should. Just load up on the Nurofen before you switch it on.

Celebrity Wrestling is loud. And not exciting loud, either. It’s
loud like living next door to neighbours that wear horseshoes and have
a giant gong instead of a floor, and use plastic explosive devices to
turn over their shrieking surround sound TV, and they have a snot-caked
baby with a mouth the size of a McDonalds freezer that regularly knocks
satellites out of orbit with it’s relentless wailing. Only louder.

The studio audience act like they’ve been given too much sugary
orange juice instead of their Ritalin doses, and so they whoop and yell
at the slightest encouragement. If the entire show was simply about a
man sitting in a chair doing a crossword, they’d still work themselves
up into a mental shamanistic frenzy. So imagine what they’re like when
they get to watch the crap Di Marco brother off Eastenders (DVDs) have a fight
with Jade Goody’s (DVDs) boyfriend.

And now to the wrestling. Well, it’s not really wrestling. It’s in
fact a series of sub-Gladiators style games, like putting a ball in a
box, or poking each other with sticks. Or the Dads’ favourite - the
round where the girls have to rip each other’s clothes off as fast as
they can.

A lot has been made of the very, very low level of fame the
wrestlers have. But they do have to have a certain level of fitness to
perform, and so they should be given some credit. And James Hewitt (book) is a
genuinely frightening man. His military training means he can flick a
switch in his mind and turn into a dead-eyed killer in an instant.

Of course, once the fighting’s over, everyone’s very pleasant to
each other, like they’d been sharing a lovely bit of battenburg instead
of repeatedly slamming each other’s faces into the floor.

Someone high up at ITV must have realised that this would happen -
British people just don’t do angry wrestling very well. They’re too
ingrained with cynicism and self-deprecation to take it seriously
enough. So they countered this by bringing in a bunch of Americans.

There are two former wrestlers that act as trainers in this series.
Presumably they do actually train, but they appear to spend most of
their time trash-talking each other with such a lack of self-regard
that they don’t notice the amount of spit and dribble pouring out of
their mouths.

The ‘expert’ is also a former wrestler, Rowdy Roddy Piper (DVDs). He’s not
so much a pundit as an action figure that sprouts gibberish soundbites
when you pull the string on his back.

And holding it all together is Kate Thornton, a woman who sold her
personality to the devil for fame. She’s a sensible English girl at
heart, trying desperately to keep up with the manic straight-faced
bravado swirling around her. Her compromise is to do a series of
strange body jerks when she speaks, as if she mixed up ’sassy’ and
‘epileptic’ in her mind.

The best way to improve the show would be scrap Thornton in favour
of someone slightly more arch. Someone who’s in on the joke. Like Terry
Wogan (CDs/DVDs/books) presenting Eurovision. Someone that can reassure us  that it’s
crap, but we shouldn’t take it too seriously.

By a thousand miles, the best part of last night’s show was the boy with the inexplicable banner "I Love DVDs". Yeah, DVDs are great.

Find the cheapest wrestling DVDs around at kelkoo.com

[story by Stuart Heritage]