ITV Dropping Celebrity Wrestling

Today is a sad day. It is the day that Celebrity Wrestling died.

In America, television executives are famous for dropping shows off the air if they don’t get enough viewers. Literally, if a new series doesn’t inspire at least 50 people to change their name by deed poll to that of one of the show’s characters, it’s deemed an irrevocable failure.

This dropping happened to the American version of Playing It Straight, so when you see June Sarpong wriggling about on a sofa during an interview saying "it was a really big success in the US", it’s not because she’s riddled with parasitic tape worms, it’s because she’s lying.

The last high-profile time this happened in England was with an ITV game show called Shafted, presented by teak-varnished xenophobe Robert ‘nobody loves me’ Kilroy-Silk.
It was, at heart, a simple question and answer quiz, but buried beneath
such a ridiculous amount of confusing rules that viewers could only
understand what was going on if they Dr Stephen Hawking (Books) providing a running commentary.

And now, sadly, the same fate has been given to Celebrity Wrestling. Apparently, it was such a ratings disaster that only 2.6 million people were watching ITV on Saturday.

This week will be the last chance you have to witness the spectacle
of 12 personalities push each other around and try and rip each other’s
clothes off, while a thousand explosions and air-raid sirens blare at
ear-punishing volume.

Hopefully, this news will also mean someone will take those stupid cartoon Celebrity Wrestling adverts down from all the phone boxes, too.

hecklerspray can’t help feeling
a tiny bit responsible for this decision. Not that we have any sway
over the content of British television - otherwise there’d be a
streaming 24-hour channel dedicated to exploding robots fighting giant monkeys on the moon - but we’ve been fairly critical of Celebrity Wrestling in the past.

And now it’s gone… well, we’ll miss it. A little bit. It
was charming that everyone involved was obviously trying so hard. There
are still four episodes left, so there’s a good chance they’ll turn up
on ITV at 2am. Which is where they should have always been. Then, at
least, they’d be able to show blood and boobies, something they’ve
clearly wanted to do from the outset.

So say goodbye to Celebrity Wrestling this weekend, because next weekend ITV will be showing something people will be even more sick of - a Star Wars film.

[story by Stuart Heritage]