British Wrestling (old British wrestling) is fine if you can shut your brain off for long periods of time when you're watching it. There's plenty of fun to be had. Indeed, the Smith/Wright match on the tape is perhaps the most surrealistic I've ever seen. Hardly anything hits with great crispness and they repeat themselves 5-times over but I guess that's what makes it fun.

The point of exhibition wrestling is apt. It's weird in that the presentation of that of a "sport", but the work itself... well, it makes the funkiest of all llave seem like the most realistic of all RINGS. Well, maybe not, but there's like *zero* fighting over holds. It'd be like a football match where one team just lets the another have an attack and they knock it wide. Then they switch and the team who were originally on attack let the other team run down to their end of the pitch and knock it over. All shots wide and over are on purpose of course. Whenever a goal is booked to be scored is the first time there's a genuine shot on goal. Transfer that to old British Wrestling and it's incredibly similar.

Perhaps "moving with the times" for British Wrestling would've been trying to be more realistic. Granted it was WWF that hit the screens not the "realistic" (well, realism is relative to its time and I guess it was for 88) UWF II but maybe the crowd suddenly saw how contrived/fake-looking the vast majority of the stuff was in its "let me do this and I'll let you do yours" way of working. That they switched to the woof (or the "Wrestling's for 8 year olds; It's fake! Now, let me watch my Coronation Street" side) suggests "no".

Actually, what I remember of the final tag match was Regal trying more to win than to merely to "out-counter" ("It's not scored on points so suit you, sir" he says) his opponents so perhaps, in a very subtle way, some guys were trying for such a direction. Maybe in too subtle a way though; Danny Boy Collins didn't clock onto it, opting for his roll-back flip, head-flip, cartwheel, somersault, slide through legs coutner for the wristlock whilst leaving his poor opponent to just stand there holding his arm and looking like a total jackass. Oh, and someone should've told him and Robbie that if you're building from "a" to "b" to "c", you don't do "a" three times and never the other two since, y'know, you're actually not building then; merely repeating the same thing over again and making (in the case in this match) Robbie look like as big a jackass as whomever had to stand there, yawning, holding DBC's wrist.

So, um, old British Wrestling isn't to be taken (and looked at) all that seriously; unless you want to do your head in. In which case, why not just watch a Shawn Michaels or Kurt Angle comp?