‘Judo Al’ Hayes has died in Dallas, aged 76. My hearing the sad news coincided with a tumble of forgotten yesterdays as I watched last week, as part of ITV’s 50th birthday party, some evocatively grainy snatches of the all-in wrestling which used to clock up more than 10 million viewers on a midweek winter evening and every Saturday teatime. Each of the channel’s regional companies took turns to record the fun. Four decades ago I was a callow, clueless ITV outside broadcasts producer for Rediffusion’s London channel sometimes charged with covering these grunt-and-groan passion plays from a series of suburban small halls. Suddenly on TV last week, in a nostalgic blink of reverie, there we all were on the canvas again — Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, man o’ mystery Kendo Nagasaki, Jackie Pallo and genial panto-villain Mick McManus. My favourites were Charlie Drake-lookalike Les Kellett, who invested his bouts with the tragicomic timing of a Keaton, and ‘Judo Al’, the most skilfully athletic as well as most dashing (he looked like the footballer Bobby Moore). Al was a bright Luton Grammar School boy who, they reckoned, could have been a legit Olympic judo player, which is why, I suppose, he soon changed his ring name from ‘Luton’s White Angel’. He left for the United States, where he was a successful promoter and agent, well before the mid-1980s when Greg Dyke’s ITV sensibly pulled the plug on the old-hat light-ent fraud.
Crucial to the whole wheeze was the honey-soaked mid-Atlantic drawl (self-taught, he was actually top-drawer Surrey through and through) of good ol’ trouper and commentator Kent Walton, who died two or three years ago at 86. It was poignant last week to hear Kent once again purr, ‘Greetings, grapple fans.’ In truth, Kent was ringmaster of the whole circus, playing it deadpan and believable with just a hint of confiding-sceptical. The wrestlers themselves I remember as a quiet, pleasant, even shy bunch of fiddle-fit working men; introverted athletes, really. By the end they were demi-celebs making jolly good money. One of my regrets is that I never covered a bout involving my good friend Brian Glover (1934–97), later playwright and distinguished, coot-bald National Theatre actor (and Tetley’s teabag-man of the adverts). Granada or Yorkshire TV was Brian’s shop-window. His shopkeeper dad had fought as ‘Barnsley’s Red Devil’. While teacher-training at Sheffield University, Brian had begun moonlighting in the half-nelson headlock trade as ‘The Iron Man from the City of Steel’ but once he had been a late substitute at Wilmslow Town Hall after a French fighter’s no-show, he kept the mask and, for ever, the (intimidating then) nom de g-rrr: ‘Leon Arras from Paris, France’.
In my time, to polish its ratings, ITV once or twice hired the Albert Hall for a televised grapple gala. One year the Duke of Edinburgh attended and we all had to stand in a line to be introduced — we sporting DJs, the wrestlers in fighting finery. Among them was a nice, regular cannon-fodder Cockney, Eric, a Brixton-born-and-bred black man who wore a Zulu-type mask and billed himself ‘The Wild Man of Africa’. When Eric’s turn came for his handshake and bow, Prince Philip stopped and inquired pleasantly, ‘Which part of Africa are you from?’ The sudden panic in Eric’s eyes flickered through the two slits in his mask. Presuming he had not heard the question, HRH repeated it more precisely: ‘Which country in Africa?’ Eric knew he had to make a stab at it. ‘Er, Barbados, sir,’ he essayed.
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