BB FANS

THE first thing to say about Celebrity Wrestling, which was launched in a shower of indoor fireworks on ITV1 this weekend, is that it doesn’t contain much in the way of what you might call wrestling. Doubtless a harsher critic would add at this point that it doesn’t contain much in the way of celebrities, either, though surely that would be an unfair remark to make about a cast that includes the likes of Jenny Powell, the presenter of Loose Women, Marc Bannerman, the former EastEnders actor, and Leilani Dowding, who has a regular column on the third page of The Sun. Several columns, to be more accurate.
And I, for one, was delighted to see on the bill for Saturday night’s grand opening Jeff Brazier’s name. It was Jeff, of course, who first shot to fame as “the one called Jeff” on The Farm, last year’s innovative celebrity pig-abuse show. (Are you ready for series two, which is just around the corner on Five? More importantly, is the pig?) I confess I don’t know what Jeff did before he went on The Farm, and I’ve pretty much forgotten what he did on The Farm, too. But these are details of almost no consequence now. We have reached the fabulously postmodern stage where, given a fair wind and the right agent, a person can sustain a long and illustrious career exclusively by doing celebrity challenge shows, and that should be enough for anyone.



At the same time, for those of us who care about the long-term health of celebrity-based television, it can’t help but be a worry to see the same faces turning up again and again. James Hewitt, for instance, must still be getting his breath back from appearing in the Champion of Champions contest on Channel 4’s The Games. Yet there he was on Saturday, dragging his 46-year-old limbs into further profile-boosting action for Celebrity Wrestling.

All the signs are that, despite drastically widening the definition of celebrity in order to encourage participation, the producers are nevertheless drawing from a disturbingly limited talent pool. There are, in the end, only so many people in Liberty X and one necessarily fears for the future of programmes such as these if measures are not quickly taken to ensure that some new celebrities start coming through at grassroots level.

Credit to Celebrity Wrestling, however, for one imaginative piece of team selection: a big welcome back to British television for Oliver Skeete. It was Skeete, you may recall, whose fame briefly burned bright in headlines as the Rastafarian showjumper, by which people meant he had dreadlocks. As Skeete probably grew tired of pointing out, he is not a member of the Rastafarian faith. Still, the press and television could not resist the idea that he was one of a very small number of people raised in Brixton who dream of competing in the Horse of the Year Show, and one of an even smaller number prepared to don jodhpurs and pursue that dream over training fences.

Alas, Skeete was prevented from achieving showjumping glory by a mixture of circumstances, including an absence of the good fortune that all sportsmen require, the inherent conservatism of his chosen sport and the fact that he wasn’t very good at it.

Nevertheless, his abrupt rise to national coverage demonstrated the striking fact that one could be a famous sportsman even without achieving anything. Indeed, so completely did Skeete foreshadow the culture of the celebrity challenge show, it’s simply amazing that he hasn’t appeared on one before. What kept him? No point worrying about that now, though. He’s back, and that’s the main thing.

“Tonight, they just fight,” Kate Thornton, the presenter, promised us. But that turned out to be the biggest fib told in the name of showbusiness this weekend. They didn’t “just fight” at all. They shoved each other about a bit in games of elaborate and carefully padded contrivance, called things like Sumo Slam, Net Brawl and Murder Ball. And they gave each other a pummelling with those enormous plastic paddles that Gladiators used to go in for in the Nineties.

Except that this is Gladiators reimagined for a generation more attuned to the howling and gurning of America’s WWE (the former WWF). As such, it bears as much relation to the good old days of Kendo Nagasaki slapping the canvas in suspiciously broad agony as Skeete bears to David Broom.

Still, I guess the idea is to provide some teatime panto for the kids, and for anyone else who cares to see Annabel Croft, the former British tennis player, grapple with Kate Lawler, the former Big Brother winner. “It’s not often that you are straddling a woman on the floor,” Croft admitted — and this despite having spent time on the women’s tennis circuit.

As well as jostling each other, the teams must also jostle the week’s “masked celebrity”. Did the programme really need another person whose identity was a mystery? We got one, anyway. And in the end I’m not sure what was more bewildering: to see Fatima Whitbread emerge from beneath that mask, or the fact that she had just suffered a miserable mauling in the ring, courtesy of Victoria Silvstedt. The great British athletics legend, losing a bout of hand-to-hand combat with an underwear model . . . well, you could have knocked me down

I have nothing against celebrity wrestling as a format. The name is perfect: celebrity wrestling. It has a tinge of transatlantic trailer trash about it, promising guilty, decadent pleasure. Like Cheese Whizz. I have no idea what Cheese Whizz is, by the way, but I have heard it mentioned in American films, and I imagine they eat it in places like Beaverhead, Montana (look it up), while enjoying ice-cold beer and sweet-voiced country singers.
Disappointingly, Celebrity Wrestling on ITV turns out not to be the Cheese Whizz of television, failing to deliver on either the celebrity front or on the wrestling, and being neither decadent nor pleasurable.

In fact, I should go as far as to say, it may have been the most pointless 75 minutes I have ever spent in front of the television. Well, 60 actually. Until I get a vastly improved contract, I am not watching this tosh all the way through.

I have no inside knowledge of the production process behind the programme, so I am taking a bit of a flyer here, but my guess is that when they drew up the list of participants, Michelle Heaton, Jenny Powell, Leilani Dowding, James Hewitt, Mark Speight, Jeff Brazier, Annabel Croft, Kate Lawler, Victoria Silvstedt, Marc Bannerman, Oliver Skeete and Iwan Thomas were not absolutely the first 12 names they came up with. I cannot envisage a production meeting at which someone thumps the table and says: "Get me Jeff Brazier. If we can't get Jeff, we haven't got a show."

What I suspect happened is that there was a series of meetings that started with the exciting vision of Meryl Streep and Beyoncé Knowles in a cat fight and ended with Saturday's less than thrilling encounter in which Jenny Powell and Victoria Silvstedt pretended to tear off each other's clothes, providing a bit of blue for the dads at what is prime family-viewing time on ITV.

It is not a time when I should normally expect to be among those present, which may explain why I was so disappointed with the cast list. On a different channel at a different time, there might have been celebrities in whom I was more interested. Like people I had heard of, for instance.

I hope you understand I am not being snotty and superior about celebrity nor about wrestling. I am not unfavourably disposed to either. I would happily tune in for a bout between, say, David Aaronovitch and Bernie Clifton, or a no-holds-barred encounter between Ainsley Harriott and Julian Lloyd Webber. How about Professor Heinz Wolff versus Ronnie Corbett? Not to mention those who have prior argument: Nicholas Witchell versus Prince Charles; Ken Livingstone and Paul Dacre; the Hamiltons against Max Clifford in a tag match.

Any of those, I submit - and I have more names should the producers wish to contact me - would be more interesting than the vacuous nonentities pretending to snarl at each other on Saturday evening.

Maybe the unavailability of half-decent celebs forced the producers to concentrate on the wrestling rather than the celebrity. The commentator David Goldstrom even had the temerity to say "wrestling returns to ITV", as if this rather poor charade had anything to do with that quaint stuff from Deptford baths or the Assembly Rooms, Ashton-under-Lyne, that ITV used to show on a Saturday afternoon, until Greg Dyke did the nation a favour and cancelled it.

Celebrity wrestling borrowed its tone - and a couple of the participants their hairstyles - not from the Dickie Davies years but from the WWF wrestling that played on Sky Sports ad nauseam around 10 years ago, with the former professional Rowdy Roddy Piper co-hosting it, and two more WWF types "coaching" the teams, with the requisite amount of whooping, hollering and bad-mouthing of the "referee".

Some idea of the desperation of the project can be gathered from the round called "The Masked Celebrity". The idea of this, I suppose, is that the viewers might derive added excitement from the fact that one of the celebrity grapplers would be unknown to us. But as most of the others were as well, the impact of this gimmick suffered somewhat.

After being chained to a couple of the female wrestlers, the Masked Celebrity was pulled around the ring a little, before being revealed as, wait for it, "the fabulous Fatima Whitbread". I hope she was decently remunerated for her efforts.

The thought did strike me that perhaps there is a shortage of proper celebrities, until I logged on to a website offering thousands of them for hire; one of the few places where you will find Boris Johnson and Tommy Docherty rubbing shoulders, and Gareth Chilcott and Kirsty Wark lining up together. Admittedly, they are listed as after-dinner speakers, but I am sure if the brown envelope were suitably bolstered a little light wrestling would not be out of the question.

It is not as if it is proper wrestling either. The contests are wrestling-style games, quite demanding I should think, but a none too distant cousin of Gladiators and It's A Knockout. The audience figures may prove me wrong, but if they can maintain interest in this nonsense for eight weeks I shall be most surprised. It is all cheese and no whizz in my view.

i've just watched the show

if jeff brazier is 5'11" then i'm 7'3"

ONE of the trainers in ITV's Celebrity Wrestling once left an opponent paralysed when a move went tragically wrong.

D-Lo Brown is one of three WWF stars coaching contestants including Victoria Silvstedt, Annabel Croft and James Hewitt.

But five years ago D-Lo left Darren Drozdov crippled from the waist down during a New York bout watched by 15,000 fans.

D-Lo, now 35, attempted a "sitdown powerbomb", lifting 6ft 5in, 20-stone Drozdov and intending to drop him on his back.

But he fell on his head and Brown lost his balance to land on top.

The accident dislocated two of Drozdov's vertebrae and he still cannot use his lower body.

Droz, 35, said: "I told D-Lo from day one that things happen and it's not his fault. This is something that was a mistake. No one did it intentionally.

"It's a fact of life in any job. You go in expecting to be OK. Some days it doesn't turn out that way."