WCW Worldwide on Channel 5

[adamfromengland]

I suppose this is one for the UK members of the forum...

Does anybody remember WCW Worldwide on Channel 5 here in the UK? It was on at 7pm on Fridays, from July 1999 until Vince McMahon bought the company in 2001.

What a ludicrous show it was! ;D

Remember the way they used to censor a chair shot by using the Batman-style "KAPOW!" graphics? There's a video on YouTube of it, which I know I can't link to, but if you search for "wcw worldwide channel 5" on YouTube - it's the first one that pops up. Check it out, it's ridiculous.

Also, do you remember the way the announcers, Scott Hudson and Larry Zbyszko, would try and make it out it was like one proper show, instead of what it actually was - matches taken from Nitro, Thunder and WCW Saturday Night. How they could do this with a straight face, I don't know, as the sets would change when they went from Nitro to Saturday Night!

Hudson and Larry used to just goof off all of the time, because they knew nobody from WCW would see the show. Making insider comments, shooting on wrestlers, and generally just messing around.

I don't know why, maybe it was because they seemed to lower the crowd noise down and higher up the studio announcers for some reason, but the action seemed so tame.

Also, and I could never figure out why, but it was five or six weeks behind what was actually going on in WCW at the time over on TNT/Bravo on Cable.

Even the voice over guy for Channel 5 used to rip into the show, which always baffled me. I mean, why have a go at a show that's on your own channel?! Maybe it was just that bad. ;D

So, over to you, any memories of the show?

[HRH The KING]

It was god awful. The Batman style screen graphics were just ridiculous.

[Naniwa]

I remember one show which was just a hacked up Nitro, the announcers reacted to a Flair run-in by saying "OH NO, it looks like a senile old man has wandered into the ring, he seems lost and confused!"

While where on the subject Channel 4's Sunday Night Heat was pretty shoot heavy, the announcing team was generally the Coach with either Michael Hayes, Kevin Kelly or Taz, it sounded like it was recorded drunk at 3 in the morning. Hayes spent about 3 weeks ripping on Regal for botching a slingshot in between threatening to get coach fired.

[strykerdarksilence]

It didn't help that WCW was mostly awful by that stage, it probably helped to treat it as slapstick.

[BRAINFADE]

I don't know if i have imagined this, but does anyone else remember Mike Tenay being a heel commentator on this for a time?

[pundabaya]

Bah, I remember when Worldwide was shown on Central (ITV region, don't know if any others showed it) on saturday afternoons. Regal was on commentary for a good while on there, and was awesome.

[Objection!]

I loved this show as it was my introduction to wrestling. My memories of it now are very fuzzy. But it turned me into the bitter WCW mark I am today. ;D

[Lord Bendtner]

I remember this show too. Was my first real TV exposure to WCW. And it was terrible. But it was the show that turned me into a huge Stacy Keibler mark.

[adamfromengland]

Feb 20, 2011 5:17:55 GMT -5 Naniwa said:

While where on the subject Channel 4's Sunday Night Heat was pretty shoot heavy, the announcing team was generally the Coach with either Michael Hayes, Kevin Kelly or Taz, it sounded like it was recorded drunk at 3 in the morning. Hayes spent about 3 weeks ripping on Regal for botching a slingshot in between threatening to get coach fired.

I used to love WWF Heat on Channel 4 - it was a fun little show.

Remember in 2001 when Channel 4 didn't want anything to do with the show, and moved it from the 4pm on Sunday slot, to the early hours of the Monday morning?

They used to put it on at 12.30am (until 1.30am) when there was a pay-per-view starting at 1am on Sky Sports! ;D

Feb 20, 2011 18:49:47 GMT -5 BRAINFADE said:

I don't know if i have imagined this, but does anyone else remember Mike Tenay being a heel commentator on this for a time?

You're not imagining it, it did happen.

It was in late-2000/early-2001 when Larry couldn't do the show for some reason. Maybe he was on-screen at the time doing the Old Age Outlaws thing? I can't really remember. But yeah, they had Hudson and Tenay doing the show for a while, and Tenay was a heel colour commentator, for some reason.

Didn't Tenay used to say he was like the PA for the Magnificent Seven stable?

I used to love those storylines the announcers used to make up on Worldwide. ;D

[Cactus Jack]

That's my video on YouTube. I loved WCW Worldwide on Channel 5. I'll type out a proper post with memories when I have more time

[nitrothunder]

Worldwide was great. I like how the ring used to spin around.

[Asics Johnson]

How strange... Worldwide Wrestling was nothing like that, stateside. I remember watching the show from as early as 1994, when Hogan and Savage first joined. It was always "new" matches, and by that, I mean they were taped (obviously), but they weren't matches from Nitro or Thunder. We also never got the "KAPOW" logo when someone was hit with a chair.

England is weird...

[adamfromengland]

Feb 21, 2011 11:00:05 GMT -5 Cactus Jack said:

That's my video on YouTube. I loved WCW Worldwide on Channel 5. I'll type out a proper post with memories when I have more time

Cool. Looking forward to it.

Feb 21, 2011 11:21:15 GMT -5 nitrothunder said:

Worldwide was great. I like how the ring used to spin around.

That wasn't this show. The spinning ring was WCW Worldwide recorded at Disney in the mid-90's for TV in the States.

The WCW Worldwide I'm talking about, was made for us in the UK. It was matches taken from Nitro, Thunder, and Saturday Night, and put into one show.

So, we didn't get the spinning ring, sadly. ;D

Feb 21, 2011 12:29:48 GMT -5 Asics Johnson said:

We also never got the "KAPOW" logo when someone was hit with a chair.

Yeah, you wouldn't have got that in the States.

It was the UK TV channel, Channel 5, who did that - not WCW.

[Asics Johnson]

... like I said. :-P

[adamfromengland]

Feb 21, 2011 18:59:49 GMT -5 Asics Johnson said:

... like I said. :-P

Yeah, erm, sorry about that. ;D

I sort of mis-read your post.

[CMWaters]

Yeah, UK Worldwide sounds interesting.

IIRC, for US Worldwide for a while, all we got was the spinning ring and Dusty Rhodes mooing before the main event of the show.

[zing]

Oh as if I could forget!
Yeah, I watched it because I was in my beyond obsessive mark phase, but even then I crapped all over it. That was probably about the time I started becoming disillusioned - I wonder if the two are connected?
It was always annoying because TNT was on freeview anyway and I religiously watched Nitro and Thunder, so I just frustrated myself watching these matches I'd seen before get edited to hell and crapped all over. Didn't stop me watching though did it?

[Evilution E5150]

in Australia on channel 9 we used to get a edited 1 hour version of Nitro called International Nitro that was about 2 weeks behind and we got that from 1999 till it closed i think

[Big Evil]

By the later days of WCW, Worldwide was like this in America. It was a syndicated show that aired the same way in the US and UK, there were no differences. Worldwide started in the 80's when it was still owned by the Crocketts and used to be original programming before moving to the Disney/MGM Studios and starting off with the lower card wrestlers and jobbers, almost a B-Show to WCWSN. Then, when the Nitro/Thunder era began, it developed into a canned show that showed dark matches and recaps from Nitro & Thunder. It was always weeks behind what WCW was actually doing for some god awful reason. Prime example was the fact that two episodes of WCW Worldwide aired in the two weeks AFTER WCW had actually went out of business. But they had already been sent out and were in syndication, so it didn't matter.

[Ryushinku]

I do remember WCW Saturday Night getting shown at an ungodly hour, like 2 in the morning, on ITV back around 1993. Because that was the first pro wrestling show I watched!