Last week I had the pleasure of watching one of the best British wrestling documentaries I’ve seen in recent years. Insane Fight Club focused on the good and the great of the Glasgow-based Insane Championship Wrestling in the lead-up to their biggest ever show.
This past Wednesday BBC Three gave us a second look at those crazy Scots in Insane Fight Club II, which focused on two main storylines, their first tour of England, and the proverbial prodigal son returning from the bright lights of WWE.
The first part of the show focused on their tour, with Mark Dallas and his crew, including Heavyweight Champion Jack Jester and the ever-lovable Grado (I met him once you know, back in 2003 in Blackburn) jumping into a campervan and combining promoting the show and gaining publicity, which involved meeting the guy who played Jimmy Corkhill in Brookside and getting drunk with a couple of guys from Geordie Shore.
With the tour going down a storm the focus of the show shifted to the run-up to their big show at the Barrowlands in Glasgow. The main talking point here was the return of former ICW star and former WWE star Drew Galloway. The man who was once Vince McMahon’s chosen one had recently been released from the company and had returned to ICW during their English tour, and for the big show he was matched against Jester for the title.
If you were watching this in the hope that Galloway would give away some of Triple H’s secrets then you were probably disappointed. There’s hardly any mention of what he did in WWE, but there is a very emotional moment where he talks about the recent death of his mother, and how he had to watch events from afar because of his work with WWE.
Perhaps the most telling part of the entire peace was Jester’s reaction to finding out he was going to drop the title to Galloway. Although they’d been friends for years Jester couldn’t help but feel a great deal of resentment in Mark’s decision to give the title to the returning Galloway, and while you could see why Mark wanted to put the title on Galloway given his somewhat higher profile you could also see Jester’s point of view, coming as it did from someone who’d been with the company for years.
There’s also the little side-story concerning Grado and his weight problems, with the chappy having put on about 30 pounds since the last documentary. But instead of changing his habits and going on a diet Grado opts to visit a hypnotist in the hope of getting a “hypnotic” gastric band fitted. (It didn’t work, judging by the montage at the end of the piece.)
All of this combined made for a very interesting and well-made piece, but I have to admit that it kind of lacked the spark of the first instalment. Don’t get me wrong, it was very enjoyable, and it was great to catch up with the boys to see what they’d been doing, but perhaps I was expecting a little too much because the first piece was so great.
But with all of that being said there’s only really one way I can end this review, and that’s by giving Insane Fight Club II the thumbs up.
By day I‘m an unemployed retail worker, and at weekends I volunteer in a local museum, but by night I’m the author of The Two Sheds Review, Britain’s longest running professional wrestling and mixed martial arts blog. It’s been online in one form or another since June 2000!