‘Easy! Easy! Easy!” My voice is lost in the cacophony as hundreds in Keighley’s Victoria Hall join the chant. It is the most exciting thing to happen in the West Yorkshire town in years: Big Daddy has come to meet Giant Haystacks in the wrestling ring. Six-year-old me knows it’s something special.
My family look a bit odd in this venue in Keighley in 1983, what with my dad being Bangladeshi and my mum being white. At school I’m browner than the white kids and whiter than the brown ones. But on this glorious day there is nothing different about us; we are part of the single chanting mass witnessing a battle more exciting than anything in Return of the Jedi (another highlight of 1983).
We know the heroic Big Daddy’s victory over the villainous Giant Haystacks is as inevitable as the tide – but right now it’s hanging in the balance. Haystacks has been up to his old tricks and is fighting dirty. My heart is in my mouth. Big Daddy is on his knees. What if our hero – the “babyface” in wrestling parlance – loses? Unthinkable. He needs our help to chant him to victory.
Easy! Easy! Easy! Shirley Crabtree (Big Daddy) pins Martin Ruane (Giant Haystacks) to the canvas. My world erupts in joy.
Today, it’s difficult to explain to children in Keighley just how significant it was when Big Daddy came to town. In 1983, we didn’t have enough TV to last a full day. Children’s shows ran out in the middle of the morning. Watching my dad mix cement was a legitimate pastime.
Now we have stars far bigger than Giant Haystacks, but they exist in a world of mass celebrity and instant access. In 1983, these wrestling icons were untouchable and unknowable. ITV transmitted professional wrestling from 1955 to 1988, bringing to our screens on a Saturday afternoon the likes of Mick McManus, Harvey Smith, Kendo Nagasaki (AKA Peter Thornley) and Catweazle (whose real name was Gary Cooper, which makes you wonder why he needed the stage moniker).
Imagine if The Rock was also on EastEnders and a member of One Direction, and you come close to understanding what these wrestling gods were to us. Actually, scratch that. There is no comparison between the wrestlers we grew up with and today’s celebrities, particularly not to a northern working-class child of the 1980s.
Although British wrestling was broadcast nationally, its heartland and spiritual homeland was always the north. Big Daddy hailed from Halifax, Catweazle from Doncaster and the actor Brian Glover began his performing career as wrestler Leon Arras the Man from Paris. His journey via the wrestling ring to a role in Alien 3 began in Barnsley.
Then, in 1985, it stopped. ITV took World of Sport, the home of British wrestling, off the air. Wrestling, the replacement programme, staggered on as a standalone on ITV presented by Kent Walton, but was axed in 1988 in the face of decreasing popularity. British wrestling died. Right?
Wrong. Like Big Daddy being revived by our chants in 1983, British wrestling was only playing dead.
Cut to: February 2018. I’m in Preston. I recognise the milieu. It’s like Keighley, only Lancastrian. I’m meeting producer Anna Nguyen, who is working with the Dukes theatre in Lancaster. Her role has been funded by Tamasha as part of an Arts Council programme to increase diversity in the arts. She, British Vietnamese, and I, mixed-race British Bangladeshi, go into Preston’s Evoque nightclub on a Saturday afternoon. Inside is a single point of focus: a wrestling ring. There are hundreds packed into this place. I realise wrestling in the northern heartland isn’t staging a comeback. It never went away.
When she arrived at the Dukes, Anna wanted to get under the skin of the community the theatre was serving. She spotted two seemingly unconnected things. First: in 2015, Lancaster became a city of sanctuary and the 97% white British population began welcoming refugees and asylum seekers from Syria, Iran, Sudan and Kuwait. Second: there were posters for wrestling matches around the city. She wanted to make work that would speak to people now and resonate with the region. She wanted to produce a play about wrestling. Anna found me via a previous play I wrote that toured to Lancaster, The Chef Show.
Since that afternoon at the Evoque, we’ve interviewed wrestling journalists, wrestlers and owners of gyms. This form of entertainment and escapism has much to say about the role of the male in a post-industrial landscape. We’ve been to towns where tensions simmer between offcumdens (newcomers) and those born there.
It all led to Glory, a comedy drama set inside a wrestling ring and directed by Red Ladder’s Rod Dixon. Our fading hero is Jim, who once wrestled as Jim “Glorious” Glory. He is the owner and chief coach of a gym he sees as a palace and monument to his past. Everyone else just sees a dump.
We met with the many Jims running gyms in dirty northern towns. We also met Christian, a black British former soldier who craved the discipline and structure he discovered in the army. He found it on civvy street in one of these dilapidated boxing gyms. Meeting with refugee and asylum-seeker groups in Lancaster, we discovered young men who were, more than anything, bored. They can’t work, have little money and live in an often hostile environment.
We threw our characters together to wrestle with identity, with what they want from life and each other. This is a play about who we are in Britain today. It’s about the glory days that are well behind Jim, and a future that looks a little different to his past but has its own glory. If he could wipe away the film of nostalgia from his rheumy eyes, he might see it.
And there’s plenty of sweaty, body-slamming, bone-shuddering wrestling. If you pine for the days when Big Daddy defeated Giant Haystacks, come along and join in the chant: Easy! Easy! Easy!
Glory is at the Dukes, Lancaster, 21 February-2 March. Then touring until 13 April.
