Monday Night RaGE 1

One week after Maybe Memories, RWL was back at Turning Medieval for the first edition of Monday Night RaGE.

Three matches, a backstage confrontation, a few more developments on the road to Entertainmania II, and something resembling an actual entrance stage.

Things were looking up.

Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the footage.

No Tarp, But There Was a Plan

Once again, the blue tarp was nowhere to be seen.

After spending much of the summer wrestling on gym mats at Darwen Vale High School, RWL had returned to its familiar field, and the grass was once again doing most of the work.

This time, however, somebody had come up with an alternative.

A thick white wire had been laid out in a square, marking the boundaries of the wrestling area.

It wasn’t a ring in the traditional sense. There were no ropes, no canvas and certainly no turnbuckles worth mentioning, but at least there was now a visible line separating the inside from the outside.

And that was becoming important.

By this point, RWL had adopted what were simply known as RWL Rules. Essentially, there were no disqualifications, meaning weapons and outside interference were fair game, but pinfalls and submissions would only count within the ring area.

The white wire therefore served a genuine purpose.

RWL had finally found a way to have ring boundaries without actually having a ring.

There was also something new at the entrance.

Rather than the usual arrangement of wrestlers simply appearing from somewhere off-camera, the show featured an entranceway constructed from lighttubes.

It looked pretty cool, giving RaGE 1 a distinctive appearance compared with the previous shows at Turning Medieval.

There was another benefit, too.

If somebody fancied using a lighttube during their match, there was now a convenient supply of them standing right beside the entrance.

Set decoration and hardcore weaponry, all in one.

Very economical.

Enter the CorZonE

The show opened with Valo addressing his increasingly personal rivalry with “Cyanide” Danny Cooper.

At Maybe Memories, the two had finally agreed to settle their differences at Entertainmania II, where they would face each other in a Deathmatch.

The rivalry had started with Cyanide interfering in Valo’s RWL World Championship opportunity at Smack!YerBitchUp, before Valo retaliated by suspending him at Misery Business.

By now, however, the storyline had become about considerably more than wrestling.

Behind the scenes, Valo had become involved with the former girlfriend of Lewis O’Brien, the man behind the Cyanide character. Lewis and Valo were close friends, and the situation had caused genuine hurt between them.

Both had agreed to turn that real-life tension into a worked-shoot storyline, deliberately blurring the line between what was happening in RWL and what had happened away from it.

Valo wasn’t exactly making much effort to be the good guy.

“Lewis O’Brien… the man who’s girlfriend I stole… I’m pretty damn proud of that to be honest, but Cyanide… come Entertainmania, me vs you in a Deathmatch. Only one of us can be standing after that, and that will be Valo”

Subtle.

The promo continued, although the complete recording has unfortunately been lost. In the surviving footage, there’s an edit before Valo delivers another warning.

“And trust me on this, Lewis, at Entertainmania, you will enter… the CorZonE”

The CorZonE, of course, was Valo’s finishing move.

Once again, Valo had used Lewis’s real name rather than simply addressing him as Cyanide, reinforcing the personal nature of the rivalry.

The full promo was recorded, but all that currently survives is an edited version from the original 320×240 WMV music video uploaded to YouTube in 2007.

Whatever was said between those two surviving sections is now unknown.

Not ideal when trying to reconstruct a storyline built around people talking to one another.

Still, the message was clear enough.

Valo and Cyanide were heading for a Deathmatch at Entertainmania II, and neither was pretending it was a friendly disagreement.

Crystal Clear, Straight Through the Entrance

The opening match saw “Cyanide” Danny Cooper face Shawn O’ Mercy.

It was a rematch from Maybe Memories, where Mercy had regained the RWL Hardcore Championship in a Dog Collar Match after Valo interfered against Cyanide.

This time, the championship wasn’t on the line.

The match wasn’t advertised as a Hardcore Match either, although under the newly adopted RWL Rules, that didn’t mean a great deal.

No disqualifications meant no disqualifications.

There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about the match itself, but the finish certainly made use of the show’s new surroundings.

With an entranceway built from lighttubes, there was no shortage of suitable equipment for somebody looking to cause a bit of damage.

Cyanide took advantage, delivering his Crystal Clear to Shawn O’ Mercy through a lighttube.

He followed it immediately with the pinfall.

One week after losing the Hardcore Championship to Mercy, Cyanide had beaten him in a non-title match.

It didn’t return the belt to Cyanide, but it was a small measure of revenge following the events of Maybe Memories.

And the entranceway had already started paying for itself.

Well, assuming nobody wanted it to remain intact.

Same Two Blokes, More Flips

Next came another encounter between two wrestlers who had spent a considerable amount of time facing each other.

Jayyy and Valo.

By this point, the pair had developed something of a regular series of matches, both in RWL and through their increasing involvement in the wider UKBYW scene.

Throughout 2007, both had been travelling and gaining experience with National Alliance Wrestling (NAW) and elsewhere, working with wrestlers outside their own promotion and bringing what they learned back to Blackburn.

It was starting to show.

Their matches were becoming more ambitious, with a wider range of moves and a much better understanding of how to put things together.

This was another competitive, back-and-forth encounter, with both men showing off what they’d picked up.

Valo pulled out a big Canadian Destroyer, while Jayyy seemed particularly interested in finding new ways to rotate through the air without the assistance of any ropes.

Among his collection of standing aerial attacks were a Corkscrew Moonsault and the Stand On You Shooting Star, alongside several other acrobatic manoeuvres.

All of this, remember, was happening on grass.

Inside a square made from white wire.

Not exactly the sort of setup that encouraged a sensible approach to wrestling.

Jayyy eventually picked up the victory, but the result wasn’t really the interesting part.

What stood out was how much the two had improved.

Compare their earliest RWL matches with what they were doing by September 2007, and the difference was becoming obvious. They were still wrestling in the same sort of places, with much of the same equipment, but the wrestling itself had moved forward considerably.

The ring hadn’t improved much.

The wrestlers had.

Yesterday in Spyke’s Office

Before the main event, RWL presented something a little different.

A backstage segment.

Not just somebody standing in front of a camera delivering a promo, either.

This was RWL’s first multi-cut promo segment, filmed the previous day and edited together to tell a story.

It was introduced with the caption:

“YESTERDAY in Spyke’s Office”

The footage had been recorded on 2nd September 2007, one day before Monday Night RaGE 1.

And it began with Spyke, RWL’s Assistant Manager, sitting in his office watching the Maybe Memories DVD.

Apparently even RWL management liked to keep up with the product.

His viewing was interrupted when Teddie H came barging into the office.

Teddie had made his RWL debut at Maybe Memories, putting on an impressive match against Project SEX, and now he wanted more.

Specifically, championship matches and tougher competition.

Spyke explained that those decisions were entirely up to Valo, rather than himself.

Which was when the telephone rang.

It was Valo.

What remarkable timing.

Spyke asked him to come down to the office, and Valo duly arrived to deal with Teddie’s demands.

Having heard what Teddie had been saying, Valo offered him exactly the sort of challenge he was asking for.

In two weeks, Teddie H would face KillSwitch for the RWL Cruiserweight Championship.

An interesting choice of opponent.

KillSwitch was a 6’6”, 28-stone superheavyweight, who had somehow become RWL’s inaugural Cruiserweight Champion at Misery Business.

If Teddie wanted a bigger challenge, he was certainly getting one.

Quite literally.

Valo continued to run Teddie down verbally, before Spyke added another match to the conversation.

Teddie H would face Spyke himself at Monday Night RaGE 1.

Teddie wasn’t particularly concerned.

He insisted that he could beat anybody on the RWL roster and threatened to bury Spyke six feet under.

Spyke called his bluff.

Teddie stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him.

And that appeared to be that.

Except Valo then offered to go and fetch Teddie back.

For some reason, Teddie agreed to return.

He probably shouldn’t have.

The moment he came back into the office, Spyke jumped him and struck him over the head with a drum cymbal.

A wonderfully mature response from RWL’s Assistant Manager.

The whole segment was a small but important step forward for RWL’s production.

Previous backstage promos had generally been fairly straightforward affairs. Somebody talked, somebody else interrupted, and occasionally somebody got hit.

This time, the scene had been planned around multiple camera cuts, with different shots edited together to create a more television-style presentation.

There was an office, a telephone call, a surprise attack and an actual attempt at telling a story through editing.

RWL was getting sophisticated.

Well, as sophisticated as a wrestling promotion could get while its management was attacking people with musical instruments.

Six Feet Under, in 320×240

That brought the show to its main event.

Spyke vs Teddie H, in a Hardcore Match.

After the events in Spyke’s office, there wasn’t much reason to expect a friendly wrestling contest.

And it wasn’t one.

The two brawled using lighttubes and thumbtacks, making use of the weapons available around Turning Medieval.

The lighttube entranceway had already featured in the opening match, and now the main event was making further use of RWL’s conveniently breakable decorations.

Unfortunately, actually seeing much of the match today is another matter.

By the time the main event took place, it was dark.

That presented a rather significant problem for the surviving footage.

The show had originally been recorded using two cameras, but only the alternative camera angle now survives in usable original quality.

That camera didn’t have the infrared capability needed to film in darkness.

Which meant that when the main event came around, the alternative recording was no use.

The original footage from the other camera has since been lost.

What remains is the version preserved in RWL’s original 320×240 WMV music video, uploaded to YouTube back in 2007.

Dark footage. Low resolution. Heavy compression. Music-video editing.

A fantastic combination for anyone hoping to work out what was happening.

Because no clean recording survives, the reconstructed full-show version also presents the main event in music-video format, rather than as a conventional match.

It isn’t a stylistic decision made for the modern release.

It’s all that’s left.

Despite the limitations, the important moments can still be established.

Spyke and Teddie fought their way through the Hardcore Match, with Teddie eventually delivering his Face Adjustment to pick up the victory.

After demanding tougher opponents and championship opportunities earlier in the show, Teddie had now beaten RWL’s Assistant Manager.

And he still had that promised Cruiserweight Championship match against KillSwitch to look forward to.

Spyke, meanwhile, had discovered that hitting somebody with a drum cymbal before a match didn’t necessarily guarantee a successful evening.

The Show That Survived. Sort Of.

Looking back, Monday Night RaGE 1 is a strange one.

On paper, it was a relatively small show. Just three matches, a couple of promos and the usual collection of backyard wrestling nonsense.

But there were signs of RWL continuing to develop.

The lighttube entranceway gave the show a distinctive look. The white wire ring boundary provided a more clearly defined wrestling area. Jayyy and Valo were continuing to demonstrate how much they’d learned from working outside RWL.

The Valo and Cyanide storyline was becoming increasingly personal as Entertainmania II approached, while Teddie H was beginning to establish himself as somebody with ambitions beyond simply turning up and having a match.

And then there was Spyke’s office.

RWL’s first multi-cut promo might seem like a small thing, but for a group that had started recording shows on borrowed school camcorders less than a year earlier, it was another step towards making the shows feel more like wrestling television.

Unfortunately, the footage hasn’t aged quite as gracefully as the ideas behind it.

Only one usable original camera angle survives.

The opening Valo promo is incomplete, preserved only through edited excerpts in an old music video. The main event has no surviving clean footage at all, leaving the low-resolution music-video edit as the only available record of the match.

Even the reconstructed full show can’t completely escape those limitations.

Some footage can be restored. Some can be sharpened. Some can be made a little easier to watch.

And some is just fucked.

Monday Night RaGE 1 falls rather firmly into that last category.

Still, the show happened. The matches are documented, the storylines continued, and RWL’s first experiment with a more elaborate backstage production survived.

It might not be the prettiest entry in the archive, but it’s another part of the promotion’s history that would otherwise be much easier to forget.

Three matches, a lighttube entrance, RWL’s first multi-cut promo and footage held together by the technological equivalent of sticky tape. Monday Night RaGE had arrived.