The Telegraph Reviews Monday Night Raw

Jonathan Liew of The Telegraph watched and reviewed Monday Night Raw last night. Here is the piece he wrote: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9894438/WWE-RAW-wrestling-Sky-review.html

Enter Hamlet.
Hamlet: Now mother, what’s the matter?
Gertrude: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
Hamlet: Mother, you have my father much offended.
Gertrude: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
Hamlet: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
Gertrude: Have you forgot me?
Commentator: Whoa! Hamlet’s grabbed the chair! Where did that come from?
Hamlet smacks a terrified Gertrude around the head, again and again, with the chair. Enter Polonius.
Commentator: Unbelievable! Lord Polonius is in the house!
Polonius: Alas, poor Hamlet. Your ass is mine.
Polonius punches Hamlet in the kidneys. As he tries to grab Hamlet in a headlock, Hamlet knees Polonius in the testicles, grabs him by the shoulders, and throws him violently against the bargueno. Polonius recoils in pain. Hamlet reaches into his tunic.
Commentator: He’s got the knuckle-dusters out! He’s going to finish him off! But wait! Who’s this?
Malvolio: Party time, bitches!

One of the arguments that the advocates of WWE - the American professional wrestling that is shown on Monday nights in the UK on Sky - frequently use in response to its critics is that it is simply theatre. It is no more or less real than a West End show, or the latest multiplex blockbuster. If so, you rather wish these same people would stop calling its participants ‘athletes’. I mean, Daniel Day-Lewis looked an awful lot like Lincoln, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a president.

The trick that has kept WWE going for three decades and more is, of course, the swift camera cut they use whenever someone gets ‘hit’. At the very moment of ‘impact’, the TV director will switch to another angle, just in time for us to see the recipient of the blow recoiling in ‘pain’. Upon such visual wizardry has the franchise managed to generate revenue £398 million last year and make a multi-millionaire of its chief executive, Vince McMahon

McMahon opened last night’s WWE Raw show, hobbling into the arena on crutches as a result of a recent hip replacement. Was he really recovering from an operation? Did he really need the crutches? It turns out he did, for within minutes some rival promoter had entered the arena and punched him right in the babymaker. A brief fracas broke out, which ended in a succession of increasingly bronzed, increasingly beefy men entering the ring and pretending to hit each other. It was all most puzzling.

Push at all four walls, and they move. Not even the commercial breaks are safe. During one, a trailer was aired for the new Halle Berry film. This, too, turned out to be a WWE production. You might think that knowing everything is artifice rather takes the edge off the spectacle. On the contrary. The idea that nothing at all in the WWE universe is real, that nothing at all can be trusted, strikes a rather Lynchian note of menace. What’s to stop random body parts falling from the sky, or everybody suddenly declaring that the year is 2078 and we all need to start hunting our own dinner?

The howl you often hear from WWE diehards who will brook no criticism of their sport, even when it is pointed out to them that sport generally has rules and a winner that is decided on the day, is: “If you don’t like it, then don’t watch it.” Well, I’m afraid that simply won’t wash here. I don’t watch Come Dine With Me because I don’t like it. But with something like WWE, something so fundamentally, violently, perversely at odds with everything good in the world, it behoves the professional writer at least to ask a few questions.

So what do WWE fans get out of it? Escapism, certainly, but from what? To what? And then, as you see Tea Party-parody Zeb Coulter and Mexican-American fighter Alberto del Rio engaging in an unwieldy debate about the merits of immigration, you finally realise.

Of all the segments in last night’s show that could conceivably have been written by a 12-year-old, this was the only one that almost certainly was. “We have 11 million undocumented workers in this country!” shouted Coulter. “And the politically correct crowd don’t know exactly what they are – illegals. Real Americans already have a tough job enough finding work! They take our jobs! They take our medical services! They take our resources, and they stifle our productivity!”

“Your time to talk is over!” Del Rio countered. “Now it’s time for you to shut up! This is the greatest country on earth because it belongs to everyone!”

Inevitably, Coulter’s protégé Jack Swagger (‘Real American’) will fight Del Rio at Wrestlemania in April, a contest that will, one assumes, settle once and for all the debate over whether immigration is a good thing. That was certainly the ascription, anyway. And it is this, rather than the cartoon hitting, that I think lies at the root of WWE’s appeal. It creates a universe where even the thorniest, most intractable problems have the most elementary of solutions. How to solve the Middle East? Simply slip a mujahideen and an IDF soldier into leotards and make them slap it out.

A simple world for simple minds. It is easy to imagine that the typical WWE fan finds the real world bewildering and embittering: too much rejection, too many rules, too complicated by far. But for a few hours on a Monday night, he (it is almost invariably a he) can disappear into a universe in which there are no rules, in which steroid-rich dolts can produce the most stirring of oratory on demand, in which violence solves everything, without exceptions.

The main event of the night was the championship eliminator between the swarthy legend John Cena and the snarling upstart CM Punk. “Tonight is a night you will talk to your grandchildren about,” CM Punk promised at the start of a speech that really should have been delivered by Morgan Freeman for maximum, or indeed any, dramatic effect. “I am the greatest, I am the best in the world, I am immortal. A legend. An icon. The best, the greatest, and in the world that you all inhabit: I am God!”

These words may well have been written for a fictional character, but they definitely came out of a real person’s mind.

Cena won. The fight itself was a more orthodox affair, featuring plenty of grunting and almost no furniture. At one stage, CM Punk managed to duck a swinging Cena fist and respond with a meaty throw of his own.

“That’s how well he knows Cena!” the commentator roared.

I mean, It’s almost as if he knew what was coming.




Now, personally I think this is actually quite embarrassing to have come out of the 'pen' of an otherwise intelligent journalist. A lot of it is stupid, the two bits i've put in bold the most disappointing because the logic is pathetically weak.

What are your thoughts?

I think it's just a vague jab at something he doesn't quite understand and something he wouldn't get a full understanding watching one show of which there are over 50 in a year.

The main issue is that he started the article with the intention to ridicule and insult the product, what's the point? He had already decided that it was bad before he began watching, and for that he shows really poor journalism. He wanted credit for pointing out that obvious, clearly unable to grasp the idea that it was staged as being something acceptable.

I also don't understand in what way that it goes "against everything good in the world", a lot of programming is violent, a lot of films and TV show violence as a valid means of solving issues and problems. Compared to a lot of action films and TV shows WWE is actually better at constructing reasons for why violence is used.

I'd like to see somebody from the Telegraph respond to this article with a positive review of wrestling, one that doesn't get hung up on the fact that it's not real. "I mean, It’s almost as if he knew what was coming."...I know it's almost as if Mark Hamill knew that his character was about to be revealed as Darth Vader's son!

Somebody in the comments compared it to soaps (Crips will be chuffed) and mentioned the fights, drugs, alcoholism, r*** and murder. Makes WWE look quaint

I thought the article was pretentious twaddle, much like the other articles I've had the misfortune to read written by him.

Some of his football ones are interesting, mainly cos they are different, but this was awful.

It amuses me how hard he's clearly trying to sound intellectually superior to the average wrestling fan, yet within three paragraphs, he uses "all most" instead of "almost." Surely such a bewilderingly intelligent man should be able to use the correct word, or at least words that make some sort of sense.

Methinks he might be a tad insecure in his own intelligence (as he bloody well should be), so he undermines the intelligence of people he sees as below him. That's a bit sad, really.

I enjoyed it.

I think he went in with his mind made up and planning to hate it and so he couldnt pick out positives about RAW and the business in general. I dont like musicals, so I dont critique them, because I know I cant be fair.

Pretty unprofessionaly in my opinion.

Aaronb33 wrote:It amuses me how hard he's clearly trying to sound intellectually superior to the average wrestling fan, yet within three paragraphs, he uses "all most" instead of "almost." Surely such a bewilderingly intelligent man should be able to use the correct word, or at least words that make some sort of sense.

The article may be total tosh, but to call something "all most confusing" is perfectly valid English, as in "the whole spectacle was the most confusing thing I've ever seen".

Right you are, my mistake, I read that one wrong. My point stands about him being a pretentious little sod, though.

First and foremost, this is really bad journalism. I can forgive his ignorance of the subject, but a good journalist would try to understand it rather than belittle it. He's not completely wrong in some of his assertions - wrestling does contain some rather absurd logic - but he shows no grasp of the nuances of the wrestling industry, and is extremely generalistic about wrestling fans. I think the intelligent discussion we are having on the topic emphatically proves him wrong on that front.

Secondly, the journalist comes across as something of a bully. It seems like his entire reason for writing the article was to poke fun at wrestling and wrestling fans, for the amusement of other people who are also wilfully ignorant on the subject. For someone who clearly considers himself to possess such a superior level of intelligence to wrestling fans, it's rather a juvenile and emotionally stunted way to behave.

I long for the day that newspapers become redundant so that pretentious mongs like Liew have to actually report something worthwhile.

What disturbes me is that something like this will appeal to people out there and confirm their ignorant bias on WWE and the world of professional wrestling. ' “If you don’t like it, then don’t watch it.” Well, I’m afraid that simply won’t wash here.' Who does he really think he is with this quote? Some sort of paragon of moral values?

Wish I didn't bother reading it, for a "professional journalist" he sure as he wasn't very balanced which brings you to question why he bothered with the piece in the first place.

He sounds like he's got a massive inferiority complex and is desperate to sound intelligent and belittle anyone who has a different view, the amusing thing is though he spent so much time trying to appear intelectually superior to anyone who might like Professional Wrestling that he actually shows himself up for not having the capability to understand why people may like it.

Its an awful article written by someone who clearly had no intention of viewing it through an unbiased eye before ink had left his pen.

These are the kind of 'critics' that I'd love to have a serious discussion with about the good and bad side or Pro Wrestling, unfortunately guys like this have no intention of allowing themselves to be placed in a position where their opinion can be taken to task.

Nobody found it funny? A few gold quotes in there

I wish I hadn't read the article. I now want to find this man and solve my problems with him through violence.

To be fair, all the comments are negative feedback.

I think I am being a techno-bimbo as I can't read any of the comments.

The article itself was ill thought out - he clearly had no intention of researching the company, the product, the storylines or anything about WWE. He wrote it with a deliberate poisened pen.

Long time Lurker, 1st time poster in this section...

That article really made me angry. It seemed to neglect the fact that this is a story driven stunt show that entertains millions across the world and seems to comfortably sell out the bulk of arena's it visits.

Cack article... that is all.

Poor article, like others have said it looks like he had every intention of criticising the product prior to watching.

seems abit random...if you're going to write an article about wrestling (and the last time I checked the Telegraph doesn't have a regular wrestling column) it would seem far more natural to review WrestleMania the biggest PPV of the year. Reviewing a random episode of Raw strikes me as odd .

The journalist clearly has an agenda - wrestling is not a real sport so he thinks he can easily denigrate it and belittle the fans because its an 'easy target'. The article was very derisory in tone and did not approach the subject with an open mind.

This unfortunately - perhaps without the poor attempt at psychological profiling - is what many non-wrestling fans think of professional wrestling: a bunch of steroid induced bodybuilders pretending to beat each other up in pantomine esque fashion whilst wearing very camp spandex outfits that isn't believable or entertaining. All the journalist has achieved is proving he can identify stereotypes and convey the same broad sweeping generalizations as the rest of society. In this respect his observations are not so much penetrating in their insight as boring in their conformity to social convention.

Nothing to be gained from reading this article it just perpetuates ignorance.

This is just another reason for why I hate journalists.

If you have no interest or knowledge on something, why go to the effort of writing your opinion down and publishing it.