James Mustoe with the first part of his in-depth look at the career of WWE’s William Regal.

Silver Vision’s exclusive ‘Live in The…’ series of DVDs is a rather strange concept, as the releases basically feature a week’s worth of WWE television generally encompassing whichever European tour WWE has most recently been on.

Essentially then, WWE is re-releasing footage that has previously been made available on free television.

While this may sound pretty pointless for those of us who religiously record and collect each WWE TV show, for those who only casually watch and may have even attended the shows featured here, the DVD may provide a handy memento of their live wrestling experience.

WWE’s William Regal has had a rough time of it recently, with Powerslam magazine referring to him as a ‘demoted drug failure disgrace’ in their most recent issue.

True, Regal did fail his second wellness test on May 19, but I don’t see Powerslam taking pot shots at the similarly ‘troubled’ Jeff Hardy, of whom they generally seem to have a more positive attitude on, despite his similarly chequered past.

Regal has been a consistently solid to excellent ring performer since his stateside debut in late 1992, and has also been one of the more entertaining characters since the inception of the Lord Steven Regal character in late 1993…

A look back at WrestleMania XV, now available as part of Silver Vision’s Tagged Classics series

Well it would seem that WWE’s annual mass- talent release is under way. As I previously noted in my draft column series, WWE tends to like to let go a number of performers around the time of the draft lottery (prior to the advent of the draft a similar firing would ‘traditionally’ take place immediately after Wrestlemania), and it also seems that a fair few of those released are drafted beforehand for some bizarre reason, only to never appear on television for their new programme.
While some releases have already occurred …

For this week’s column I want to do a more traditional historical piece on the power hierarchy of the WWF(E). While Vince McMahon has always maintained overall creative control of his product, there has generally been a constantly changing pattern of creative staff and booking team members.
What I want to do here is write a potted history (in no way exhaustive) of these different creative eras from 1995 to the present day, encompassing memorable themes, matches, and angles, as well as highlighting the actual wrestlers who were mainly featured by …

In the first ever WWEpreview half-year awards I voted JBL as ‘least improved’ wrestler in the WWE this year. This was due to my feelings that he simply had not improved since his December comeback.
Sure, I agree that some initial ring rust would not have been unheard of, but almost everything JBL has participated in, ring-work wise, has not been up to scratch. Then I went away and thought about it, looked at some of his older work, and thought again.
While many now look back on JBL’s 2004-2006 run, and …

Following up from my last column, it looks like not Big Daddy V, but Mark Henry is the commonly labelled useless lump who is going to be in receipt of the big ECW ‘Main Event level’ push.
Oh well, good luck to him, and he’s another monster heel character who has come on in leaps and bounds since 2003 (shame he’s been employed since 1996, but oh well you can at least give him points for improving recently!}
With regards to this year’s draft’s similarities with past trends, they’ve ended up pretty …

For my next column I was going to write some sort of ‘best matches’ piece on Chris Benoit. However, while looking around the ‘net this week I noticed that there is already a lot of this sort of column up, plus I think that actually compiling a list of great Benoit matches (even after last June’s tragic events) is to easy, as long as you are able to differentiate Benoit the worker from Benoit the person on those fateful days.
That being said I decided to go for something a bit …

With the latest WWE draft occurring this Monday, I have been retrospectively looking at each of the previous talent exchanges in order to look at the impact they have had on the talent involved.
As an aside, I should note that while there was not an official draft in 2006, Paul Heyman was allowed to choose two wrestlers from RAW or Smackdown to participate in the launch of the new ECW brand. These two picks were Rob Van Dam and Kurt Angle.
(i) Van Dam’s career mishaps have been documented in all …