James Tyler, pro wrestler with the Scottish Wrestling Alliance, talks to us about Rob’s rookie status and his (dubious) chances of succeeding ahead of his appearance in Rob Drummond’s Wrestling. The show fuses theatre, film and live professional wrestling. James – and two other professionals from the world of Scottish wrestling – appear in the show between 9th-13th February 2011 at the Arches, Glasgow.

Click here for full info and tickets

With the SWA Stars preparing for our Bridgeton event on October 23rd, a few stars in training for the event found themselves grappling with a special guest when the Machine found himself grappling against ‘Beefcake’ Bruce Devlin.

In a visit to SWA’s Area 52 training facility Bruce Devlin, the acclaimed Scottish comedian known for his sharp wit causing riotous laugher across the country, learned the ropes from head instructor Damien O’Conor while filming for The Hour, airing weeknights at 5pm on STV. O’Conor took the Beefcake through his paces in preparation to fight the dangerous, mysterious masked man ‘The Machine’.

In his quest to face the brutal Machine, Devlin learned the basics of pro wrestling while training alongside the Lowland Superstar Glen Dunbar, Source’s Helo and the magnificent Nikki Storm in preparation for his big match.

With advice from Helo and Dunbar, as well as the guidance and supervision of O’Conor, Devlin prepared himself as he jumped into the training at full force before facing his toughest challenge yet as he goes head to head against former SWA Laird of the Ring Champion, The Machine!

Catch STV’s The Hour weekdays at 5pm to see SWA Stars in action!

You can catch Helo, Glen Dunbar in action as SWA Source heads to Bridgeton on Saturday October 23rd.

With the details going up on SourceWrestling.co.uk today, I figured it was time to say a little more on the gig we have going on in my hometown of Kennoway on the 29th in the Smart Hall, the heart of the town. I usually do the site interviews, by McGill tried his hand on interviewing me – but seeing as I’m Managing Editor of Fan Access/SWA Online, and I’m not one for the ego, I’d rather post it here.

I’ve had a lot of fun in SWA in the past few years and we’ve done a lot of good things from fund raising, to hosting super shows, to giving kids a more creative and productive outlet that’ll help show them that their dreams aren’t unobtainable. But in all our time we haven’t left the west of the country. Until now.

When I was growing up it always felt like you had to jump on a bus and go somewhere else for something to do and as I got older, I had to go further to keep myself busy. If I’m going to leave the world of wrestling, I want to set up a base to bring all the fun and fund raising to Kennoway and hope to branch out to the surrounding area if it’s a success.

Anyway, here’s the interview conducted by Paul McGill for SWA Fan Access – and shamelessly stolen for right here at theredeemed.co.uk.
— -
Homecoming.
By McG

Having a mixed career both in the ring and as a manager within SWA, James Tyler has been an odd one to judge. He’s had his highs and lows in his time, with one of his best highlights being leading the A List to the top with two of it’s members, Wolfgang and Falcon, breaking into the NWA Scottish Heavyweight title ranks and all but one member of the group holding SWA gold. Tyler himself has even gained a title for his CV when he was awarded the T-Division Championship, losing it to Ricky Gibson in November last year.

With his main focus in SWA being his revived managers contract with Falcon and Black Samurai Junior, Tyler has taken a backseat role to tackle other projects, one of which has been to interview Source stars for Sourcelight here on SWA Online. But this time round he’s given up his seat in the interview chair to sit uncomfortably in his workshop as we interrupt some unusual location scouting to fire some questions back on the ‘Captain’.

With the evolution of Source over the past few months we’ve seen the brand break into new venues in Cumbernauld, Newton Means and Rutherglen. Next up is a town in Fife, a far cry from the usual area’s you’re likely to see the SWA banner flying and it’s the sole reason we’ve placed the captain in the hot seat as it’s not just another venue to him, it’s right in the heart of his home town.

So, how close is this venue to where you grew up?
Five minutes. Just five minutes, a quick walk. Smart Hall is right next door to the local church where my parents were both church elders and as such, I spent a lot of time there. There was a summer where I was handed the keys so I could go in and play pool or basketball. I know the place all too well.

How does it feel to be going home?
It feels amazing. When I was growing up I was always the odd one out. Everyone else had careers and ideas and goals, and I did too, but I was always doing something different and strange and bizarre. And no matter how insane one of my ventures was my family and friends back home would support me. So it feels good, not only to be going in front of my home crowd, but to give something back to them. A good nights fun and entertainment.

How insane were the ventures?
Very. Isn’t wrestling insane enough? Everyone expected me to use my qualifications and such to get a high flying career, get into a 9-5 job and settle down and all these years later I’m writing, helping produce online sitcoms, taking part in the development of a play and own a wardrobe full of spandex and other various costumes. Wheres the fun in a normal life?

How did you get started in wrestling?
By accident, in a way. I love wrestling and wanted to know more about it, so I traveled to Sheffield to train with Alan Johson who was running a Hammerlock offshoot training facility there. On that day I got a quick run of the basics and experienced my first time in the ring and after spending a very long and tiring afternoon there I knew that I had to keep going.

Thankfully Peter Murphy got involved in setting up a school in Scotland in 2003 and since then I’ve been training under his guidance. Which has been tough, he’s no pushover and he sets some incredible challenges. The whole team at 52 are brilliant, from Eric Canyon to more recent trainers and contributors such as Damien O’Conor have been wonderful. But tough. Very tough. I was never the physical type growing up so it was a huge culture shock for me to step up the cardio and take quite a bit of impact.

But no one gets turned away at Area 52 and no one will give up on you easily. They will push you, challenge you and shape you into the kind of wrestler you want to be. Even give you opportunities to explore other aspects of the business which is how I got into managing, among other things.

It’s without a doubt one of the best places to learn the craft which is a huge reason why WWE’s VP of talent came and had a peek at some of our best guys.

We’ve seen you taking time off to focus once again on Falcon’s management. So, what was it that brought you back into the game for Fife?
Source is all about opportunities, and how could I refuse an opportunity to wrestle in front of my home town?

In honesty, for the most part SWA and Source have been focused on one side of Scotland which has worked well for us but now we’re testing the waters in a new territory. And that’s exciting. We’ve built a solid and lasting reputation and now we have a chance to go to a strange new world. To seek out new venues and new opportunities. To boldly go where so SWA bookings have gone before. Which is a massive opportunity for everyone to get out of their comfort zone and go somewhere new. It’s up to everyone booked for that show to represent SWA and make the fans in attendance want to come back which is a huge challenge to everyone on the card from the breakouts such as Andy Anderson and Mark Sweeney, to the solidified stars like Scott Renwick and Falcon.

In a way, to me, it feels like the first Rebirth all over again. And that’s hard to not be a part of.

Can you tell us your opponent on the night?
It’s someone who means a lot to me, and despite knowing each other and training together for years, someone who I’ve never actually faced in a singles match. He’s also one of the best technical wrestlers I’ve met, and despite having some questionable taste in wrestling wear, is someone i’d be honoured to face; William Grange.

Here we have someone who’s just a great wrestler, and someone who has grown in leaps and bounds since I first met him. I’ve watched him wrestle not only in SWA, but travelled with him to other places to see him explore his wrestling talent and personality. He’s grown into a personality that people love to hate and has more than enough talent to back up his arrogance. I think he’d be a phenomenal challenge for me to take on in my home crowd.

Will you be back at Falcon’s side when he faces Mark Sweeney on the same night?
I won’t be at his side on the night, but I’ll be watching and cheering him on. He’s one of the most talented and funniest guys I’ve met in the wrestling world and it’s always a pleasure to watch him at work. The fact that he’s been given Fergal Devitt as an opponent on May 15th is testiment to how good he actually is.

From the first day I met Falcon, I knew there was a special quality in him and despite us having our moments of, you now, being bitter and twisted enemies, I’ve always felt he’s someone who could take the wrestling world in his hands and do whatever he wanted with it. I’ve always had faith in him and I know that he’ll not be a pushover for Devitt, and I also know how thrilled he is to take on the world class athlete.

Who do you have your money on?
Falcon, of course. Devitt is a huge name, the word huge doesn’t do him justice. I’ve been in the ring with him in the first Battlezone and I’ve seen first hand some of the hardest guys I’ve met be n fear of the man. He’s that damn good. But Falcon has overcome a lot of challenges in his career s far, the Battlezone where he came in second and lasted the distance to become NWA Scottish Heavyweight champion proved how he can step up to the plate.

He’s held the British Junior Heavyweight title before, I think he has what it takes to step up and take his place alongside Conscience, Johnny Moss and Gary Steele and become the British Heavyweight Champion.

Looking back on your career, what do you feel are your best moments?
The A List, without a doubt. Even though we weren’t exactly making friends it was a chance for all of us to really make a mark on SWA. With Wolfgang , BT Gun and Falcon breaking into the top of the mountain by gaining Scottish Heavyweight title runs, Gunn and Micken gaining tag title victories, the T-Division run I had and of course, introducing Lolita, Lady L and Burnistoun actress Louise Stewart into the world of wrestling… it was wonderful.

You even had you own show!
Yes! The A List event was a lot of fun, with us sitting at ringside and manipulating a show we’d put together. That was the night I came up with A List Rules, which was certainly somethng that I got a lot of boo’s and hisses for, but wrestling Dunbar was a lot of fun and making up the rules as I went along was the only way I could take down such a profoundly wonderful technical wrestler.His talents are amazing and it’s great seeing him breaking out with a new energy.

So with all that behind you, are you confident you can challenge Grange?
We’ll see… I just hope that with my family in attendance and my daughter cheering me on, I can do my home town proud.

For more information, head to sourcewrestling.co.uk.

I’ve either been too busy or lazy to update this site on a regular basis these days. I’ll let you decide which and I’ll do a quick update on current stuff. Project type stuff.

Despite my overall laziness, I seem to have been doing a lot from organizing a wrestling gig in my hometown, to making costumes, to writing and script tasks, so this is whats keeping me busy and feel free to give feedback, comments and tell me how good/awful everything is.

First things first, but not particularly in that order.

Fife, the final frontier…
A while ago I was asked if I could orginise a show in my home town, something that turned out to be a non starter for a few years and was held up in discussion and debate. A couple of months ago I got another phone call suggesting SWA come through and I just thought ‘screw it!’ and thankfully, everyone else was on board.

When I started wrestling I only had a few goals set in mind. To get in a ring, done. To be a manager, done. Tag team, done. Title, done. Do the creative thing, done. So now it’s the last goal, do it in front of a home crowd. So I’m highly looking forward to bringing wrestling to the sleepy little town of Kennoway in Fife, where slowly the surrounding areas have offered less and less to do since I was a teenager. I’m really hoping to bring something different and entertaining that night.

So on Saturday May 29th SWA:Source will arrive in the Smart Hall at the heart of the community which will give me a chance to give something back to the community thats raised and supported me in all my insane ventures.

I’ve got the line up sorted, everyone’s confirmed. I need to triple check some people and such before I post it here or on Source/SWA – but Saturday May 29th, Mart Hall, Kennoway, Fife… put it in your calendars, people.

Live! In Colour!
A few people have been asking if they’ve seen my name in the paper. I’ve been giving the stock reply ‘If they said good things, yes. If they said bad things, that was someone else.’ The thing being pointed out to me was from the Herald and a few artsy publications. Which creeps me out considering I’m a foul mouthed git.

There’s not much I can say on the project right now. Rob Drummond is the guy behind it all and he’s brilliant. That kind of insane, evil genius, kind of brilliant. His latest venture was a play which would revolve around the ideas of an audience member, allowing them to fuel his creativity to perform a unique one off play. The guy doesn’t just look for the next gig, he builds himself challenges and the one I’ve got a mention in is no different.

I’m looking forward to figuring out whats what – right now, I have no idea whats happening next.

I’ve also committed myself to a project to make a sit com written by former SGC’er Gary Alexander which revolves around a nice concept that I’m not giving out. But I will say, one of the tasks to tackle is to find a comic book shop that can be used as a location. That… says enough to know half the reason I’m loving the project in these early stages.

Year One
Right, I realised I hadn’t updated anything Year One-ish in a while so I decided to upload a few things I was editing.

Because I’m still hacking pieces together, rewriting and editing, it’s rough as hell – more so than usual, but things are actually happening and the plots moving on and stuff is ready to jump to an intense level.
So… 2.4, 5, 6 & 7 are now online.

I intiially wanted a frantic and confused theme, as well as showing a group of people fed up with their lives and adding in non essential conversation. I realise that can seem muddled, so pretty much as soon as I get it all up online, I’ll be printing it out, adding hand written notes and editing furiously to polish it up and make sure everything fits.

Rewriting it has been hard and confusing and even I lose track of myself, of whats I’ve added/removed without having hours a day to think about it. So… yeah… here’s the first few hundred pages, updates to part 2.7.

Fabrication.
If you’re a Scottish person, or anyone really, that loves Sci Fi you should know about the Sci Fi Scotland forum. If not, why not?

I’ve been posting some of my sewing attempts in this thread, the last updates being a tool belt for the Year One gear and a BSG Colonial officer uniform for Raven Shayde. Which worked out better than expected, despite me almost throwing my sewing machine out the nearest window.

In addition to that, I’ve also been putting wrestling gear together for someone (may have mentioned that before) and am taking requests for custom entrance gear. And for something that’ll make use of the lycra currently sitting in my cupboard.

And somehow this all links to my attempting to figure out photoshop again. I’ve been making test posters for the Fife show to run with Source promotion for the rest of the year and seem to have gotten carried away and made a running theme of…

…I don’t know why…

Anyway, I wanted to add replies to questions people have asked me in email and extend a few comments I made to replies posted here, but I’ve run out of time. For me, Sundays are busy days. Not the day of rest.

Oh – and if anyone’s wondering why there’s a pic of Grace Park up there… I like shameless hits from Google image search.

I hate to say it, but Phoenix Rising UK will be closing on Friday March 5th. There’s been a lot of upset and problems lately which has resulted in the site owner throwing in the towel. When the owner goes, well… there’s nowhere left to go with the site, so it’s closing down. In it’s place however, will be a new site.

The new site isn’t a means of splitting from the old PR or creating a new, cool or hip faction. I don’t want to kick it off with bad feelings or carry over any upset. Seeing as I was working on developing a new theme with tweaked software, the new site will be the efforts of that work so it doesn’t go to waste. All I had to do was come up with a new name, sothepicardmaneuver.com was born…

The Picard Maneuver
Geeky chat with tight spandex! he Picard Maneuver was developed to be a care free, stress free playhouse of immature fun as well as general laid back conversation with meaning, depth and a love of tight spandex, it’s all about not taking yourself seriously. Anti-serious, anti-drama, anti-bullpoppy and pro-fun. You can sign up and become a member, or if you have something to say, something to show off or just want your own little care free corner of the internet with a geeky twist – sign up for a blog.

Do we have rules?

Well, not really. There’s the usual no-tolerance of harassing, bullying or discriminating other members, but that’s pretty much it. You can swear, shout, talk about your boss being an ass, join in more mature conversation (yeah, you’ll need to ask me about that) or simply post your artwork, stories or other stuff.

All we ask is a tall ship and a star… no, wait, wrong speech. All we ask is you sit down, log on and have a laugh. Not devote your life to us. Just have a giggle and enjoy yourself.

Bring your own beer, money doesn’t grow on tree’s you know and I can’t afford to drunk you up…

So come in, sit back, make a few posts, start a blog and have fun. If you don’t.. I’ll send Worf out to get ya!

Check out The Picard Maneuver for more info, new stuff and general tomfoolery!

-James
thepicardmaneuver.com

To read the full article from TrekMovie.com and see more pics and info from the induction, including pics of the younger Roddenbury with the award, head to their article here. You can also get a full recap of the January 21st awards at emmys.tv.

Wow! I haven’t posted anything here for days. Or been on twitter. And I’ve only been on Facebook to play Mafia Wars. The new SWA Online goes live in a couple of days so I’ve been making the last minute changes, adjustments and such.

And it’s been a headache. I wanted to change the software completely and provide something that was more admin user friendly as well as something that non-expert admins could handle and something that would contribute somethnig back to the user base.

So I broke it down into sections I’d need on the front end… SWA, obviously, Source, After Hours and Fan Access. Right, easy.

Not really. I have a collection of CMS’s that just don’t seem user firnedly in the slightest and the best ones had the biggest learning curve. As I have to teach operators how to use it, and I have very little patience, I went for something that a lot of people find easy to use and that my feedback circle said was the best one for the job: WordPress.

Unfortunately, WordPress isn’t the best thing for the job. But, WordPress MU is.

With MU I can create an SWA base site, sub-blogs for Source with their own user style and do the same for other sub-sites. With the right plugins I have a events manager for both sides of the promotional coin and a few other handy plugins ready to roll to enhance the use of the site.

Fan Access & Forums were moved over to a Fan Access Community sub-blog with a slightly tweaked base template so I could have the FA side-menu thrown in there without using a category manager that would befuddle newbie admins and hey! It’s done.

NextGen gallery will handle the photos, TubePress the videos… basically the same as it does on this site.

The main advantage of using MU is that I can have separate eblogs running separate sites – but with the same userbase so logins are easily handled. I hide the backend from anyone but admins… and bada-bing, bada-boom. A multi-layered website. The only complex part is the community/Fan Access aspect and with moving it into it’s own blog… it’s simplified.

So yeah, the new SWA site is a set of custom templates, one user base, community with Fan Access and forum, social networking integration, simpler admin features such as an events calendar to handle upcoming show previews, photo galleries, video galleries and some more…

…it’s been slightly stressful and has taken up the bulk of my time in the past few weeks from the simple development and outline on good old fashioned paper to refining the code and putting the finishing touches, getting the info up… but it’ll hopefully be wonderful.

You may have read about Carpool on this very blog or you have have been hooked to Robert Llewllyns website since he launched the online show or you might have downloaded it on iTunes, but now the Red Dwarf star has (in my opinion) his biggest guest to kick off 2010 in Captain Jean-Luc Picard himself, Patrick Stewart.

No, wait… SIR Patrick Stewart.

Or King of England Patick Stewart if you follow Brent Spiner’s twitter…

Master of the dad dance, Bobby Llew has spent the better part of 2009 giving lifts to some fascinating guests and filming the chat for his online show Carpool. Writers, actors, comedians, fellow Dwarfers including Craig Charles and Danny John Jules… now he’s climbed the ranks to the captain of the Enterprise.

With Stewarts huge acting career, both on screen and his beloved stage, he’s a huge guests for Llewellyn to secure. So go watch it.

Click here for Carpool.

It’s been a long road with some coding battles and throwing out whole sketchbooks and notepads with ideas, but finally and with a last minute change to the CMS, the Arena Network site is online and already we have some interest after pre-launch advertising last week.

So what is the Arena? It’s a network/plugging of wrestling promotions in Scotland.  It’s also a talent showcase offering wrestlers, managers, MC’s. photographers and more the chance to have their own website at a low cost that will automatcally add your news to help gain advertising efforts through this site. And it’s cheap as chips…

For further information on the Showcase Profile offers click here.

It’s a personal project for those of us at Coma White who have worked alongside wrestling promotions in the past. We want to give wrestlers and other talent the opportunity to advertise themselves in a professional outside of free social networking sites where personal information is free for all to read. And more… but you can read that on the link above.

After a few months of planning (actually, two or three years of planning as some within SWA and 3CW will know) we’ve decided to put this all together and the past couple of months have been filled up with sorting out details, tweaks and tests. Now , while not the finished product, we are happy to be online and working out some further details with the last minute CMS change – which I already regret, sure I’ll get better features, more flexibility and a heap load of other things but it doesn’t excuse it stealing a significant portion of my Friday down time.

Expect more to come over the weekend and further update sin the coming weeks – we’ve already had interest from a good number of people in somevery closed/private plugging of this site so whle we work out the details with them, we’ll be adding the final tweaks to this site, including adding some visual appeal, now we’re live!

Thanks to all who supported and pushed for the idea – we hope this site can serve you well.

Out with the old, in with the new. Kind of. This site might look almost the same as always but it now comes with more WordPress – something I put off for a while as I couldn’t be bothered to switch systems. The reason being that I wanted various bells and whistles and the lazier CMS I was using doesn’t look like it’ll be updated for a while. Boo.

It also gives me new toys to play with as I’ve been too lazy to update lately. So expect more from me as I kick myself out of lazy mode.

Well… saying I’ve been lazy is a bit of a lie. I’ve recently been swamped in a few projects which direced my focus elsewhere. One of which has been the re-building of Phoenix Rising, a sci-fi community with news, creative arts etc.

Their previous server was useless and the software failed a lot. so I put something new together for them when it was decided there’d be a move and I’ve spent most of December working out the bugs and making alterations.

I used WordPress for that too as everyone seemed to love it – and used it’s test server to tweak settings for my own changes here while I was at it.

I’ve also been editing more of Year One getting ready to post more for it’s three fans, and I’ve even put together a sexy new site for it.

Well, not so much sexy as ‘different’. I tried to make it appear to be as much like the computers I’d imagined in the story but only got half way there. The colour and background…. spot on. The rest? Work in progress. That can be found here.

And as it’s a new year and all I’ll be nice. I hope you had a puke-filled celebration free from your usual incest and self loathing and I wish you a reasonably tolerable new year.

JT | Being nice.

PS. If you’re wondering why the pic of Tricia Helfer… I could use a few extra hits.