Might Bill Stirling have been Bill Ross?

The currency “changeover” was on Monday 15th February 1971 which would have made the preceding Friday the 12th, which previously occurred in 1965. I think retailers were prohibited from displaying the new currency prices prior to the changeover, but there was a transitional period where they accepted both currencies and displayed both price formats.

It should be noted that the UK went over to decimal currency three days later, so this would have been one of the last bills printed only in LSD.

This little article from TV Times in 1961 gives an insight into how TV broadcasts were relayed around the country. I would submit that it reinforces my view that the supposed “pulling of the plug” just never happened.

Cracking bill there with Geoff Portz’ son! Bernie returned from Calgary with something of a “reverse Mr. T” haircut and the name ‘Bearcat’, even though the original Bearcat Wright was black! Wasn’t it about a year later that Marty lost the title to Steve AKA Bull Blitzer?

Peter Kaye is still on there.

And the A9 north of Inverness was a far worse road then than it is now. Wick to Glasgow in the same day for Alan Dennison would have been a challenging journey back then, however it was undertaken.

Didn’t we encounter a “Finnish” wrestler on a bill a while back who we concluded to be Pete LaPaque? Also a 16 year old Fit on the bill. Judo Mike Hamill was presumably Kung Fu? One other thing we’ve touched on before was that you can say what you will about Andy Robin, but he put in as many miles on the road as anybody.

The stories of Max’ frugality are legendary, such as religiously driving the van at 55 to save petrol and John Quinn being ready to kill him at Wembley over a derisory payoff. In this internet age, we now have a better “grasp” of the structure of the business back then. In the early 80s, the only “yardstick” we had was who was disappearing from our TV screens, and it was major names: Saint, Rocco, Bridges, Nagasaki, St. Clair, Jordan, to name but a few.

He was also, of course, one of those dastardly Germans who was still popping up some 40 years after the war had ended: see also Blitzer, Bull.

Same hairdresser 😂

I have a reasonable command of written Flemish/Dutch, and the Patterson is supposedly the younger brother of Floyd.

When Vince McMahon (Junior) took the WWF national in the 1980s, various regional promoters, with Verne Gagne of the AWA leading the effort, tried to come together to combat it, but their various egos got in the way. Worth checking out some of the interviews with Verne’s son Greg for some insight into what went on.

He was still being billed, at least in Scotland, as “First man to beat McManus on TV” some ten years after the event. Saw a poster in Girvan in mid-1977 - Adrian Street was on the bill, so possibly a Dixon show?

While reading something completely unrelated elsewhere, the name of John Naylor came up. Should he be on this list? Born in 1944 apparently.

As you mention TV, another factor in all this is that ITV was very much in its infancy in that part of the world having only come on air there about 18 months previously. This would have been somewhat of a curiosity to the locals, many of whom wouldn’t have known Syd McManus from the real thing!

Muir of Ord is a village between Inverness and Dingwall: current population is about 3000. Little in the way of public transport (particularly on a Saturday evening) or car ownership at that time, so I can only surmise that either Dingwall wasn’t available or it was booked without someone having done their homework?

Mr. Historyo gets a half point deducted: it’s Ross-Shire, hence Dingwall-based Ross County F.C. Notwithstanding that, were some of these possibly a “testing of the waters” to see if it was viable to run in the Far North?

The more I think about this, the more I come to the conclusion that it didn’t happen. Think about the logistics: We’re assuming that Dale Martin were actually represented there, realised that something had gone off-script (remember, this was a Norman Morrell show), then have to get to the OB unit, gain access to it (which would be met with something along the lines of “Who are you?”, although that probably wouldn’t be the exact wording) - you can see where this is headed. I’m filing under “urban myth”.

No recollection of actual events here, but I can offer a possible explanation for items 2 and 3. Back in the day, distribution of TV was the responsibility of the GPO, who had several “TV Network Switching Centres” around the country. If a feed was “pulled”, might they only have pulled the feed to one NSC (London?) and left Manchester’s feed working, which was responsible for output from ABC in the North (there was no separate Yorkshire ITV region until the 1968 franchise “round”) plus anywhere north of there? Was this what happened, if anything actually did?