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The planned ITV World of Sport series is a go, PWInsider.com has confirmed. There will be an official announcement regarding the series coming over the next 24 hours. We are also told an official press conference is slated for this Monday in Manchester at Dock 10 Studios at 2 PM.
We have heard Jeff Jarrett is heading to the UK this weekend, so it appears Impact Wrestling/Anthem Media will be involved with the series.
ITV ran a pilot episode on New Year's Eve 2016, a two hour broadcast featuring commentary from Jim Ross and Alex Shane.
World of Sport was a sports anthology series that ran for 20 years on ITV and regularly featured pro wrestling personalities and matches from Europe. When the decision was made in 1985 to cancel the series, it crippled homegrown pro wrestling in that region for many years, setting the stage for the then-WWF's already growing popularity in the region to flourish just a few years later.
The interesting back story here is that WWE has, over the last several years, opened communications with ITV with the idea of purchasing the pro wrestling-related material from old ITV World of Sport library for their own use, without success. In 2013, John Chapman licensed and filmed a World of Sport TV pilot that ITV opted not to pick up. The online attention to that pilot led to WWE reaching out to ITV in 2014 to open communications about purchasing the library. The acquisition never went down, but those two events may have started the process of ITV opting to launch their own pilot taping last year.
Talent that appeared on the initial pilot included Grado (who won the World of Sports Wrestling championship on the special), Dave Mastiff, Danny Hope, Kenny Williams, Sam Bailey, CJ Banks, Mark and Joe Coffey, Rampage, Ashton Smith, Viper Kimberly Benson, Alexis Rose, El Ligero and Zack Gibson, among others.
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