My guilty pleasure that I'm not at all guilty about...

Anyone that knows me knows that I am not generally an enthusiastic person but in life there are a few things that even people like me can enthuse about.

One of the things that can get me lively and acting like an obnoxiously excitable tool is professional wrestling. I did however get a bit of a shock recently when an acquaintance dropped the bomb – he told me that it wasn’t real. This did come as a bit of a shock as I didn’t realise that there are simpletons like him in the world. Of course it’s real, on the 26^th of January 2012 for the fourth year in a row I was in attendance for the TNA impact tour, sitting three rows from the front and shouting like a twat it felt pretty real to me.

I’m not stupid, I know that it’s simulated violence but does that make it any less real? No, of course it doesn’t. I don’t know how each match is going to finish and I don’t know what each wrestler is going to do or how they are going to act (act being the operative word).

It really irks me when people tell me that it’s not real on the basis that they are not really fighting as if they’re telling me something that I just can’t grasp. I don’t turn round to people and say that Tom Cruise wasn’t really being shot at in Mission Impossible (unfortunately) or that Paul Newman wasn’t really trying to con someone in The Sting yet to anyone who hasn’t seen these films it comes as a surprise. When I see AJ Stiles Vs. Christopher Daniels squaring up in the four-sided-six-sided-squared circle then anything can happen.

It’s theatre, pure and simple and people need to realise that just because there’s no ground and pound and just because they aren’t recognised actors doesn’t take anything away from the passion and the sense of drama that I get when shout whatever stupid slogan I can think of at the time like a complete and utter twat.

Long may it last.