Taking place on April 4th, 1998, WWF Mayhem in Manchester was originally planned as a UK-exclusive pay-per-view in the vein of One Night Only. But thanks to a dispute between the WWF and Sky Box Office, the PPV broadcast was nixed. Both parties left tons of money on the table, but especially the WWF, who’d booked but one UK date that tour, on the assumption that the overflow would just order it from home.
To recoup the promotional costs and lost PPV buys, the WWF still filmed Mayhem in Manchester and released it on home video. It’s been described as a glorified house show, but that’s not the case at all. It’s a house show, period.
Glorified is the last word to describe this shoddy of a production. Instead, the one word that comes to mind watching Mayhem in Manchester is chutzpah. The absolute chutzpah to market footage that looks this bad! And as we’ll see, it gets even more galling.
Things get off to a rocky start when, not one minute into the tape, narrator Michael Cole lists off all the great UK shows the WWF has done, beginning with “Summerslam 1991”.
We then see a highlight package that completely spoils the ending of the tag title match:
Defying any sense of shame, Cole declares Mayhem in Manchester, “one of the greatest nights in WWF history”, then introduces highlights of a Brakus match. Well, perhaps not “highlights”, but clips nonetheless.
Then, just to see how much they can get away with, the WWF not only cuts the rest of the night’s bouts to a tiny fraction of their original length, but pretends they’re the full matches. Michael Cole and Kevin Kelly provide commentary as if they’re watching the matches live, despite the many obvious edits.
Did they not, for example, notice this sunset flip disappear into thin air in the Godwinns-DOA match?
In the end, the Disciples of Apocalypse put up “one heck of a fight” but lose in a minute forty-five.
Next up is Bradshaw vs. Marc Mero & Sable, which is not a handicap match despite the graphic.
The Marvelous One manages zero offense in this apparent forty-second squash.
The evening’s fourth match-up lasts long enough for viewers to appreciate the camera setup: one or two handhelds on the floor, and one fan cam in the crowd.
And for no reason whatsoever, here’s the crowd! Wow, tremendous crowd. Anyway, back to the match, exactly where it left off.
The Rock himself gets so distracted looking at the crowd that he forgets he just tagged in!
The anomalies continue in the Goldust-Cactus Jack match, where Jack somehow reverses this sunset flip into a chin lock:
He and Goldust then play fast and loose with time and space while Luna looks on.
Goldust wins, but the ensuing Sable-Luna catfight (shown in full, of course) lasts nearly as long as the match (at least as presented here).
The next bout, the Legion of Doom vs. the New Age Outlaws, has its fare share of splices…
…where the crowd abruptly switches from loud to quiet and back to loud again.
Seven minutes in, the Road Warriors look well on their way to the titles…
…until Chyna runs in and hits Animal low, causing a DQ. Unless you fast-forwarded through the tape intro, though, you already knew that.
The next match pits new WWF Champion Steve Austin against the European champion, “Triple HHH”.
At the last UK event, you’ll recall, The British Bulldog was booked at the eleventh hour to lose his European title to Shawn Michaels.
The idea was that, the next time the WWF came to England, more fans would buy the pay-per-view [non-televised live event] to see the Bulldog [exiled to WCW] win the title back from Shawn Michaels [retired].
In the intervening months, the title lost some credibility…
…to the point where Triple H barely defended the European title on their European tour.
By far the longest match presented on the Mayhem in Manchester video, Austin-HHH is notable for two things:
One, it’s Steve Austin’s first-ever WWF title defense…
…and two, the extreme close-up camera picks up the following exchange:
Austin – He’s using the fucking ropes!
Referee Mike Chioda – What the hell are you doing? Are you holding the goddamn rope?
HHH – Fuck no!
Chioda – So why’s it moving?
HHH – Fuck off!
“Boy,” says Kevin Kelly. “The emotion in this championship match really coming to light now!”
The night’s main event is a rematch from WrestleMania pitting The Undertaker vs. Kane.
Tonight, though, there is no elaborate entrance for Taker. Hell, there isn’t any entrance for Taker, whose Lord of Darkness gear got mixed up in baggage. Rather than try to summon the supernatural in his street clothes, Taker gets jumped by DX out of literally nowhere.
Though Undertaker won their last encounter, Kane controls this one-sided match because, as Cole notes, “The Phenom’s body took a tremendous toll at WrestleMania 14”. Well well well, how the turntables.
The first time Taker gets in any offense at all, however, he wins, putting Kane away with one chokeslam and one tombstone after three minutes. In other words, a typical dark match main event.
In reality, the match went over twenty minutes. In fact, if some nerd in the crowd with a stopwatch is to be believed, the cuts to most matches are astonishing.
Goldust-Cactus (13:23) lost 70% of its runtime, DOA-Godwinns (13:45) 85%, and Mero-Bradshaw (10:17) its first 95%.
Even the company’s new mega-star, Stone Cold Steve Austin, had nearly half his match omitted.
Whether the WWF thought the event too ugly to show in its entirety, or whether they really needed to skimp on magnetic tape, they somehow managed to hack the three-hour Mayhem in Manchester down to 58 minutes.
And not only that, they really thought they could get away with it, recording impossibly enthusiastic commentary to hide the holes in the matches (and the overall insignificance of the card).
Nowhere on Mayhem in Manchester’s US packaging (besides the run time) did the buyer get any indication that the listed matches were only clips, shot in bootleg quality. Even Highlights of WrestleMania didn’t try to pull a fast one like that.
And for that, you have to kind of admire Mayhem in Manchester, the bizarre footnote in WWE’s history in the UK. It may not have had the atmosphere of One Night Only or the Jacqueline toplessness of Capital Combat, but it proved that no wrestling promotion is ever too big to go full carny.
Only one question remains:
How bad must that Brakus match have been that they couldn’t even pretend to show the whole thing?