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Being British, if you mentioned wrestling to me as a child it would instantly conjure up the image of two fat men with names like Big Daddy or Giant Haystacks bounding around the ring wearing swimming trunks (or worse still, what looked liked a woman’s swimming costume) on Saturday afternoon television.
If you came from the US though, wrestling would likely trigger up something similar yet still entirely different. The fat men were (for the most part) replaced with tall, bronzed, muscular guys, who for some reason couldn’t talk without shouting and pointing their finger menacingly. The wrestlers names were also far more butch sounding, as witnessed by the subject of today’s post, Hulk Hogan.
Hulk Hogan was arguably the most famous face of the WWF (World Wrestling Federation, not the panda logoed wildlife charity, who incidentally forced WWF to change their name to WWE) but had he decided to keep his birth name of Terry Gene Bollea, maybe that wouldn’t have been the case.
In more recent years he has had to change his name to Hollywood Hogan and even wrestled in a mask under the name Mr. America for a time. Ironically this was partly due to not actually owning his own name, and partly due to Marvel comics understandably being a little annoyed at the use of the word Hulk, especially when fans were said to have “Hulkamania” during the height of his career.
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It’s sad to report that Gary Coleman, child star of US sitcom 
Think of British comedy double acts and chances are the first names that will come to mind are Morecambe and Wise. Their shows, particularly the Christmas specials, pulled in millions of viewers, so when they left the BBC to go to ITV it understandably left a big hole in the BBC’s comedy programming.
One of the earliest TV shows I remember watching when I was very small was 
I first became a fan of the late, great, Kenny Everett when I was around five or six, arguably too young to truly understand his unique brand of comedy. The television was on one evening, when a cartoon suddenly appeared. As with most kids I loved cartoons at that age, and assumed they were all intended for kids, so I couldn’t understand why it was on at night when the children’s programmes had finished long ago.
If you haven’t already heard, the great British actor Edward Woodward passed away on the 16th November, aged 79.
Doesn’t look too bad for a sixty year old, does he? The little yellow bear with black ears that we all know as Sooty has been around since the 1950’s, meaning he’s entertained at least three generations of kids. This has put him in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest running children’s TV show, although the format and name of his TV programmes has changed a fair bit over the years.
Patrick Swayze, star of films such as 
