You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. This week we have another reading from the LRB archive.

Tom Crewe, a contributing editor at the paper, whose first novel The New Life won the 2023-Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

We'll be reading his diary from December 2021 about his youthful obsession with pro wrestling.

Wrestling Days

No one could understand.

My dad used to come in, glare at the TV and stalk off.

My mum was bemused. My brother detested it. Once it was no longer cool,

the other kids mocked me, and eventually I stopped mentioning it. I didn't mind the secrecy.

My passion acquired a pure intensity this way, stop it up like a gin.

But where did it come from?

I liked reading, hated sports, was inclined to chubbiness, played the comic parts in school musicals.

I liked prints.

I affected some refinement, refusing to swear and declining alco-pops at house parties.

So, pro- Wrestling? It was crass, violent, misogynistic, dumb, fake. It was deplorable,

embarrassing, showed a bizarre lack of taste. It was a passion,

perhaps the truest of my life. Age nine, I caught a glimpse at someone's house,

and thwack, just like that, nearly a decade of my life was decided.

It was the late 1990s, towards the end of the period known as the Monday Night Wars,

when the two big American companies, the World Wrestling Federation,

later World Wrestling Entertainment, after losing a legal battle with the panda people,

and World Championship Wrestling broadcast their flagship shows in the same slot, going mano

a mano in the ratings. It was the heyday of Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Rock, Bill Goldberg.

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