You may or may not have noticed the lack of a review of RevPro TV #4 last week, but that wasn’t due to there not being one released, I was just particularly busy. But fear not loyal readers, this week you’re being treated to a super double review of RevPro TV to make up for it. Let’s get straight to it.

RevPro TV #4
April 13, 2015
London, England
The London Cockpit

The show opens with the closing promo from At Our Best where Marty Scurll put out the challenge to AJ Styles for his own title at Summer Sizzler. We then cut to Zoe Lucas and Andy Quildan, who confirm that the aforementioned match will indeed be occurring at the next big York Hall show.

As we then transition to the cockpit, 2 Unlimited come out to the ring to make their debut on RevPro TV. As a team they’re fresh off a big win against The Addiction, and the commentators are hyping up that now that they’ve moved past just putting on great performances to winning the big matches they could well be on their road to the titles.

With the Sammon brothers in the ring awaiting their opponents, Andy Boy Simmonz appears on the balcony and runs down the team on the microphone. He says that while they may think they’re on their way to the top, he’s got one huge roadblock in the form of a team he’s put together: Psycho Phillips and Big Damo.

2 Unlimited vs. Psycho & The Beast: With this match we’re running into our first chronology issue of the TV series. This match is airing after the rematch of this encounter at At Our Best, despite it being the debut of Psycho & The Beast. You’re bound to run into these problems when running events regularly while the TV in-ring content is two months old, but it’s something I hope they’ll be able to improve on in the future.

As for the match itself, it was a fun power team vs speed team encounter, with both teams acquitting themselves admirably. The only real fault that I’d find of it would be that the finish involved Patrick rolling up Psycho Phillips, despite Big Damo being the legal man. I’d put this a shade below their rematch, but for an eight minute TV opener it was a lot of fun. ***

Post match, Damo and Phillips laid a beatdown on the two Irish brothers, hitting them with a chokeslam, powerbomb and punctuated by a big senton. This was setting up a rematch that had already happened before this episode came out, where the new team got their first win as a duo.

Next up we got an extended trailer for the At Our Best VOD, followed by the studio team with a lead in to the main event.

Sha Samuels vs. Mark Haskins: Sha Samuels is a stalwart of the British scene over the last ten years, having held both the Heavyweight championship and the tag team championship multiple times in RPW over the years. He’s a great talker, and is one of the best in the entire world at playing off the crowd, but, while definitely being a good hand, isn’t really somebody you’d expect to be able to throw out there and have a fantastic main event match. He’s going up against one half of the current British Tag Team Champions Mark Haskins, who you may know of brief TNA fame, who is one of my personal favourite in ring talents we have on this side of the pond.

This match felt very much like your standard RAW main event and I don’t mean that in a particularly bad way, just that while being engaging and enjoyable throughout it never really felt like the two guys were completely emptying their tanks and purposefully holding back a little. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, as the main purpose of this match was to set up a tag title match at some point in the future, and it still managed to be enjoyable in a vacuum too.

Maybe I’m doing it a slight disservice in saying that they weren’t trying to go all out, because after a solid match the finishing stretch really kicked it up several levels and this was maybe on-track to being a legitimately great match before the match devolved back to its purpose of setting up the tag title match, with Sha stealing a victory after repeated interference from his Revolutionists stablemate Josh Bodom following a title belt shot to Haskins’ head. ***1/4

Final Thoughts: Very solid episode of TV, with everything being totally watchable and even good. Nothing I’d say you need to go out of your way to see, but an enjoyable way to spend forty minutes.

RevPro TV #5
April 20, 2015
From the Studio

With the first series of tapings exhausted over the prior four episodes, and with At Our Best being released in a VOD format rather than as a TV taping, RPW is flat out of new TV content already. Not exactly ideal with a new show, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt in seeing what they do to fill the gaps. The next taping is going to be on either April 26 or May 3 (possibly both) so that’ll mean somewhere between one and three weeks of no new content depending on their editing speed and which events they use as a TV taping.

The show kicks off with RPW Matchmaker and Owner Andy Quildan welcoming you to the show, and explaining how this’ll be a studio. He explains how this episode will be about conveying the importance of their York Hall shows in the lead up to their next one, Summer Sizzler, which is fast approaching. He talks through a video package highlighting some of the historic events that have occurred for RPW in the York Hall, and in general does a really good job of getting across a taste of the sheer magic that occurs in that building three or four times a year.

Next up Andy leads us into a clip from At Our Best, where Lord Gideon Grey challenged Matt Classic & Colt Cabana to a tag match at Summer Sizzler. You can read my thoughts on that as well as the entire event here.

Back in the studio, Quildan ran down the Summer Sizzler card so far, featuring Tomohiro Ishii’s debut in the UK, Legion of Lords vs. Cabana & Classic, Scurll vs. Styles and last but certainly not least Ricochet vs. Shinsuke Nakamura. Yes that’s right, Nakamura vs. Ricochet is going to be a thing, a total dream match absolutely anywhere in the world. The crazy thing is that match has a very real possibility of being third from the top, depending on what opponent Ishii gets placed with (I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be Ospreay). I expect the card will round out with The Thrillers vs. The Revolutionists and possibly the rubber match in the series between 2 Unlimited vs. Psycho & The Beast, and that really would make it a truly world beater of a card. Possibly RPW’s best show on paper ever, but we’ll have to see.

Next up we got treated to one of the feature matches from the first York Hall show of last year, including two guys who’ll be playing major parts in the next one: Ricochet & Rich Swann vs. Paul Robinson & Will Ospreay. Here’s my thoughts on the match from a year and a half ago when I watched it live:

I’m sooooo hyped for this one. Swords of Essex are ten year plus veteran Paul Robinson and young prodigy Will Ospreay, two fantastic high flyers and an amazing tag team, and you all know the ICMG. These teams feel almost as if they were made to face each other, so this should be special.

And it was. Not only did this match have the amazing fast paced high flying you’d expect out of these two teams, it also had some really satisfying technical wrestling smattered throughout. The crowd really believed the Swords had won when they hit a corner crossbody/knee strike combo, followed by a tilt a whirl DDT from Robinson and punctuated by a beautiful shooting star press from Ospreay. Swann came in from the floor to break it up at the very final second though. The finish came when Swann hit a tope con hilo onto Ospreay, allowing Ricochet and Robinson to battle unrestrained. Ricochet went for the Benadryller, but Robinson ducked the kick and went for a 450 kick of his own. Ricochet also ducked, ran the ropes and knocked Paul down to one knee with a Superman punch. This allowed Ricochet to hoist him back up and hit a picture perfect Benadryller (although I don’t really “get” that move) for the victory, and we have new tag team champions.

This match was just a tonne of excitement, exactly what you want from these four, but they also managed to keep it well grounded. You didn’t have any stupid kickouts, every time you thought “he’s taken too much to kickout” it was a pinfall breakup and not a kickout which kept the match going. I really appreciate that. The crowd absolutely loved the match, they were going crazy throughout, and especially for the closing stretch which in itself lasted about five minutes. Sadly though, and some will view this as me being picky, what really hurt this match for and stopped it breaking up into the four star plus territory was them ignoring tag legalities from midway through the match. When I say that I don’t mean people are coming into the ring without being legal, I’m fine with that, I mean that pins were occurring between illegal participants. It destroys the logic of the heat segment from earlier in the match where tags were used, and is something that is a really big negative for me when watching tag matches. For the pure excitement and fun though, this match was still really good. ***3/4

The match actually went far longer than I had remembered, over half an hour including entrances, so by the end of the match we’re at the end of the show. As a lead out, Andy announced that next week is going to be another studio show, as somewhat expected, with the feature match being Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Zack Sabre Jr. from the previous year’s Summer Sizzler.

Final Thoughts: For an episode with no “new” content, this is exactly the sort of show you want to see. If, like me, you’ve already seen the show they’re showing the feature match from it’s completely skippable, but for what I imagine is the vast majority of you this is offering a great match for free, what more can you ask for. If you’re yet to see ICMG vs. SoE, then I thoroughly recommend checking out this episode. Andy Quildan did a good job as host too, making the entire show in its entirety very easy watch.

You can watch both episodes here: