Opening The Turnbuckle Arms

A few months ago we each got an individual approach from Johners to become a part of a new project he was working on to expand the “with Johners” universe – putting a group together to do a monthly podcast discussing wrestling topics and any key issues at the time.

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Individually each member of The Brew’d has appeared on the main Wrestling with Johners podcast over the last year or so but other then that none of us knew each other prior to starting this project.

The Brew’d, although united by an overall passion for wrestling are a bunch of very different people, each member has their own likes and dislikes within wrestling for example there are some big New Japan fans, some prefer AEW and some have a tendency towards the Indys.

From that point we were brought together in a group chat to get to know each other and start brainstorming ideas starting with naming our podcast. Despite being there to help and guide us as required Johners was keen for us to have creative control over what we did. Many, MANY ideas were bounced around for our name – wrestling is fortunate in the sense that there are lots of different themes and plays on words you can use to come up with a name but we collectively settled on the idea of a group of friends getting together socially to discuss wrestling and what better place for that sort of thing to happen than in a pub! We finally settled on The Turnbuckle Arms – a name that sounds like it could be a real pub but also with an obvious wrestling connection, not to mention a nod to TurnbuckleTV who have done great things within British wrestling and of course support Johners too.

At some point during the process The Brew’d was born which works incredibly well for us – we’re in an imaginary pub so we will be having a nice cold brew but also giving more than a subtle nod to one of THE best wrestling factions of all time!

Interesting thing about wrestling fans, once you get talking about wrestling things kind of snowball and it doesn’t really matter that you don’t know each other, that you’ve never actually met in person and are only communicating through phone and computer screens! I’m sure most wrestling fans have spotted another fan walking down the street based on a t-shirt and there is some weird necessity or desire to spark up a conversation (socially distant of course!)

We all have different opinions and preferences but that is a good thing, it allows us to cover more ground and gain better perspective and even in the infancy of the group we have all already been inspired to check out new matches or different promotions – which in a time where we can’t attend shows but we have the World Wide Wrestling Web at our fingertips is a great distraction from everything else that is going on.

Before we got around to recording the first podcast Johners got us all together on a Skype call to continue our brainstorming but also to discuss our format and how we wanted our pod to sound. It was a really productive chat and gave everyone things to focus on so we could create an idea pool, look at graphics and artwork and really get into the nuts and bolts of what we were embarking on.

Finally the day arrived to record our first episode, Lexi had been drawn at random to be the inaugural host for our podcast, I am pretty sure she was nervous about it – I know this because she told us several times in the lead up to recording – but to be honest it didn’t really show once she hit record. The old adage of “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” or whatever it is, is really appropriate her, Lexi had put a lot of effort into planning the episode from intros to moving us along through

topics and keeping everyone involved and as a result everything ran really smoothly for us and everyone got to have their say and contribute to the topics and 2 hours later we were done… episode one in the bag. We didn’t intend to run that long but with 6 wrestling fans talking about their passion – especially since we were talking about how we fell in love with it and our favourite matches – it all just seemed to flow. On the subject of our favourite matches I don’t think anyone actually managed to single out their one favourite match, its pretty much impossible to be fair, especially when other people would mention something that you hadn’t shortlisted and suddenly you are rethinking your entire fandom…..

We have had a great time so far in The Turnbuckle Arms and look forward to flinging the doors open again soon. We have had some positive feedback from Episode One which is great but we’re hoping to keep improving and evolving and reaching new people. We have lots of plan and ideas for the future and hopefully we can get a good audience along for the ride with us.

Thanks to Mike “MadDog” Angus (@AngusMaddog) for recording our intro and to resident Wrestling With Johners musician Half Decent (@HalfDecentMusic) for supplying our intro theme.

Obviously, we need to give a huge shout out to “Big Johnny” for bringing us together and supporting us through the process of getting everything in line and organised so we could get our first episode out into the world.

We are all excited to see where this project goes in the coming months and hopefully people will be interested in wat we have to say and keep coming back for more of The Brew’d. I love our weird little wrestling family and I hope that this can shine through in the product we are creating so other people can enjoy listening to us as much as we enjoy putting it together.

Please give The Turnbuckle Arms a follow on Twitter (@TurnbuckleArms) where you can also find all the members of The Brew’d

I can be found @Matt Based Wrestling Inaugural Host and keen admirer of Big Dave - @Lexi_Helms The Jolliest member of The Brew’d - @JollyTheBear Big Chocky T - @ctopher82 Reigning, defending WWJ Brainbuster Quiz champion - @JuggaloGriz JAYYYYYYson - @jasonwood999