It is the anything goes, grip and grapple, grunt and groan variety that fascinated millions of fans when it was first aired on ITV 30 odd years ago.

Now ITV have brought it back on Saturday afternoons - complete with all the bullshine and body slams that made the purists wince even more than the combatants themselves, although the wrestlers seem younger and more athletic than their old-time counterparts.

The World Of Sport programme ran on ITV as their version of BBC Grandstand, covering several major sports including racing and football.

But it was the wrestling segment that went on to become a mainstay of the schedule with many of the featured wrestlers going on to become household names.

One of the greatest rivalries the show spawned was between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks - AKA Shirley Crabtree Jr and Martin Ruane.

Tom McLennan, creative director of ITV Studios Entertainment, said: "There is a massive indie wrestling scene in the UK and nostalgia for the wrestling shows of our youth.

"World of Sport Wrestling will combine the best of the past with incredible talent available today to make a fun, exciting and thrilling show that the whole family can enjoy."

Of course, via World Wrestling Entertainment with Hulk Hogan, The Rock and co from the United States, the sport, if you can call it such, has built a huge fan base in more recent years. But it was the home-brewed version that drew the crowds and had them screaming for more.

Now one even wonders whether the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will be keeping a watchful eye to see if there is anything that can be adapted for the Olympic programme. It may be  a fanciful thought, but knowing how showbiz-oriented the IOC have become almost anything goes if it will liven up the Games and add to the viewing figures.

The problem would be finding a genuine winner. Yet there are still those who continue to insist that what happens in pro wrestling is for real. But I have to disillusion them. It isn't. It is all fixed, and always has been.

I know this from spending a week on the road with one of wrestling's greatest characters many years ago.

Long before the advent of Mike Tyson as "the baddest man on the planet", Mick McManus revelled in that role. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the wrestler with the close-cropped coiffeur that looked as if it was a rug coated in Cherry Blossom's shiniest black shoe polish, was one of the most familiar, if reviled, figures on Britain's TV screens.

McManus was the ultimate anti-hero, the cunning, snivelling cheat whose dastardly disregard for the rules, such as they were, was compulsive viewing for some 20 years.

As he left the ring, inevitably triumphant, to a chorus of hisses and boos, outraged grannies battered him with handbags and even stuck hatpins into his black-trunked backside. They refused to believe the wrestling wasn't genuine, though McManus himself resolutely insisted, publicly at least, that it was. But of course it wasn't...

As Donald Trump would say, it was fake news. With fake blood.

I enjoyed my time with McManus and a troupe of fellow grapplers, being given access to the dressing room and listening in on the muttered conversations between opponents - and sometimes the referee - as they discussed moves and falls that would most please the punters and promoters. When they went into the ring they always knew who would win - and how.

It was often a case of "You win in Plymouth and I'll win in Bradford" as the acrobatic road show filled the provincial halls. Apart from the talk of tactics there wasn't much social chit-chat between the combatants. They all knew the ropes, and I gathered that many of the moves, the head butts, drop kicks and body slams, had been choreographed by McManus and rehearsed in a London gymnasium.

The squat, 5ft 6in McManus was the fixer, as well as the star turn. He acted as matchmaker for the principal promoters, the Dale Martin Organisation, which enabled him to say who won and where, in the process ensuring that he usually topped the bill himself.

During our time together it was clear that he was wrestling's ringmaster. He always travelled separately, attempting to get back to his south London home from wherever he was. He had his own driver, a fellow wrestler who usually performed in the show's curtain-raiser.

I got to know McManus well, and enjoyed the company of other wrestling notables of that era, among them "Laughing Boy" Les Kellett, a toothless Yorkshire grandfather well into his 60s who lurched around the ring like a drunk when on the point of defeat before unleashing his trademark forearm smash.

It was Kellett who demonstrated to me how such a potentially damaging blow was "pulled" a fraction from the recipient's face, and how capsules of cochineal or pig's blood were sometimes secreted in the ear or mouth and then burst to give the baying audience an appreciated touch of gore.

He and McManus had an alleged feud for years, as McManus genuinely did with his greatest rival, Jackie Pallo, with whom he refused to speak after Pallo revealed in his biography how most bouts were rigged.

McManus, the headmaster of contrived nastiness, was a remarkably quiet, polite and gentle individual outside the ropes. He once invited me to tea at his Dulwich home with his wife, Barbara, where the small hands that were professionally employed throttling throats lovingly caressed his collection of antique porcelain, a subject on which he was an authority.

Showbiz with fake blood wrestling may have been, but sometimes the participants did get seriously hurt. There have been broken necks and limbs, and one instance of a wrestler left paralysed for life after crashing into a ring post when his opponent mistimed a head-drop.

"You should see some of the injuries I've had," McManus told me. "Sometimes it is impossible to get out of bed the next day because you have been battered so badly."

But he reckoned it was those jabbing hat-pins from old ladies which caused him the most anguish.

Since his trade was pure theatre, it seems appropriate that he passed away peacefully, aged 93, in a home for retired actors.