There are certain things written in newspapers that make you sit up and take notice. Except on this particular page, of course, which tends to be as uplifting as reading your own eviction notice.

Rumbling sombrely into work on the train the other day, while shoehorned in among a series of glum commuters who looked so grim they could’ve sucked on a lemon and the lemon would’ve pulled a face, my senses were stirred by an opening paragraph which stated that “a drug that reverses ageing and could help astronauts travel to Mars may be on the market in three years, scientists claim.”

It was quite a startling revelation and decidedly welcome news given that great swathes of the public in this country are used to regularly taking something that accelerates the ageing process and hinders our intrepid attempts to travel to far flung places. It’s called the Scottish rail network.

As I peered at my reflection in the carriage window, glimpsing an increasingly wizened fizzog that has so many lines there was once a major signalling fault on my crow’s feet, the spirits were lifted again when I gazed back at the rag I was nonchalantly leafing through to see that World of Sport Wrestling is set to return to terrestrial television for the first time in 30 years. There’s even a launch event in Manchester on Monday to champion the forthcoming 10-part series of ding, dings, seconds away and 80 denier tights.

Back in the dim and distant past, ITV’s World of Sport was an institution in itself and one launched in the late 1960s as a rival to the BBC’s Grandstand. Its variety of hosts down the seasons included hardy perennials like Eamonn Andrews, Fred Dineage and Jim Rosenthal but perhaps its most celebrated was the debonair Dickie Davies, a man who wouldn’t have looked out of place if he was perched in an upmarket cocktail bar while charming the waitress with some suggestive, nod-and-a-wink anecdote about an hors d’oeuvre at an ambassador’s reception.

Forget the actual sport on offer, Davies’ neatly manicured quiff was an enchanting spectacle in its own right and the eye-catching fleck of white hair at its forefront made him look a bit like Elvis after he’d just given the ceiling a coat of emulsion.

In its previous incarnation on the box, wrestling attracted upwards of 16 million viewers which was an astonishing achievement given that the general premise of the whole panting palaver seemed to revolve around a variety of sizeable blokes, who may have polished lathes for a living, getting severely winded in some smoke-filled community centre, civic hall or corn exchange in Preston.

Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus, Kendo Nagasaki? To a man they became household names despite some of the more heftier specimens possessing all the brisk, manoeuvrability of a hovercraft with a deflated air cushion.

Watching a heaving, sweaty, grunting embrace between Big Daddy and the bearded colossus that was Giant Haystacks, for instance, was an eye-opening education like no other and at least gave you more of an insight into the complex mating procedures and elaborate rituals that had to be employed by the dinosaurs if they were to successfully breed without shattering their spines.

When the bold Big Daddy unmasked the international man of mystery that was Nagasaki – the clandestine Kendo was from that far off, exotic, mystique-shrouded land of Stoke-on-Trent – the collective gasp of astonishment sent shivers down your Shirley Crabtrees.

It wasn’t just the fellas who revelled in this golden era, of course. Klondyke Kate was a fearsome, formidable character who sparked something of a gold rush … quite possibly in the other direction given her terrifying stature.

A gentle giant of a woman outside the ring, her aggressive persona inside it made her a target for venomous diatribes, particularly from the hand-bag wielding, heel-swinging female pensioners in the crowd who were among the most hostile denizens of these boisterous arenas.

If they weren’t stubbing fags out on the backs of competitors they didn’t like then they were captured on camera delivering good honest, homespun northern justice. “She wants shooting, cos she’s dirty and she’s not fit to be called a woman,” said one erudite female of distinction in the terrific BBC documentary, When Wrestling Was Golden – Grapples, Grunts and Grannies. “How she’s got the nerve to walk into the ring looking like that, I don’t know, she’s got no shame,” hissed another redoubtable figure with a sour face that looked like she’d just failed to prise her falsers out of an apple.

For those of a certain vintage, Saturday afternoon wrestling on the telly really did hold you in a double nelson … without the wafts of sweat, moist chintz leotards and gurning grannies, of course.