In the wake of CM Punk’s remarkable “worked shoot” promos in the past few weeks, there has been a tidal wave of commentary from so-called wrestling experts – some insightful, some frankly laughable. On one hand, recent events have shown me why I love this bizarre industry in which I’ve had the pleasure to work for the past three years. On the other, they have made me more certain than ever that I made the right decision when I decided that I’m leaving at the end of this month.

Before I go any further, let me acknowledge a couple of things because I can almost hear the groans from half the people reading this. I am well aware that by talking about quitting a wrestling company, I immediately sound like a cheap imitation– some guy in an indy promotion trying to cash in on Punk’s success by orchestrating a copycat storyline. In response, I’ll resist the temptation to point out any irony in claiming that WE in the UK are borrowing creative ideas from THEM. Instead, I’ll simply promise you that I genuinely am leaving and that you really won’t be hearing me on any FWA broadcast produced after this summer.

Worse still, I might even come across as a small-time commentator who is deluded enough to believe that anything like the same number of people care about his future as do about a top headliner in the United States. I assure you I’m not that self-important, but the FWA nonetheless has a sufficiently large following on Facebook, YouTube and its website that I think I owe an explanation to those who will be interested. The fact that we have such a passionate fanbase makes me all the more sad to say what I’m about to say, but given the nonsense I just read on the FWA website courtesy of Greg Lambert, I think it urgently needs saying. The sensible thing for me to do would be to wait until 2nd September when I’m contractually free to speak my mind, but I can’t let my former broadcast partner’s re-writing of history go unchallenged.

Lambert describes Alex Shane as “a guy who has raised his head above the parapet to be shot at so many times, taken countless bullets of criticism from fans and peers alike, but never wavered from his devotion [to British wrestling]”. Please, spare me. It’s beyond a joke for Greg to talk about another company being filled with “yes men” while simultaneously praising Alex like every other sycophant who has been brainwashed to do the same over the years. I speak from experience because until recently, I was much like Greg – part of the unquestioningly loyal inner circle that makes up the cult of Alex Shane.

The thing you have to grasp about Alex Shane before you can hope to understand him is just how heavily influenced he has been by his childhood. This was a young man who had a tough upbringing on a council estate and an even tougher initiation as a 13 year-old entering the wrestling business. He grew up seeing the world as a brutal place where everyone was in competition with each other to survive, and the only way to make it was to be smarter than the rest. Even before entering into the wrestling business he was fascinated by the world’s great magicians, and specifically by their ability to make people believe something seemingly impossible just by projecting it in a convincing manner. At age eight he was trained by a magician himself and was taught that through this method, magicians had a way to control people. Worse still, they could control them on mass.

The reason Alex Shane is so dangerous is that he can play the role of a genuine nice guy to perfection. When I first met him backstage at a show in 2008 he was the opposite of his in-ring character – he was charming and funny, and I was flattered that he was apparently a fan of my work as a commentator. Over the next few months we became good friends, and I was baffled by some of the criticism I read about him on internet forums and from disgruntled former FWA employees. I found Alex Shane to be an exceptionally intelligent man, and the more he explained his theories about the way the world really worked, the more they made sense to me.

In the world of Alex Shane, everything is potentially a conspiracy. When Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris, it wasn’t just a tragic accident – no, it was a secret plot. When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, it was actually a ploy to begin a war in the Middle East. When 33 Chilean miners were rescued from deep under the ground, it was not a simple good news story but rather an attempt to persuade the public that governments should be trusted and will protect you if you are ever in peril – the number 33 was used deliberately to alert those “in the know” that the whole event had been staged. It all sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but Alex has a way of explaining his theories in such a way that his disciples end up believing the same thing. I’m not even sure he has ever believed any of this himself, but he uses it as a tool to lure people in a real-life "agenda” which has become bigger than Alex alone due to the very use of these methods. I believe that when Greg Lambert talks about the very real nature of the "Agenda" vs "Resistance" storyline, he knows as well as anyone what that really means.

I am a classic example of what being involved in this agenda can do to you should you try and leave. My increasing commitment to Alex Shane’s vision over the past couple of years nearly cost me my sanity on a couple of occasions, and it has certainly cost me every other opportunity I might have had in the wrestling industry. I lost the trust of IPW:UK, where I first worked as a commentator, because they rightly believed I was more committed to the FWA than to them. I quit a potentially lucrative job as the English language commentator for CMLL so that my voice didn’t become associated with two different products. Through my work for Fighting Spirit Magazine (a job Alex convinced me to take) I have burned bridges with several other significant British promotions who think that my reporting of their shows was unfavourable. There is nowhere I can plausibly work now except the FWA – but then, that was the plan all along.

I’ll never forget the day it hit me that I’d been played for a fool. It was 20thNovember 2010, the day of European Uprising at the NEC. By this point I thought I had become a trusted member of the FWA team who was having a real input on booking and other important creative decisions. Many of the roster clearly thought so too, because backstage I was becoming the guy from “the office” to whom many of the boys had started to complain about the direction of the company. For months I had batted away criticisms that the FWA was becoming the "Alex Shane show", with storylines becoming increasingly about him and his inner circle at the expense of other talent who deserved to be given a chance to shine. I knew this was rubbish, because at the NEC we were planning to emphatically put over Leroy Kincaide as our new world champion. It was supposed to be the defining iconic moment of the new FWA – an image that would do for us what Jody Fleisch vs. Flash Barker at British Uprising did for the old FWA.

Except it never happened.

Alex and a handful of others, including Greg Lambert, had decided to swerve the entire roster and management team by secretly planning a finish in which he would betray Leroy and be revealed as the true leader of the Agenda. Contrary to putting over Kincaide as the top star of a new generation in British wrestling, Alex had made himself the centre of the storyline again. It proved to me that he didn’t really want to help promote the FWA – he just wanted to make some more money, increase the profile of the Alex Shane brand, elevate his new apprentice David Deville, and push in whatever direction the real agenda was required to go in. Everyone else had been right. I had been wrong. And I felt like a fool.

Alex's explanation to all this was to say "Dave, you would have never pulled of that priceless look of shock at the end of the show had you have known." Even if this was the real reason, which it wasn't, it is as if the quality of an end of show angle was something that I could have only pulled off if I had been lied too. I guess when you have been in the wrestling business for three quarters of your life, lying to your team simply becomes "working".

Alex Shane is a typical example of someone in wrestling who has "the book" and performs on the same shows he is involved in. You only have to look at Alex’s other followers around the UK and the promotions they run to see the exact same methods being used. How can someone who decides which characters get the most attention ever be objective when they themselves are a part of the talent pool they are assessing? Wrestling fans know that this lack of perspective normally leads to disaster. Would anyone outside of Alex and his cronies really argue that WCW collapsed because of a secret plot to destroy them from the inside?

Alex claims to have studied wrestling history and learned from its mistakes. Rubbish. He has studied it simply to see what others who have "horded the wealth" did in the past and is using the same techniques to keep himself and his friends in the top positions. As for Alex Shane surrendering the role of booker or "Head of Content" to Greg Lambert, you only have to read Greg's article to see why Alex was so happy to do so. Meet the new boss, who’s exactly the same as the old boss!

Having realised all of this, I told Tony Simpson in December that I had lost faith in Alex’s leadership and would not be renewing my contract after it expired on 2nd September 2011. In hindsight it was a huge mistake to show my hand so early – obviously Alex got wind of the news and decided to exploit the fact that he had creative control of my character for seven more months. Having been his “friend” in real life for two years I had trusted Alex with a number of personal issues and now, having realised he had no other hold over me, he announced that we would be conducting an interview in which his character would be blackmailing mine about a “secret” he knew about me. I knew exactly what he was alluding to – this was a thinly veiled threat to reveal a very real secret in the context of a wrestling show. Only he would ever stoop this low for the purpose of "continuing the work".

Since Christmas I’ve played ball and kept my departure quiet until almost the very last moment, but I’ve decided to speak out now for one reason: I can’t sit here and watch lackies like Greg Lambert continue to distort the truth. Alex Shane is being falsely presented as the saviour of British wrestling at a pivotal moment in the worldwide evolution of our industry, and I feel I have a responsibility to correct that fallacy.

Let me finish by addressing two people directly. The first is you, the reader, whom I want to ask a question: when a storyline in the FWA seems similar to one in a big American company, did it ever occur to you that Alex Shane’s ideas might not have been stolen but willingly given to the very people he claims stole them? Alex's obsession with using "the occult" (which simply means “hidden”) often came up in my conversations with him. He always used to tell me "the best place to hide things is in plain view, Dave!" I often wondered why someone as smart as Alex would have come up with the insane notion of a storyline where he claimed that plants in the UK offered deals to groom talent and spy on others. It was even more shocking to me that other respected members of the worldwide wrestling scene such as Doug Willaims, Patrick Lennon and Drew McDonald went along with it in the first place. Now I am beginning to think for the first time that maybe this whole thing was a perfect example of the obvious being hidden in plain view to pretend the truth was nothing more than an angle, in case the truth should come to light one day. If I’m right then this is Alex Shane's greatest sleight of all against the British scene he publicly claims to love.

The second person I want to address is you, Alex. Bearing in mind the things I’ve mentioned here and the hundred other things you know I could have said, perhaps you and I should agree on a truce. You keep your secrets, I’ll keep mine, and on 2nd September I’ll go and pursue my “future endeavours” – the first recorded person to break free of the cult of Alex Shane. After all there are some things in life more sacred than pro wrestling, even if you are to deluded to see it or too manipulative to say it.

I believe that the work that so many of us have done in the FWA can still help British wrestling return to the mainstream – the company has the media exposure, heritage and contacts to make it happen. But first the truth needs to be told, completely and unvarnished. Then those who genuinely want to see our industry thrive will need to learn to work together, because until that transpires people like Alex will continue to steer the ship in whatever direction suits their personal agenda, relying on the theory that laziness = dependence = control. I have done my bit to try and get British wrestling to get back on track but now, having said my piece, it is time for me to tap out with my sanity intact. I only hope others with the passion that I used to have can go on to save the UK's premier wrestling export before it is damaged beyond repair.