I was at a loose end on Saturday morning (husband away on a stag-weekend in Budapest) and just happened to flick the TV on to a show called 'Four Weddings'. Now, I'd never seen 'Four Weddings' before, but I remember that when it first came onto our screens about a year or so ago it was touted as "the show you'll love if you love 'Come Dine With Me'". I used to like 'Come Dine With Me'; it was a novel idea that now resembles an annoying relative in the sense that it feels as though it's been with me since birth and it's just always going to be around, glowering resentfully in the background forever. The older shows are filled with nice, if sometimes a little odd, people who actually seem interested in what they're going to cook and have a genuine enthusiasm for meeting people. Now it's all bitchy asides, over-the-top drag queens and people who want their fifteen minutes of fame at any cost, so for me it's lost its original, cute and quirky appeal and I don't bother with it any more. I'll bet Channel Four are shaking in their shoes at that reveal, but there it is. Sorry.
Anyway, nothing else was on telly during this fateful Saturday morning so I decided to see what 'Four Weddings' was all about. It was genuinely, eye-scratchingly awful, and yet at the same I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing, so I kept it on, blinking wildly in disbelief like a vicar in a lap-dancing bar.
The premise of the show is that four brides who are getting married at the same time, go to one another's weddings and score each-other on the dress, the venue, the food and the general ambience. Sounds mind-bogglingly terrible doesn't it? As you might have guessed, for entertainments' sake the weddings are always wildly different, so you'll have one bride insisting on a full 'princess' wedding, while the next one abhors anything too over-the-top so she's getting married in the local council hall in a binbag. Well - you get the idea; more to criticise.
The funny thing about it right from the off is that these brides might as well be marrying store mannequins with faces drawn on in lipstick; we don't see or hear anything from the men who captured these angels. The programme assumes we're not really interested in them, which is fair enough when you think about it...grooms are just boring, standing there in their suits. (Jerry Seinfeld once said that the reason men all dress the same at weddings is so that if the groom doesn't turn up you could just substitute him for the next man along).
The judging began...in the episode I watched, the first bride had what she referred to as a "full fairy-tale princess wedding". It was a mistake really, calling it that, because the other three brides immediately judged it as though she was really marrying royalty instead of just wearing a meringue dress with a few sparkles on it. "It's not a very princessy venue, this" moaned one of them as she walked into what looked like a tiny, draughty church, obviously having expected Westminster Abbey. The hatchet-faced fifty year-old having a 'biker's' wedding (don't ask) said she thought the reception venue (a local rugby club) didn't seem like somewhere a princess would have her wedding reception, and that the food they were given for free lacked the "wow factor" (a phrase I hate with an absolute passion; it's so ubiquitous that the saying itself doesn't have the "wow factor"...and besides, what is the "wow factor"? You only ever hear that phrase when something is judged not to have had it. What did ever actually have the "wow factor" - 9/11 perhaps?).
I don't think anybody actually smiled throughout the whole programme. It made me depressed, partly because it really was bloody awful, and partly because it shows women at their harridan, carping and competitiveness worst - criticising people on what they think should be the happiest day of their lives. It may actually have been the most dispiriting, mean-hearted and selfish programme I have ever seen, and I've seen 'The Secret Millionaire'.
In the end, the bride judged to have had the 'best' wedding wins a honeymoon in the Caribbean, so obviously each bride gave the others as low marks as they could possibly get away with. I just hope, as the winner relaxes on her sun-lounger with a steel band playing in the background, that she thinks all the mean-spirited griping on national television about Sharon's rubbery chicken tarragon and how her dress made her look like Giant Haystacks was worth it.
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