Bak's TV Week: Four Weddings

I've been to four weddings this year. And that's not all; I have at least another two to attend before the end of September. I know what you're all thinking: 'Bak, a man as ruthlessly spiteful as you doesn't have that many friends'. You're probably right; I imagine I'm only invited as an afterthought, to make up the numbers. Always the bridesmaid never the bride, that's me.

 

Or maybe it's some sort of conspiracy to bankrupt me. If so, it seems to be working. Have you any idea how much it costs to go to a wedding these days? There's the travel. I live in London. Two of these weddings were in Scotland. The next one is in Belfast. And the one after that is in Las Vegas. Las Vegas! I mean, do these people have no consideration?

 

Then there's the suit; at least a couple of dry cleans will be required this year. And the present. Don't forget the present. Not unless you want to be treated like a leper by the shameless money-grabbers who invited you in the first place.

 

With my experience, Living TV should have been filming me for its latest horror-show, Four Weddings. Instead they asked four bints - to whose weddings I wasn't even invited - to pit each other's dream weddings against each other in a bid to win a five-star honeymoon in the Caribbean.

 

The catch is this: the weddings are not being judged by independent observers. Oh no. They're being judged by the brides themselves. Inviting complete strangers to bitch about your wedding behind your back? I thought that's what families were for.

 

So it's basically a really tacky version of Come Dine With Me, with weddings instead of dinner parties. And the result is a bit like watching other people's wedding videos. Except it's even more mind-bendingly tedious than that because you don't know the people involved.

 

You couldn't care less if one of them cries because she asked for fairy lights on every table and got candles instead. Or whether the happy couple's first dance is to Celine Dion or Metallica. You don't even care if the hubby is left jilted at the altar because one poor bride-to-be has been run over by a bus on her way to the church. You. Just. Couldn't. Care. Less.

 

Don't Marry Her

As you might expect from a show like Four Weddings, the brides are no Angelina Jolies. There's Carol, a pale, bookish bore with Goth pretensions who wants to have an 'anti-wedding'. Yawn. And Sarah, who looks a bit like Amy Lamé after a nasty accident and sounds like Foghorn Leghorn getting his knackers trapped in a vice. Sarah – bless her delusional socks – wants to have a 'fairytale wedding'. The wedding snaps will inevitably tell a different story.

 

Then there's Donna who looks like Trailer Park Barbie: hair like radioactive spaghetti and a face like a clenched buttock. Aberdonian Donna wants the works: pink dress, bagpipes (Satan's own musical instrument), and the full church treatment.

 

This despite the fact that she looks like the kind of woman who might turn to dust as soon as she steps on holy ground. Completing the bridezilla line-up is Alison: pushing 40, rough as old boots, and a mouth like a Liverpool docker's a**e. A shoo-in to win, in other words.

 

The harridans – sorry, brides – rate each other's nuptials in the following categories: venue, food, overall presentation and, of course, the dress. Whereas I rate my mates' weddings on shortness of ceremony, amount of free booze, totty count and total financial cost to me. But that's only because I'm nothing like as shallow as Carol, Sarah, Donna and Alison.

 

Each bride has a budget. Carol gets £4.5k for her tedious 'anti-wedding'; Donna gets £15k for her whore-in-God's-house routine; greedy Sarah bags an eye-popping £18k for her Shrek-like fairytale; and Alison proves she's every bit as cheap as she looks with just £3k and a reception in what appears to be a working men's club, circa 1976.

 

The Weddings From Hell

 

And so to the big days themselves. Poor, drab Carol must have misheard when Living TV got in touch. She thought they said 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' and assumed, given her deathly pallor that she was getting the role of corpse bride. "I don't like flowers," she bleated at one point, as bunches of daffodils wilted in her wake. Seriously, her wedding couldn't have been less lively if someone had actually died. It made Diana's funeral look like a street party.

Sarah's, if anything, was even worse. Yes, there was a castle; yes, there were bridesmaids and flower girls a-plenty.

 

But the venue was way too big for Sarah and her seven friends and ended up looking more like an episode of Most Haunted than a celebration of youthful love and never-ending happiness. Karma for Sarah's constant complaints about the food at her rivals' weddings I reckon. Funny that, she doesn't look like the kind of girl who's fussy about what she eats.

 

Donna's wedding had initially promised to be the most interesting. By which I mean: the most likely to end in a hair-pulling, bitch-slapping brawl. But it wasn't to be. And this despite the fact that she and her new husband appeared to have come dressed as Jordan and Peter Andre.

 

In fact, apart from a few drunken Jocks roaring "FREEDOM" at every available opportunity (how long has it been since Braveheart was in cinemas?), there wasn't even the merest suggestion of a scrap. Shameful.

 

Scary-Mary Alison's low-budget wedding was always destined to be the winner. Lesson: you don't have to spend lots of money to have a memorable day. Give me a break. I only hope the dream Caribbean honeymoon she won brings new husband Graham a little bit of joy ahead of the long, dark years ahead of him. God knows, he's earned it. As for me, I'm retiring from wedding attendance at the end of this year. And from watching TV shows about weddings as of right now.

 

Quotes Of The Week

 

"Churches give me the creeps." - Funnily enough, Goth Carol gives me the creeps.

 

"We want it to be quite classy, quite sophisticated." - Even £18k can't buy you class, Sarah.

 

"I really have to think about what stood out." - Alison gets her claws out when scoring Carol's wedding.

 

"I'm not really a beef girl myself." - You could have fooled me, Sarah.

 

"She's possibly the most stunning bride I've ever seen." - Presumably Alison is the only bride Donna's ever seen.

 

"If we came last it shows that we had the wedding we wanted." - No, Carol, it shows you had the worst wedding by a country mile.

Bak On TV

Read more of Stuart Bak's TV reviews in our Couch Potato archive. Do you agree with Stu's opinions? Disagree? Drop him a line on bakontv@hotmail.co.uk