Living TV – Four Weddings Review
Four Weddings is something of a departure for Living TV, because unlike every other programme on the UK’s leading channel for tearful 30-year-old women, this show doesn’t consist of a soulful, malnourished bint harping on about feelings while Coldplay drone soulfully away in the background, bravo for experimentation, eh?
For the uninitiated Four Weddings is the marital Come Dine With Me; four brides all go to each other’s weddings and are co-erced by the show’s producers into saying sound-bitingly nasty things about each other’s weddings. Sadly, on the opening episode it’s not just the brides who fail to come up with anything amusing to say – the sarcastic Dave Lamb-esque voice-over seems so uncomfortable with his role as Chief Bitch that his snarky asides mostly sound like teenage-level carping.
It’s obvious from the start that Four Weddings has had a bit of money thrown at it. Not least because it’s been trailed more relentlessly than a shitty-arsed fox, but also because they’ve brought in a Diet Kubrick director who insists on doing artful establishing shots for each venue. To be fair they don’t look so bad when the venue in question is a stately home, but surely even the best director would struggle to make a municipal sports hall in London look imposing.
The producers aren’t the only ones who’ve flashed the cash. The cost of the brides’ weddings is broadcast at frequent intervals and range from Lorna, who somehow managed to find someone to take £6,900 of her money to let her host her wedding in a cave. Yes, a cave. Presumably, she had to wait until they stopped pissing themselves with laughter before she could confirm the booking. Actually, the cave turns out to be the best thing about Lorna’s wedding, which after the atmospheric underground antics drizzles out into the sort of damp squib that you’d normally associate with the final night of a three-day teacher training seminar.
At the other end of the spectrum is the page three model who has decided to spunk £77,500 up the wall creating precisely the sort of event that you would imagine a page three model with a budget of £77,500 would like: white doves released from box – check. Groom dressed in space-age/bacofoil suit and improbably pointy canoe shoes – check. More fake tan than you’d get if you pureed a WAG – check.
Along the way the brides are mostly respectful – which is much as you’d expect really because as every Brit knows your true feelings about a wedding are reserved exclusively for the drive home, when the bitching begins in earnest. Consequently, we get some minor league carping about an array of pointless things:
- Berries in dessert
- “I like large dresses but not that large” (or something equally stupid)
- Incorrectly judging when the pork should happen.
Just as you’re beginning to lose the will to live, the show ends. In this episode, justice is done and the winner is the heavy-drinking Welsh couple who run a haulage firm and who managed to spend £22.5k for a weekend bash in a decent stately pile that begins with a Friday night, getting-to-know-you-session including British Bulldog in pyjamas (great idea) and ends with the couple dancing to Lady In Red (the bride was wearing red, so the song was mostly appropriate). Ultimately, we got the inevitable shot of the page three model realising she’d lost and looking like she’s just been papped on the crapper and, then, mercifully the show ended.
So, what can we learn from the hour of our lives that we’ll never get back after watching Four Weddings? Well, clearly, the show’s not aimed at men. In the Four Weddings edit the man’s role is reduced to: making an ill-judged fashion statement through the medium of crap suits, making a short, rubbish speech, and finally doing the Robot dance in a sweaty shirt. Oh men!
The positive is that if you’re looking for some left-field ideas for weddings then you should find them on Four Weddings, but ultimately you’d be far better watching Come Dine With Me re-runs and flicking through wedding sites during the adverts. Hopefully, Living TV will stick to doing what they’re good at and keep Coldplay and famished-looking, teary-eyed bints in work. And until they finally convince someone to make our dream series Ray Mears Whittles A Wedding From Wood we’ll just have to accept that wedding TV is not for us.
Four Weddings will probably be on Living TV on repeat for much of the next century.
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