Loving dangerously

I was recently sharing a joke with the Reverend Spooner's girlfriend, Betty Swallocks ("so, this dyslexic walks into a rab" it began), when the conversation turned to soft drinks. "You recently mentioned in your column that Vimto is an anagram of vomit" said Betty, "but did you know that Evian is a palindrome of naive, which is a perfect description of anyone who's mug enough to pay through the nose for such an eau-verpriced beverage?" "And did you know," I retorted, "that there's a spa town in France called Source, where Perrier water is bottled? Look at this label if you don't believe me, it says 'Bottled at Source'." How we laughed, little suspecting that our fictional conversation would one day end up in print in the pages of a London evening newspaper.

Given the current American obsession with boycotting all things French, it's unlikely that many bottles of Perrier or Evian are currently being drunk at New York weddings, but nuptials there remain a predominantly teetotal affair. Unlike British wedding receptions (which are usually fuelled by booze and routinely end in vomiting and fist fights between families), most Manhattanites value their sobriety at all times, and that's why yesterday afternoon's Bridezillas (Carlton) was a concept doomed to failure from the outset.

According to the programme makers, the title referred to "brides who mutate from normal human beings into obsessive control freaks when it comes to controlling their perfect day," but the footage they'd shot in New York (the city that never sleeps, and looks like it the next morning) showed us not a bunch of raving female monsters, but three purring pussycats happily preparing for their ceremonies. Indeed, the only desperate creatures I saw were the poor husbands-to-be being dragged into diamond shops and gentlemen's outfitters, and I was reminded that marriage is the world's only cruel sport where the trapped animal has to buy the licence.

In true Birtian style, the production team had written their story in advance, then gone out to find some footage to fit it, and the lamentable discrepancy between theory and reality highlighted the fundamental flaw in that modus operandi. "Vanessa is facing bridal meltdown," thundered the narrator as a female Wall Street trader appeared on screen, but his words flatly contradicted the evidence of my own eyes, because the woman was thoroughly calm and reasonable as she wisely checked that her wedding dress was in perfect shape.

"Karen's high expectations have already been shattered," he continued, as a 29-year-old fashion PR director talked about how well everything was going, while an actress named Cynthia refused to look anything other than delighted and radiant as she too was tarred with the same Bridezilla brush. Indeed, the only person who seemed to be losing their cool was Cynthia's father, and his ire was understandable, because he was having to foot the entire $100,000 bill for his daughter's wedding, and was rapidly discovering that his credit card was really a debt card.

"The strain is starting to show," persisted the narrator defiantly, as the three women continued to grin beatifically at everyone around them, in direct contravention of the director's wishes. True, some of the trapped male animals seemed to be in pain as they pulled on their illfitting morning suits and their squeaky-clean patent leather shoes, but the females were all in seventh heaven, and I suspect that the strain won't really start to show until the wedding day is over. Only then will the unsuspecting men begin to realise that although they have married Miss Right, her first name is Always. And if any feminists out there are reading this, don't bother sending outraged letters to me, criticising my unreconstructed views of married life. Just get back in the kitchen where you belong, and don't go filling your fluffy little heads full of complicated things that you don't understand.

This programme set out to be the televisual equivalent of Stephen Sondheim's I'm Not Getting Married Today, but failed because it didn't manage to bring us a single on-screen tantrum worthy of the name. In spite of some excellent camerawork, and a sensitive score by Samuel Sim (based on a slowed-down version of The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy), it lacked the patience and persistence to track down and film the raw material it needed, probably because the production budget hadn't allowed the crew the time they needed to find any examples of genuine Bridezillas. With the television industry becoming increasingly fragmented (and therefore under-resourced) in this digital multi-channel era, lack of adequate time for research has become an endemic problem with documentaries, but then lack of research is also a problem for many young men, who frequently plunge headlong into matrimony without properly thinking through the consequences of the deed. Perhaps that's why it's said that a man is incomplete until he marries. Then he's finished.