Four weddings (no funeral yet) (Four Weddings)

Member Name: cerys82

Product:	Four Weddings
Date:	05/08/09 (125 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting to see the different types of weddings

Disadvantages: general nastiness, too much padding and faff, not enough variety

Four Weddings is a series, especially commissioned and produced by Living TV, which began showing on Monday nights at 9 in July 2009. The show takes place over an hour on the original Living TV station but is repeated numerously over all the Living channels over the week.

The premise is simple. Four brides or civil partners to-be attend each others weddings and rate them on categories including the dress, the venue, the food and overall presentation. At the end of the programme the scores are added up and the couple whose wedding which has been scored the most popular win a 5 star honeymoon.

So essentially it's the film 'Confetti' meets "Come Dine With Me"!

So far there have been a variety of different types of events. The ceremonies have varied between civil and religious to pagan, and the budgets from a couple of grand to £80,000.

I started to watch this programme with interest as I am a bride-to-be myself and although all my arrangements are all firmly in place I do find it interesting to see how other people want to carry out theirs, I particularly like it when people are shown to have put a lot of thought and a lot of themselves into the day.

Therein, however is where the first problem lies - the weddings themselves even with their massive variation in budgets and styles are mostly the same. Even the people who swear that theirs is going to be different and anything but traditional seem to slip into these ways. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with that, in fact for me to say that would be downright hypocritical. However, it does get a bit repetitive. One thing that I would have expected and that would have alleviated this would be for there to be a larger showing on the programme for multi-cultural weddings, but that doesn't seem to have been the case.

The more that I have watched the show also, the more I have felt aggrieved by the snippy comments of the contestants. I personally would hate to hear anyone criticise my wedding and in fact its just downright rude and cruel - and far too much of it seems to be down more to the fact that some of the contestants, whilst acting as guests seem to resent the fact that its not their special day!

The format itself is ok, but for my mind they do a lot of "coming ups" and just general faff and don't feature enough of the 'special days'. This is definitely a programme that Sky+ fast forward is invented for. The revelation of the winner is excessive protracted.

And this being a competition, far too much emphasis is put on how much the weddings cost and not enough on, you know, the people that are getting married and how they feel about each other. What is interesting, however, is that its the most braggingly expensive ones that tend to be the least 'classy' (if that doesn't sound too harsh.)

The comparisons with 'Come Dine With Me' are more than fair, not least because the narrator seems to be doing their best Dave Lamb impression; his snippy comments do help cut through some of the general unpleasant comments of the contestants however.

All in all I will continue to watch this whilst I have a vested interest in weddings, but I have to say that it is something that with each episode of it my opinion seems to be deteriorating so I wouldn't be surprised if I amend my rating.

Summary: Ok to begin but gets very repetitive and weary after a few episodes.