How Not To Tie The Knot! (Four Weddings)

Member Name: blonde_girl774

Product:	Four Weddings
Date:	21/10/09 (116 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Entertaining & Original.

Disadvantages: Having three strangers at your wedding?!

If I had to name my favourite channel on Sky then I'd probably be hard pushed to do so, however if I had to name the channel that I tend to record the most then Living would win hands down. For those of you that don't have access to Living then I honestly don't know how you survive, the thought of my Sky box breaking and leaving me unable to watch Living makes me break out in a cold sweat... well not quite but I do get quite angry if Sky Plus manages to miss recording something usually because my boyfriend's interfered with it. Living is an entertainment site and offers viewers a mixture of programmes but I tend to find it's aimed more at the female market and usually shows series oppose to one off programmes. It shows programmes such as CSI, Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice and Top Model. One of the latest programmes to be screened on Living this year is one called Four Weddings, a programme aimed distinctly at the female market but strangely also a programme that my boyfriend even admits to enjoying just as much as me!

The idea behind Four Weddings is quite simple really (think Come Dine With Me in a white dress) and I'm amazed it hasn't been done before, four brides go head to head in wedding warface by rating each other's wedding to win a dream honeymoon. It sounds like a simple concept and it is, in fact that's what makes it work so well. Brides write into the show and offer to feature on it, competing against three other brides to win the dream honeymoon. Each show follows the same format, the brides will meet in an informal setting at the start where they'll be able to question each other and find out a bit more about the forthcoming weddings. Next they will attend each other's weddings where the three brides will all sit together and be present for every single thing that happens on that day. Following this they will all score each other's weddings on four different criteria and then whichever bride recieves the highest collective score from the other three brides will win a dream honeymoon for herself and her new partner. All sounds rather simple really and it certainly is!

Each wedding is scored on four differnet things, there's a mark out of ten for the dress, a mark out of ten for the venue, a mark out of ten for the food and a mark out of twenty for the overall presentation. This means that the maximum score any bride can give to another bride is fifty and that the maximum total score any bride can recieve is one hundred and fifty. During Season One I discovered that if any bride gets a score over one hundred it means their wedding was pretty good as the winning brides normally tended to get this sort of score with some brides coming in with as low as about sixty on certain occasions. There's quite a lot of personal interpretation that goes into what exactly the brides are scoring on, some brides give a high score in the dress category if they like the dress and would wear it themselves whereas other brides feel it's more about how well the dress suits the bride that's wearing it. Perhaps a bit of clarity here from the producers would result in the categories being a bit more uniformly interpretated and therefore the scores more fair.

As for the scoring itself it does tend to vary dramatically again depending on what the individual bride classes as a good and a bad score. For instance some brides will say oh I loved the dress, it was beautiful yet only give it a score of about six out of ten which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. There's also a fair bit of planning and plotting that goes into the scoring, for example I've seen it before when a bride has rated the two good weddings she went to rather poorly and the bad wedding she went to rather highly. This is simply tactical plotting which should result in her having a higher chance of winning the show, it's quite unfair but it's to be expected really. There must, of course, be some sort of ruling here to prevent the brides from giving each other all zeros just to result in them automatically winning the honeymoon almost! Overall the scoring system does work well and adds an air of competitiveness to the show that is both addictive and entertaining, obviously an element of audience participation would be good but it's impossible really.

Now obviously there's no regular characters in this show as they're different every week which is quite refreshing as you'll certainly never get bored of them. In Season One there was a real mixture of brides from the rather posh to the rather common too, however I suppose this is done on purpose as it makes for better viewing if there are some sort of clashes along the way. There were a few brides that just made me cringe whereas a few others just made me laugh, as you're viewing them for less than an hour you don't really have chance to develop much of an opinion on them really. Basically anyone can star on the show, all of the brides on the first season were brides that had volunteered to go on the show - it was all real and there was nothing set up about it at all. The first series of the show completed a couple of weeks ago and Season Two is currently being made, in fact if you fancy appearing in this show and you're getting married soon then Living have an advertisement for future brides on their website so you may want to check it out!

You do have to wonder what would make any prospective bride want to invite three strangers to her wedding, have them critically score it and give their opinions to the entire viewing audience and finally have it shown on the television. My first thought was that they must all be quite short of cash for a honeymoon and this did seem to be the case... for about twenty percent of the brides. Some brides were spending over twenty grand on their weddings so it did make me wonder why they couldn't afford another couple of grand on the honeymoon of a lifetime. In actual fact when the honeymoons were revealed near the end of each show I did find myself thinking if they were really worth it, yes they sounded amazing, for example a seven day luxury safari in Africa or a ten day stay in a four star Carribbean resort but they weren't exactly life changing holidays. In fact they were holidays that people with a fair income take every year. As such there doesn't seem to be a great incentive for going on the show... unless you want three strangers at your wedding.

Each show lasts for an hour although it's more like around forty five minutes by the time you minus the advert breaks meaning that in forty five minutes you meet all the brides, see all the weddings and sees the results too. I do feel that each show could either be longer or could be split into two different shows on consecutive nights maybe. Forty five minutes results in you actually seeing about seven minutes of each wedding which isn't really long enough to gage an overall opinion. I think the producers of this show have actually missed out on making it run for longer or over a longer period of time by squashing four weddings into forty five minutes. There would be plenty more to see as each wedding seems to be over too quickly, with only a few minutes footage before the other brides begin to give their scorings you don't really get a feeling of whether or not the scores are justified. There is also the chance to visit the online website on Living to see where the couple went on their honeymoon and other additional features that you don't get with the television show.

So what makes this such a good show to watch? There's one thing that stands out for me and that's the sheer mixture of weddings that you get on the show, almost all of which will clash with another bride's taste who is appearing on the same show. From the classic white wedding to pagan bikers tying the knot, to civil partnerships, to weddings at London Zoo to brides on an extreme budget there really is something unexpected in every show. I think this alone makes it entertaining, I can't imagine ever going to a pagan biker's wedding and as such it allows me a glimpse of something very different to my life, seeing the reactions of the other brides and also my boyfriend while we're watching this show just adds to the entertainment. There's obviously the wonderful weddings but then there's also a number of weird and wacky ones too. Not to forget of course the typical catty remarks and bitching that you get whenever you put a group of girls together involving a thoroughly critical analysis of the wedding meal and an eagle eyed dissection of the first dance too!

The series culminated back in September after nine episodes with a special celebrity episode which saw four (relatively) famous faces going up against one another. I actually only recognised two of these famous faces and that was at a push so it wasn't really what I'd call a celebrity episode. However it was a nice way to end the series and there were some fairly lavish weddings! So what characters really stood out for me? Well there was the WAG wannabe Melanie who just wanted glitz and glamour everywhere on her wedding day, Lorna Vincent who opted to getting married in a cave, Donna Ritchie who topped even Jordan on the tacky pink scale of weddings and Carol Ann Hewitt who had her very own anti-wedding wedding which involved a bouquet of Christmas baubles rather than flowers! There was certainly plenty of giggles and shocks watching these weddings and I for one would recommend you watch the new season when it does come out, it makes for easy watching and even if you can't watch it every week you won't miss much at all!

The only thing that gets me about this show is why exactly you'd spend so long planning your wedding, spend so much money on making it perfect and ensuring all your loved ones are there... just to have a reality television camera in the corner the whole time. However despite that, there's something quite likeable about this show and I certainly find it entertaining. Even my boyfriend enjoys it after he moaned for the hour prior to it about having to watch "my rubbish," he even likened it to the Channel 4 counterpart Come Dine With Me. So if you're a fan of Come Dine With Me, but fancy watching it on a slightly larger scale then this programme would be right up your street. If you also fancy seeing just how crazy people will go with their weddings then you'll certainly find it entertaining. However the only difference is that the brides rarely get as bitchy as the diners on Come Dine With Me and the voiceover that I find so entertaining on that show is sadly lacking from this one. Four Weddings is just what you'd expect it to be and, after all, who doesn't like a good wedding?

Thanks for reading.

Summary: A show which sees four brides score each others weddings to win a dream honeymoon.