Do you take this car and flat to be...?

Imagine if you will a new television game show. We shall call this programme From Here To Paternity. Or if that's too wordy a title, we could agree on Yes, I'm Your Dad.

The thrust of this programme will be to introduce absent fathers to their children at the moment of birth. The reluctant fathers-to-be will be shepherded to the delivery rooms by the production crew, and shortly after birth they will be handed the baby.

At this moment, the studio audience, having been bullied into life by the warm-up man, will cry out as one: "It's your baby, you bounder!"

If this programme were to be taken up by Channel 5, the derogatory word in this catch-phrase could be exchanged for something a little stronger.

Too tasteless for you? How about another new people show, perhaps to be called It's Your Funeral. This would be one programme you could be guaranteed never to watch, having already been lumbered with the starring role.

This show would... well, perhaps not. Such notions are absurdities, introduced with mildly mischievous intent and not intended to offend. Besides how can these little fictions stand up to the tasteless rigors of real life?

For this week a couple who had never met were married in the name of entertainment. Carla Germaine, 23, and 27-year-old Greg Cordell entered a blind date wedding competition organised by the BRMB radio station in Birmingham as a "matrimonial experiment".

Their prize list was impressive. They won each other, a honeymoon in the Bahamas, a luxury apartment in Birmingham and a Ford Puma car. The apartment and the car will have to be handed back in a year, after which time Carla and Greg will be left with each other, the honeymoon photos (courtesy of that nice man from the News of the World) and the honeymoon video (thanks to the boys from Channel 4).

And if they split up before the year is out, at least they won't have to argue over the car and the flat.

This very modern wedding is an appalling travesty of everything that marriage is supposed to represent. That much is so obvious it hardly needs saying, though this has not prevented the churchmen of Birmingham condemning the reduction of "a sacred and momentous decision to a media event".

Well, these religious gentlemen are quite right. But when you look beyond their objections, this tacky exercise does throw up some interesting questions about marriage.

To most people, marriage is a public expression of private feelings, whereas the blind wedding was something else, a public display of feelings that cannot yet exist, unless that hour alone together before the wedding was particularly intense and instructive.

Carla and Greg strike me as fools and dupes, slaves to pointless publicity, and yet perhaps they will succeed. Such a happy scenario seems unlikely, but at least these married strangers did promise to be each other's "lover and friend whatever may come", which, when you think of it, isn't a bad marital vow.

The only other wedding to generate such interest recently will take place this summer when Prince Edward marries Sophie Rhys-Jones. Edward and Sophie had a long courtship and managed to meet without resource to a local radio station in Birmingham.

Their wedding will generate masses of media coverage, much of which I'm afraid will bore me as much as it would doubtless bore Prince Edward to have to look at my wedding photographs.

Royal weddings used to be fairy-tales, and then they became scary-tales, as we saw with Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Carla and Greg's wedding has been condemned by everyone, me too - and yet wasn't Charles and Diana's wedding also in essence arranged, albeit through more regal channels?

28/01/99

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.