Moron TV, Don't Tell the Bride

Overpopulation may be a thing, or it may not.  It’s probably a thing if you have access to graph paper, some pens, a few stats about birth rates and a nagging sense that there are a hell of a lot more annoying young people about the place than there used to be, many of them on scooters.

It’s probably not a thing if your job involves the maintenance of the lamp at the top of your tall, thin, circular and often fog-bound place of work.

Controlling overpopulation can be done in a number of ways.  Global conflict is a good short term fix, but booms of the explosive kind can be followed by booms of the baby kind.

There is a school of thought that if you can’t stop population growth, then you can at least try and nudge population development.  In short, if people are going to breed, then an effort should be made to ensure that the result is of benefit to the human race.  The problem with this is that eugenics and selective breeding is most usually either the preserve of madmen (it’s always men) or the landed classes, who want to keep property, wealth, power or a particular genetic defect, such as a weak chin, in the family.

Certainly in these enlightened times one would never consider trying to dissuade or prevent anyone from pairing, and starting a family with, anyone of their choosing, no matter how shocking the people in question might be.

But what else could explain ‘Don’t Tell the Bride’?

DTTB is genuine weep-for-future-of-humanity teevee.

Essentially the format is that a bloke is given all the money and all the responsibility of arranging his wedding.

Exactly.

This includes choosing the wedding dress.  If you go into any menswear shop you will witness men asking their wife or girlfriend if what they are trying on is suitable.  Men cannot even be trusted to choose their own pants, so what fucking chance of they got picking out a wedding dress?

One of the worst contrivances of DTTB is that the bride always appears to have a really clear idea of what they want their wedding to be like.  And the bloke, who presumably has spent time with, and possibly even discussed wedding plans with, the lady in question, always does something completely unrelated.

Her:  ‘I’ve always dreamed of a classic wedding, white dress, classic car, church.’

Him:  ‘I fucking love Battlestar Galactica.  Not the remake, the original series, so it’s going to be a Battlestar Galactica themed wedding.  I’ve spent three grand on tinfoil already.  It’s going to be lush’.

Other highlights include the traditional bloke organising a hen do, comprising of a bottle of Lambrini and a VHS box-set of ‘Sex and the City’ to be watched at the bride’s mum’s house, while the groom has a weekend in Vegas, or similar.

All of this, surely, is intended to stop people like this breeding, the intention being that any bride-to-be confronted with the prospect of a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe themed wedding and a groom who still has stripper glitter behind his ears will want to go to her room and cry for so long she is no longer of child-bearing age, while the bloke in question is, thanks to the magic of media, revealed to womankind to be not the sort to be trusted with a white frock and some fruit cake, never mind a family.

Given the lack of imagination, coupled with the love of a format-flogging-franchise that exists in tellyland, I await the arrival of ‘Don’t Tell the Corpse’ to the schedules, where some clueless family member is given seventeen grand to arrange the send off of a loved one.  If it runs true to form, then the gorm-bereft idiot with the loot will blow it all on the wake for him and his mates, leaving the rest of the family to knock up a coffin from cereal packets and pinch any floral arrangements from the local allotments, where a mysterious six foot deep hole has also recently appeared.  Hard to tell what will result from such a show first, ASBO or BAFTA.