The guests have arrived. It’s 20 minutes since they should have been greeted and led inside to their seats for the wedding ceremony.
Instead, friends of the bride and groom mill about sipping warm champagne and taking in their surroundings: an aircraft hangar at Manchester airport that’s been dressed with flowers and candles.
Behind the scenes – chaos. A group of wedding planners is frantically dragging chairs into place, wrestling with last-minute decorations and attempting to establish a semblance of order for when the plane-loving bride and groom arrive. Welcome to the Ultimate Wedding Planner.
BBC Two’s new reality television series sees eight wannabe wedding planners battle it out over six episodes to win the ultimate title.
The stakes are high, six real couples yearning for the wedding of their dreams. The judges are fierce, nothing gets past Sara Davies, Fred Sirieix and Raj Somaiya.
“It’s a contest,” says Sirieix, whom viewers will recognise as the First Dates maitre d’. “We are here to find who’s the ultimate wedding planner in the UK.
“But what you also see is these two worlds… And you can see the difference, when, for example, in episode one you see the bride and groom and they’re all so happy, and suddenly it cuts to behind the scenes and it’s all carnage.
“I like that because it’s a beautiful story,” he continues. “It’s intimate, it’s warm, it makes you laugh, sometimes you want to cry.”
Pitted against one another – and yet forced to work together – are eight aspiring wedding planners, with differing levels of experience, hoping to jet-set their careers. There are more than a few tears, raised voices and crossed swords.
Each couple (bar the last episode) have already chosen their location and theme – might be an aircraft hangar, might be a farmyard.
The planners have three days from brief to nuptials to craft a show-stopping wedding. Their budget is £10,000.
Each week one planner is eliminated, until the remaining two go head-to-head in the final episode.
Dragons’ Den star Davies is adamant this show is different from the other wedding fodder on TV.
“It’s not the bride doesn’t know anything until she turns up. It’s not make-believe or pretend. It’s their wedding day that they’ve been planning for years,” she says.
“And you feel that, you really feel it.
“And then the planners feel that and want to make that amazing. And then to add to all that pressure, they know that they’re in a competition so they’re trying to work as a team but they’re trying to show off their individual skills.
“And then it doesn’t help that me and Fred are walking around going, ‘oh, it’s not quite good enough, come on, that’s not up to scratch’, and then Raj is screaming at them. It’s a lot to contend with. I have never experienced anything like that in a TV show.”
Wedding planning, says industry expert Somaiya, as seen in My Big Fat Asian Wedding, is ranked as the eighth most stressful job on the planet.
“So we’ve already got people in a stressful environment. We then chuck them into a wedding three days before. They don’t know the venue. They don’t know the vendors that are turning up.
“Then they make all these promises because they’re in a contest and then have to deliver upon them. I mean, you’re literally lighting a fire and saying crack on.”
The stress was not lost on the judges, either.
“They had good intentions and they really wanted to deliver a great wedding,” says Sirieix, 51. “But it was very stressful. It was very disorganised. It was chaos.
“It was tough because at the end of the day it’s called Ultimate Wedding Planner, and our reputation is on the line here. And we can’t just be giving a title like that to somebody who is not able to deliver.
“So it really was a quest for excellence and we were pushing them to their very limit.”
He continues: “At the last wedding, you can really see the progression of all these wedding planners and see how much they’ve learned.”
“The planners really took on board our feedback every week and they just got better and better,” echoes Davies, 39. “And they get more ambitious, a little bit too ridiculously ambitious some weeks.”
For Davies, the toughest part was back at HQ when the judges had to decide who was getting knocked out.
“They’re all staring at you because their future hangs in your balance… I didn’t sleep the night before HQ every week. I was so upset for them.”
Deciding who to eliminate caused a fair bit of ruckus between the judges.
“Even at 10 o’clock the night of the final wedding, we’re still all arguing because we can’t agree who should win,” Davies admits.
Somaiya, 54, adds: “‘Til five in the morning.”
But it wasn’t all hard work: Davies and Sirieix got to experience the weddings as guests (while Somaiya pulled his hair out backstage). “Sara was drinking like a fish,” jokes Sirieix. “She loves gin and tonic. I had to pick her up from under the table.”
“I was definitely one of the last ones on the dance floor at every wedding,” Davies continues. “I used to take great delight and dance with the father of the bride and the little bridesmaids… We had six good weddings.”
And their expert tips for would-be planners?
For Somaiya, it’s all about timing – once behind, you’re forever playing catch-up.
“It’s like a swan and everything’s swimmingly beautiful on top, and underneath the legs are going crazy.
“At 11 o’clock – and I had this every fricking week – I want somebody there to greet my guests and walk them in. It doesn’t matter what’s going on under that ocean. So long as the swan is swimming on the top of that thing, I don’t care.
“I don’t care if the flowers are up. I don’t care if the music’s on. We need to greet the guests and make sure that everything looks perfect. And it never did.”
He recommends planning as far ahead as possible and keeping a tight rein on budget.
One thing often neglected, Somaiya says, is the weather. “That destroys so many weddings and it destroys families – they have massive arguments on the day. So have a rain plan. If it’s sunny, go outside and have a glass of champagne. If not, you’re in, it’s cool.”
The Ultimate Wedding Planner comes to BBC Two on Tuesday, August 8.
