Wedding junkie

Admit it. More than once these past few weeks, you spent your weeknight watching somebody else’s wedding on cable TV.

Sure it began innocently enough. There’s no reason to sound so defensive. You were clicking your remote during a commercial break and stumbled on Channel 44, The Party Channel (you believe it is called), and watched, bemused, as the bride began the first day of the rest of her life getting her eyebrows plucked by tweezers in the expert hands of a local genius.

But you stayed longer than you thought you would. So you clicked your remote back to National Geographic to assuage your guilt. Hoover Dam. All that concrete. There.

But then, yes, there’s the matter of whether there would be a dramatic descent down a winding staircase, with a six-foot train slithering behind the putative virgin, like the serpent in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So you click back to Channel 44.

And that is how it started, this dependence that threatens to stay forever.

You can’t even explain it. You thought wedding videos were meant to be stashed away, safe from vicious relatives, unimpressed guests and, God forbid, the cavernous mouths of the uninvited. The latter are the most brutal: they remember your names forever, and condemn them to that part of hell on which are written the sequin-and-Styrofoam names they didn’t get invited to see.

Wedding videos are explosive stuff. But here they are, on cable TV. And you’re watching.

And it’s catching on, too. Amid the ratings war between the major television networks, where they’re unleashing weapons of mass media destruction, there’s a low intensity conflict brewing in this region of cable television. You know this region. It’s the South and North Poles of cable. Last I heard, The Party Channel has just dislodged Taiwan TV Shopping, DW Germany and that channel where the computer monitor shows whether the cable signal is strong or weak.

But Channel 44 shouldn’t relax, because the issue of sustainability worries its faithful junkies no end. It should continually reinvent itself if it is to beat the market share of that channel where they tell you what’s on in the other channels.

I’m thinking reality TV. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy stuff. Maybe a panel of men and women who’ve separated from their wives and husbands punctuating each of the weddings’ segments with searing commentary.

“I don’t know how they’re going to live down the embarrassment of that awful gown.”

“Uh-oh. Not too much wiggle room in those vows. Tsk, tsk.”

Or an awards night always makes things more interesting. I think, for instance, that after watching hours of wedding videos, we deserve to know who’s Best in Getting Women to Stand Up and Catch That Darned Wedding Bouquet.

SunStar Cebu
21 October 2004