time was when you knew where you were with weddings. They marked the close of the story. Nineteenth-century novels used weddings as full stops, as did pantomimes and the fairytales from which they derived. The final scenes in Shakespeare's comedies saw the rightful lovers restored to one another, never again to be parted.
These traditional narratives, the ones with which we grew up, have little interest in the details of the wedding itself. When Prince Charming and Cinderella trip down the stairs together and wave to the audience, it's never clear if this is their big day, or whether that will happen later. In the classics, the event itself is either bundled on to the last page or takes place at some undefined point in the middle distance.
Modern wedding narratives are different, and thanks to Hello and OK! magazines we are invited to the ceremony and the party afterwards. When the Beckham wedding was featured in OK! the magazine's circulation trebled to 1.5m copies. In return for the ?1m it spent, OK! demanded more than a few blurry snaps and details about the flowers. In the modern wedding, the event itself matters as much as the love quest which preceded it. We expect a richly-textured story to savour and revisit at leisure. In the case of the Beckhams, that meant a story which ran over several weeks including a recap of the courtship, an "at home" feature, and Victoria at the dressmakers, all before we got to the big day itself.
Fictional narratives-which is what these weddings of strangers are-change in response to shifts in our culture. It is because our experience of marriage has been turned on its head that a new wedding story has emerged. Even 25 years ago, a wedding was a powerful punctuation point, almost as immutable as birth or death. It meant that one kind of life was gone for good and that things would never be the same again. If you were unfortunate enough to marry for a second time, even through no fault of your own, it was considered graceful to keep the celebration as invisible as possible. Tangible reminders that you had gone over this threshold once before-in the shape of children from earlier partnerships-were hardly trophies to be put on display.
We might not like it but we now accept that adult life is marked by a series of separations, new beginnings and the care of children who are not our own. OK! and Hello, for all their 1950s coyness-"can you tell us how David proposed, Victoria?"-understand the changing shape of our social and emotional lives. On their pages it is unusual to find a couple where either the bride or groom has not been married before. It's quite likely that both will have children by other people and they may already have had a baby between them (as in the recent cases of the Beckhams, Ritchies and Douglases). Little girls are bridesmaids (or, as the current fashion has it, flower girls) to their mothers; brides walk down the aisle with stepfathers; former partners send over-forced good wishes from the Bahamas.
We know, just as the participants must surely know, that this wedding is not a full stop, not even an initiation into a new life. The tensions which were there before-Michael Douglas's sex addiction, Jennifer Aniston's estranged mother-will return. There will be separations, new beginnings with other people, more stepchildren. Even as the lovely bride walks down the aisle, new stories are already being set in play.
It's for that reason that the new wedding narrative works so well in soap opera. Where once a wedding represented a narrative death, today it breathes fresh life into a stale story. When Coronation Street needed a big event to capitalise on its 40 years anniversary, it married Curly off to Emma. True to form, Curly's little girl by a former partner was the bridesmaid and the related kerfuffle promises significant new storylines.
In Friends Ross has been divorced three times by his 30th birthday. His weddings have represented heightened patches of plot. Where once Shakespeare wrote about courtship as the driving force of comedy, today's Benedick and Beatrice marry the wrong people several times before they find their soulmates.
In Frasier the last series ended with a cliffhanger in which the recently married Niles (second time), declared his love for Daphne on the night before her wedding (her first, quaintly), causing her to flee the ceremony. Far from worrying that these multiple weddings had closed down rich narrative possibilities, the script writers started the new series with an hour-long special in which the bride and groom manqu? dealt with the fallout. Wedding presents were returned, writs for damages served, new conspiracies and misunderstandings set in motion.
Thirty years ago, Catherine Zeta-Jones would have become yesterday's news the moment she said "I do" to Michael Douglas. Married women did not generate their own stories. As it is, Zeta-Jones is merely at the end of act one of what will probably be a five act drama. Luckily, we are assured of the best seats in the house.
