Happy daze

THE listing in the TV guide states: “Faye and Joseph’s wedding day goes none too smoothly.” I would expect nothing else. This is a soap wedding and, as we know from experience, the happy day will inevitably turn out to be a very unhappy day for all concerned.

What else can you expect when the bride wears red and has a marital history as checkered as a draughts board?

Everything is so peaceful as the day dawns. Bride Faye (Patsy Kensit) is flicking through family photographs, while a plaintive song plays on the soundtrack.

“This is a new start. As from today, a new start,” she says. The phrase calm before the storm comes to mind.

The bridegroom, Joseph, is the first to get a shock. His pushy, posh mother Lady Byrne (Jane Asher) informs him that the ceremony is taking place at their stately home.

Then there are the guests. Joseph’s old flame Elizabeth arrives at the Byrne’s unit to inspect the bride. “What’s she got that I haven’t?” she demands to know.

Good manners, for one thing.

Surprisingly for a soap wedding, no one pipes up with an objection at the “lawful impediment” moment. Just 18 minutes after the start of the show, the couple are being pronounced man and wife. The big question is whether they’ll still be married by the end of the episode.

The unexpected appearance of the bride’s estranged parents, to whom she hasn’t spoken for ten years, puts a dampner on proceedings.

They’re out of touch with their daughter’s life, illustrated by their not knowing that the boy in the wheelchair is Faye’s son.

While mum, Lindsey, is willing to let bygones be bygones (“what happened, happened”), dad, David, is moaning that he doesn’t want to be there. He is cast as A Man Who Bears Grudges.

Neither does surgeon Jac Naylor, an old flame of the bridegroom. “I’d rather be up to my neck in sewage than at that wedding,”

she says.

Her bad mood is reflected in her treatment of new interns as she lets them practise on patients. Dr Penny’s poking around in one patient’s cut causes him to start bleeding all over the bedsheets.

“We’ve got a bleed,” she shouts.

“I can see that,” snaps Jac, trying to stem the fountain of red stuff.

Back at the reception, the bride is snogging the best man and the bridegroom has cut his finger (or maybe that’s just an excuse to send for Jac so he can rekindle their affair).

Old flame Elizabeth, who’s been hitting the booze, comments that “this is the craziest wedding I’ve been to”. Not true, really.

Madder things have happened on such occasions. Remember that massacre by Moldavian terrorists in Dynasty.

FILM-MAKER Chris Terrill undertakes the risky business of capturing the eye of a storm on camera in Nature’s Fury: Hurricane.

Aware of the life-threatening ferocity of these forces of nature, he protects himself with body armour and waterproofs his camera before stepping into the paths of hurricanes as they hit land – the point when they are at their most dangerous – in an effort to experience first-hand the true force of this incredible weather phenomenon.

Braving 100mph winds, 15ft waves, lashing rain and flying debris, he tracks Hurricane Ike across the southern states of the US, hoping to catch it as it moves from the sea onto land.

RESEARCH suggests there’s only a one in 700,000 chance of being struck by lightning. Some of the unlucky ones who’ve lived to tell the tale appear in True Stories: Act Of God.

The programme merges scientific research with personal accounts to explore the various emotional and physical effects of being struck by lightning. It’s hard to put into words what happens, but this show goes to great lengths to ensure viewers have a decent idea.

Among those featured are playwright James O’Reilly and writer Paul Auster, who both recount the painful moment in which thousands of volts passed through their bodies.

The documentary also features several members of a Mexican family whose relatives were struck while visiting a holy shrine.