Wow, that was a quick four weeks. Today was wedding day on "Best Man's Speech" It's my
second wedding of the year and once again I didn't really know anyone at the occasion.
Though at least in Trinidad I had been invited along, whilst today I felt like a strange interloper. Watching a ceremony with people you have never met before and have no emotional attachment to at all was an unsettling experience. It is such a personal moment that I felt like I was spying like a peeping Tom. Worse, a peeping Tom who had brought his own camera crew with him.
Luckily the camera crew did do their best to remain discrete and avoid spoiling the big day in any way. All the production crew are great and the last thing they would have wanted to do was cause any hassle for the bride and groom (who after all were not even the focus of the show and could easily have had their own big day overshadowed by insensitvity). But it all worked out pretty well. The Best Man's speech, which I had had practically no input on went very well. It wasn't really much different than the script that he had shown me four weeks ago, but hopefully pretending to have some broken arms and doing some rubbish jokes to some frail old women assisted him somehow. It will make a nice enough show.
Afterwards I rang the best man of the other wedding to see how his speech had gone. It had been a bit ropey apparently. Given the other wedding isn't til August this was an oddly one sided conversation. That I then had to do again, but this time as if the speech had gone really well. I hope you will watch this and marvel at my acting skills and my shameless mendacity.
But overall though I have some obvious caveats about doing this in hindsight I think it was an OK thing to do. The best man did say that the support and advice had been helpful. I liked him very much too and was glad that the show didn't exploit him or try to make him look stupid.
