“Oh happy, happy wedding day!”
On Friday, Ed Grundy and Emma Grundy are getting married in what Clarrie Grundy calls “a lovely, simple, traditional wedding” with George Grundy as a pageboy and Keira Grundy as a bridesmaid. Unless William Grundy shoots someone first.
You will have spotted that everyone involved is called Grundy. Now listen carefully for I shall say this only once. William and Ed are brothers. The only thing they have in common is Emma, who went through the Grundy boys like a combine harvester. William married her first and they had George, the pageboy, whose paternity was finally established by DNA. Now she is marrying Ed, and Keira, the bridesmaid, is their daughter. Everyone thinks it would be just perfect if William were Ed’s best man. Except William, who says, as he butters the bolt of his blunderbuss, that when Ed was his best man he slept with the bride.
I may have mentioned that, when a friend of mine who lived in a village invited Frankie Howerd to tea, the rougher element arrived en masse shouting: “Oo, missus!” “Here,” said Frankie resignedly, “come the Grundys.” There are Grundys in every village and they can confidently be relied on to lower the tone. But it’s a curious thing about long-running soaps. Time, which blunts the lion’s paws, also chamfers off the roughness of a roughneck. It would be a stretch to call the Grundys an ordinary, hardworking family but it’s a tribute to their new, improved image that the whole village has stumped up for the wedding reception, providing a barn (don’t worry about the bull, he’s probably quite gentle), two poached salmon, a whole hog roast and a dress for the groom’s mother.
My grandmother had a picture called The Village Wedding by Luke Fildes. The bride was shy as a snowdrop. The groom balanced an unaccustomed top hat. Both had carnation cheeks and stout black boots. A lovely, simple traditional wedding. Of course, it is also traditional in a soap wedding for the police to arrive at some point in the proceedings.
• A month in Ambridge returns on 16 June
