I have a theory about weddings: the more lavish the ceremony and the greater the number of guests bearing wildly extravagant gifts, the less likely the marriage is to last. One need only look at Hollywood or our own Royal Family. On the other hand, modest weddings, such as the one enjoyed by my father and heavily pregnant mother in Fulham registry office, tend to have real longevity.
I bring all this up because here we have an example of just such a wedding. Held in what appears to be the US equivalent of a church hall, it is attended by a respectable but clearly intimate bunch of guests: small children mingle with chatting women and smiling men in tuxedos.
As the opening bars of Michael Jackson's Thriller echo across the reception, the happy couple and guests are seen to exchange nostalgic smiles and then they all begin to that do that famous zombie dance. And here's the amazing thing, you start out laughing (and, frankly, worrying that this otherwise joyous occasion will be marred by achingly awful ineptitude) but soon they are performing with such witty and amusing panache you could almost believe they had been choreographed by John Landis himself.
The video lasts just over three minutes, but in wit and simple joie de vivre it rates higher than your average Richard Curtis movie. You are even pleasantly reminded of just what a genius Michael Jackson once was. And for that matter, Landis.
I watched it with my recently divorced friend Holly (New Age Hampstead Wedding; all faiths covered; lasted so long I almost ate the program - which, by the way, was larger and wordier than the English Book of Common Prayer) and said: "It warms the cockles of my heart."
"It makes me fucking sick," she replied.
