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A radio station will tomorrow launch a controversial twist on its Stranger Wedding competition - in which a bride will be presented with two potential husbands at the altar. She won't know either of them and must make a decision as to who to marry.
The Edge station's new Three Strangers and a Wedding competition has churches fuming - with one already turning down a request to host the ceremony.
The station has already "arranged" two stranger marriages, between Zane Nicholl and Paula Stockwell in 1999 and between Steve Veix and Kersha Taylor in 2003. Both couples are still together and have children.
While family and friends of the latest bride-to-be will again vet men to find her "perfect match", the twist is that they will choose two possible Romeos. The bride will have to pick one of the two strangers when she arrives at the altar and get "hitched" immediately.
However, church groups are not impressed by the stunt, with Catholic Communications director Lyndsay Freer saying the competition is "making a total mockery of marriage".
She said a person making a choice at the last minute based on how someone looked was not fulfilling any of the conditions that would be expected of the commitment implied by marriage, whether it was entered into in a religious spirit or not. "To do something like this is absolutely bizarre and makes a mockery of what marriage is all about. Some of these media outlets do anything for ratings, and really, how low can they go?"
Even the liberal St Matthew-in-the-City church, which hosted a wedding between a pizza and a pie for a product launch in May, has turned down a station request to hold the ceremony there.
"They spoke to one of our staff about it," vicar Glynn Cardy told the Herald on Sunday. "We're not going to go there.
The church says that marriage is a sacrament between two people who commit to each other... it sounds like they are not taking life-long commitment very seriously at all." Cardy said the pizza and pie promotion was allowed because it was two actors dressed up and was a "bit of a laugh".
"They were not pretending it was anything serious or real at all, which this [new] promotion seems to be."
Marketing expert Janet Hoek, a professor at Massey University, said the end result of such events would be to increase audience numbers to sell on to advertisers. "It is really extreme, and that piques people's interest. And because there are a number of these types of competitions and events available now, in order to keep generating interest from consumers, they have to get more and more extreme," Hoek said. "It's not enough to just marry a stranger any more - we have to introduce the notion of a choice, and another choice, in a tightly controlled context and upping the ante."
Hoek said competitions such as these would open up ethical questions for debate in communities.
She believed the only turn-off factors for such events would be if ratings dropped or if complaints from listeners were upheld by the authorities.
The presenters were typically light-hearted about the matter. In a press release, Morning Madhouse Breakfast host Dominic Harvey said, "It's worked twice before. If it doesn't work this time, we will just blame it on the bride picking the wrong dude."
