A wonderful TV show called Wedding SOS is currently being shown on Sky Real Lives and Sky 3 – keep an eye out for it; it's great fun and makes you secretly want a fairy godmother to come and fix your wedding too!
Jane Dayus-Hinch is the super heroic wedding planner that makes three wishes come true for each couple every episode, and she kindly gave us the chance to interview her before season five goes on air in April. In part one (we had a lovely long chat so we've split it into two parts) we find out all about life as a wedding planner in a glamorous television show.
P.S. Jane has made a very kind offer that we'll be telling you about at the end….
Wedding Organizer: How did you get involved with Wedding SOS?
Jane: The producers were looking for a wedding planner for a series they had in mind in which a British wedding planner helps American couples. Sending a Brit out to Canada or the US has proven to be a very popular format over there, like Jo Frost taking her 'super nanny' skills to US families. There's also Debbie Travis, a lady from Yorkshire who does interior design and decorating for American families. She's less well known here in the UK, but in the States she's very popular.
Anyway, the producers were having problems finding a wedding planner with more than 3 years experience, and someone of the right age; they wanted a planner who is older than the brides and who has credibility and experience. You wouldn't believe how hard it was for them to find a wedding planner to fit the profile.
I was doing an interview on TV as a wedding expert, we were talking about cupcakes and I was being light hearted about it. The executive producer of Wedding SOS was in London at the time, saw me in the interview and thought "She's the one!"
Wedding Organizer: It must have been very exciting to be approached like that!
Jane: Well, to be absolutely honest, I didn’t want to do it initially! I've been involved with making pilots for shows in the past, they're a huge amount of work and often don't come to anything. But they managed to convince me and here I am, four years, five seasons and 65 episodes later!
It rapidly became apparent that we couldn't do the whole wedding in a half hour episode; that was too much, so the concept was refined to give the couples 3 wishes with me as a wedding fairy godmother. It gives the show three focal points to concentrate on and makes the show very fast moving, you can't take your eyes off the screen as to what happens next…..
Wedding Organizer: What do you enjoy most about being on television?
Jane: I'm always amazed when I see 50-70 hours of filming condensed into a half hour show. I'm not sure if that's enjoyable per se; it's fascinating and can be quite hard actually. People only see the highlights, but I know how hard I've worked to pull it all together.
The other aspect that's remarkable about making the show – is the size of the entourage; there are about eighteen people around me, everywhere I go when filming! They include two camera men, two sound guys, two personal assistants, hair, make up, wardrobe supervisor, driver and of course the Director amongst other people. Every single person doing their job well is so key to making the show, and it's such a good team.
I also like seeing how the show has evolved over the years. When people see a repeat of one of the episodes from season one in New York, I find myself saying "But that was 2006 and we were making it up as we went along!"
Then in season two, my little Shih Tzu dog named Oscar (Jane's extraordinarily cute dog) appeared in 13 episodes, and another dimension was that I was given an assistant Mike Chalut in a later season, who was incredibly flamboyant.
By the 3rd season we were inundated by requests from couples. After producing the show for two seasons, for the first time we had a wide choice of couples. There were so many that wanted to be on the show that we had six or seven weddings to choose from every Saturday.
Wedding Organizer: Have any episodes been a lot more popular than others?
Jane: There was one episode in which the bride was tearing her hair out as groom wouldn't help with the wedding; he simply wasn't interested and he was obsessed with fishing. This poor bride had even put live fish in the table centre pieces to try and get him enthused!
I brought in top celebrity fishing expert Bob Izumi and we took the groom out fishing to talk about the wedding. It turned it around for them, and for some reason, the fishing angle really seemed to capture everyone's imagination – but it was incredibly funny when it was me who caught the fish!
Wedding Organizer: Are there any that particularly memorable for you personally?
Jane: I remember one couple getting married in Toronto, they had a fairytale castle for their venue, she had princess dress and she really wanted the groom to be her 'knight in shining armour' – literally! Her first wish was for him to wear a suit of armour, and that's not a usual request for any wedding planner…
I really went through the mill trying to make that wish come true. I tried to get authentic armour, tried fancy dress shops, plastic replicas, you name it! It was such a challenge to fulfil in only a week. And to think that I've done 65 of the shows now, phew!
Wedding Organizer: What do you like the least about being on Wedding SOS?
Jane: When they only give me 3 days to do a wedding. And that really has happened in a show we did with a couple in New York. The week started badly as our flight was delayed by five hours the night before, the luggage got lost and we were a camera down. It delayed meeting the couple; that finally happened at 4 pm on the Monday.
The groom was a Brit and the bride was a New York wardrobe stylist. 'Hi' I said. 'My name is Jane – what's the problem?'
'The wedding's on Friday,' says the bride 'and I don't have a dress.' I looked at the director – she knew.
'What? This Friday?' I said. Yes, it was that Friday at 12 noon! That gave us only three days to get everything arranged – and I was worried when I heard that a wardrobe stylist didn't have a dress. It turned out that she's tried on every dress in New York, and didn't like any of them!
I took her to Kleinfeld's Emporium – where all celebrities go – this girl was a size zero and would've looked gorgeous in absolutely anything. We still couldn't find the dress, even after spending the whole of Tuesday trying them on. They were 'too beaded', 'too slinky', you name it, it was 'too' something. By 2pm, every sales person in the store was just tearing their hair out – we'd been through hundreds of dresses. Then when she found the right one it took us all by surprise; it was so plain! She was stood on a little dais in front of the mirrors and announced that she wanted it shortening to the length of a cocktail dress.
Now this was a $6000 dress, and it was so nerve wracking watching a pair of scissors going towards it. I told her that once those scissors went in, the dress was hers whether she liked it or not! She went ahead. We only collected it the night before the wedding, and didn't even know whether she'd like it.
Wedding Organizer: It sounds like a nightmare! What were the other wishes?
Jane: Well, the groom wanted his Mum (a professional cake maker) to make their wedding cake. This poor woman arrived on the Wednesday night, and was expected to make a cake with jetlag in the couple's New York apartment that had a tiny kitchen and no baking equipment – being New Yorkers they never ate at home!
I contacted Sylvia Winestock, a celebrity cake maker who was in middle of making Catherine Zeta Jones's birthday cake, and she kindly stopped to bake a cake for this couple. I took the groom's mother into Sylvia's kitchens and all three of us worked together to bake all three flavoured tiers of the cake.
The third wish was that they wanted to have a celebration champagne toast on the steps of City Hall after the ceremony, but in New York there are strict laws against drinking in public, let alone on the steps of City Hall itself!
I chartered boat to go down the Hudson river, and arranged to have the champagne and glasses ready for guests who we had organised to be transported to the boat. We had the champagne toast in front of the Statue of Liberty and that was a fabulous wish to grant that went down very well.
Wedding Organizer: And all of that was taken care of in three days?!
Jane: Yes, to think we did that it in three days – it was intense! Exhausted is not a strong enough word to describe how I felt afterwards; it was ten days condensed into three…
After that, having 12 months to arrange a normal wedding feels like a luxury! It does show that you can arrange everything in three days…
Wedding Organizer: But only if you're willing to lose years off your life with stress in the process!
Jane: Yes, that's true, I wouldn't recommend it!
Wedding Organizer: Can you give us a little taster of one of the weddings from the upcoming series?
Jane: Well, that's tricky, we finished filming in October and there are 13 weddings to choose from.
They're all so different, but the very first one in season five leaps out. The bride had ordered everything online, and the bridesmaids dresses came back from China in black see-through material stitched in red cotton. So her first wish was to get four dresses for the girls, but as she and the bridesmaids were plus size it made it even more challenging.
What was interesting about the whole wedding, was that all the problems with it were caused by her ordering everything online. The second wish was for wedding rings as – just like everything else – she'd ordered them online. They didn't fit and were made from materials too inferior to have them resized. So we got them to design and make their own wedding rings, which was so romantic.
The third wish dealt with decorating the hall for the wedding in black and white, and the "ostrich" feathers she'd ordered online turned out to be little bigger than pigeon feathers! I like to try and fit in with the theme of the weddings, so I got to wear a fantastic outfit from Jacques Vert, one of my show sponsors, which co-ordinated with the décor beautifully.
Wedding Organizer: It sounds very glamorous and exciting!
Jane: Well, it is sometimes, especially as I get to drive around in a wonderful Jaguar XF car which is supplied by my sponsor Jaguar, and I'm also sponsored by Harley Davidson, and yes, I ride one in the shows too. But it's also very hard work as well!
Do you have a question for Jane?
Isn't Jane fabulous? Part two of our interview with Jane will be featured soon, in which she gives some excellent advice to brides considering using a wedding planner – and those who aren't…
In the mean time, Jane has kindly offered to answer any questions that you might have about your wedding. So if there's something driving you crazy, or stressing you out, drop us a line and we'll pass it on to Jane for you.
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