Married in Britain - review

If you are British, what was not to love about this programme? ‘Married in Britain’, a programme shown on BBC2 last week, followed 3 immigrant couples about to be married. Everyone was so positive and effusive about Britain it almost made your heart glow. All, undoubtedly carefully selected from many potential interviewees, but nevertheless you could not help but warm to each of them.

In Britain today, 1 in 4 births are to parents who were born outside the country. That makes you sit and think about the huge changes that are happening here, for better or worse.

Firstly there was Fernanda and Clovis from Brazil. He used to have several businesses in Brazil but they collapsed and he came to Britain for a new start. They had 2 daughters here together although she spent the first 6 months crying as she couldn’t speak English and was homesick. She eventually found connection with other Brazilians who were students and through the church. Clovis was the breadwinner, currently working 60 hours / week as a minicab driver. He searched all over for work in Britain then found work cleaning before moving on to washing dishes in a coffee shop and finally to minicabbing. ‘London is fantastic, a wonderful town’ he maintains. For Fernanda, she says that, ‘in London, I learnt a lot more about the world than in Brazil’ – because of the diversity of the population here. She cried as she talked of her brother who had recently died in Brazil, that she couldn’t be there when he died and that she didn’t have the money to bring her mother over for her wedding. Clovis was trying to restrict the wedding budget to £1000 in total – Fernanda had bought her wedding dress off the internet for £154 and her shoes for £14.99. They did the catering themselves- only sleeping a few hours each night for the preparation. And the rain on the day of their wedding did not dampen their joy: ‘We are blessed!’ as Fernanda said, before having their photographs taken in front of the river and Houses of Parliament to send back home.

Then there was Catalin and Cassandra from Romania. Cassandra couldn’t yet speak much English, but among the couples she was the exception – everyone else having acquired a very good level of English since being here. For Catalin, coming to the UK was ‘easy to come but hard to stay’. Asked why, he said, ‘The rent’. Yes, living and housing costs in London are steep and many will rely on government support to supplement their low income.

Finally there was Robert and Agnetha from Poland. They had only known each other for a short time – around 2 months, but Robert was effusive about her. He had previously been an alcoholic in Poland but had come to the UK for a new start. He had work he liked in a packing factory and found strength (and a wife) from the church here in the UK. For Robert, England was great because of its ‘beautiful roads and beautiful motorways’. Infrastructure is clearly one of the UK’s good points then. For Agnetha, it didn’t matter about his past, only what you are now. She wanted a Christian man and found it in Robert. It almost made you believe in marriage and the forever after just listening to them. The simplicity of their wedding in a very basic community hall, with a translator from English to Polish, was actually very moving. And truly I am not the wedding type.

There were other anonymous interviewees as well. I loved the Syrian woman waxing lyrical about freedom of speech. ‘In my house,’ she said, ‘I speak my mind. And my family say ‘Mum!...’. I say, ‘Listen, I come all the way to Britain to have freedom of speech, which I was denied in Syria’.

Then there was Marian, a 17 year old student from Romania. When asked whether he preferred Britain to Romania, his reply was, ‘Hell yes’. ‘In Romania,’ he said, ‘people don’t care about you.’ ‘In England, if you need help, people will help you’. He wants to join the British Army, once eligible. He says he is prepared to potentially lose his life for Britain if necessary – but not Romania. Wow.

Another wedding organiser said, ‘Spain, Tunisia, Ghana – you name it they all come here’. Another, running a banqueting hall, says, ‘We have Somalian, Congolese, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Turkish…..we don’t have British’. The British apparently are not so bothered about weddings these days: we are happy just being boyfriend and girlfriend.

And so, you might ask, where is the Indian presence here? Or Pakistani / Bangladeshi presence? After all, the greatest immigration to London in the last decade has been from India. I did wonder this, and concluded that perhaps it was ‘old hat’. Perhaps the Indian presence had simply been too long here in the UK, and integrated enough into the medical, dental, pharmaceutical professions and restaurant trades. Perhaps the focus here had up until now been too much on the lavish weddings, expensive saris and huge banquets of the ‘average’ Indian wedding – and the producers wanted something different. I did also wonder whether the Indian immigrants recently had already married back in India and were here on highly skilled migrants visas (typically IT), or as students – hence already married, or not looking to marry just yet. It was also interesting that all of the featured couples had married within their own ethnicity and religion. None had inter-cultural relationships – which is not to say they don’t exist (in their hundreds or thousands). But all had seemingly integrated well, learnt English to a good standard (except perhaps Cassandra from Romania) - helped, no doubt, by the similarities in cultural backgrounds: Christian, similar clothes and recognisable cuisine. Granted, a highly selective (and possibility unrepresentative) small sample, of course.

The Indian presence on the programme was there in someone describing what kind of wedding outfits would suit a Hindu or Sikh or Muslim population. The only other interviewee was an Indian man, dressed in traditional dress, saying that, ‘Britain has allowed too many immigrants into this country. Looking at the size and the job opportunities, there are too many, you can feel it.’

So Britain is changing – and fast. We might moan about house prices, travel, weather, high rents, low wages, long working hours (I could go on). But if all newcomers are as charming, hard working and committed to Britain as those featured on the programme, please come and please stay. We need you. Even if it does mean that for the more established immigrant communities from the South Asian sub-continent, it is all getting a little crowded.