I’m not one for regrets, and high up among the many things I don’t regret is not having a big slap-up wedding. My wife agrees. Thirty-two years ago we spent no time agonising over the decision to just go and get married and tell people afterwards.

Most friends expressed their complete understanding (nay gratitude); our respective widowed mothers were delighted and relieved. My late brother was the only one who was vaguely curmudgeonly about it, but he disapproved of everything I ever did, so that was no surprise.

We married at a registry office in Oxford with the cleaners as our witnesses. They were delighted and delightful. Our dog was a third less official witness. We went for a magnificent lunch together, came home and went to celebrate a friend’s birthday over dinner in the evening. We then went on honeymoon the following day to Burnley, where I was filming Juliet Bravo. Romantic, eh?

We have a few photos, not a hugely expensive book full of pictures of people whose names we might now struggle to remember. The pretty dress in which my wife looked stunning still hangs in the wardrobe and still looks perfect on her. Would I could say the same of my white suit. Fashion has been less kind to men over the years.

I mention this because we have just been to wedding and another is imminent. The combined cost of these weddings would be a more than adequate deposit for a house. Both couples are young and starting out in their lives together and need money much more than they need a showpiece wedding.

How society has evolved to require such vast expenditure on food, clothes, drink, music and flowers at a time when the money would be much more productively used, I cannot understand. It may be a distorted development of the dowry system, I suppose.

At the wedding we have just attended, at not one point did my wife and I turn to each other and say: ‘I wish we had done this.’ I have a business development idea for professional photographers, who are suffering harder times now anyone can take a decent photo eventually in the digital age. The computer generated wedding album. One quick session of headshots for the main participants.

Then add in the clothes, churches, ruined abbeys and banqueting halls. Much cheaper and no more confetti problems for churches.