Say Yes To The Dress UK needs more raw hatred if it is going to be as good as the American original

Will Say Yes To The Dress be the next British television sensation? TLC has high hopes for its new reality TV offering – but it may be too dull to win over a British audience

David Emanuel stars in the British revamp of ‘SYTTD’ (Discovery)

Will Say Yes To The Dress be the next British television sensation?

It premieres on the TLC channel this evening, and the channel certainly has high hopes that it will replicate the phenomenal success the show has enjoyed in America, where it’s been entertaining them for about a decade. The premise of this particularly piece of reality TV is straightforward. A bride-to-be takes herself along to some expert consultants to choose a lush gown for The Big Day. The bride is accompanied by an “entourage” – friends, relatives, hangers on - who chip in with their comments about the outfit. There’s a budget for the bride, and, well, that’s about it.

Now I have to, at this point, declare a significant non-interest. I have never been shopping for a bridal gown, either for me or anyone else, and I regard any personal retail expedition for apparel that takes more than four minutes to be a failure. The one aspect missing from Dante’s vision of hell is a bloke waiting, waiting, waiting outside the changing room, waiting to be asked over and over “Do you think it goes with these shoes? Would the turquoise one be better? Or maybe without the heels?” Or some such. I forget.

So in fact I am perhaps the ideal first time viewer for SYTTD UK, as it is abbreviated to. If SYTTD is going to be big in Britain it has to attract floating viewers such as me, transcending its essential girliness to become an enjoyable spectacle of human folly and vanity, much like The Apprentice, say, which made the transatlantic transition from Trump to Sugar so easily. I approached the first episode of SYTTD UK, then, with no preconceptions and as open a mind as I could manage.

I was disappointed, I’m afraid. The central attraction of the British version of the show is lead consultant David Emanuel, who, as everyone knows, did Princess Diana’s frock for her ill-starred marriage to the Prince of Wales in 1981, in partnership with his then wife Elizabeth. I can remember that too, because it had a very long train, much commented on at the time. I think that is the only factoid I know about wedding dresses. Anyway, his job is to go around being camp, and he is camper than a rack of wedding dresses. Campery, you see, is as essential a component for a bridal suite as a plentiful supply of filigree, lace and a chip and pin payment machine with no upper limit on the value of a transaction. With his hair coiffed to within an inch of its life and his tangerine skin, you can see why Di liked him so much. Me too.

Randy Fenoli, the host of the original US series, which is set in Kleinfeld in New York (TLC) (© TLC)

The big let-down is the entourages. They are just too nice and kind and loving. There was only one auntie who succeeded in making the bride weep, when she told her that the slinky number she thought she looked a bit sexy in “makes your legs look fat” with “shoulders like a rugby player”. There was just not enough of that verbal brutality. Indeed one of the gels, who luxuriates in the name Renay Smithies, seems to share my approach to shopping. Having already chosen her dress on line she tried it on, liked it, and her mates all agreed. Job done: but not great viewing. Where did they find such a decisive woman? Essex is the answer, as it happens. Anyway, no tension, you see.

This tension, between the various participants, almost to the point of violence, is what the Americans tune into SYTTD for, and the bitchiness is just so much more vicious on the US show, the egos bigger, the emotions more fraught, the budgets bigger. Looking randomly at a few back episodes of the American run, I found a bride proudly declaring that “my butt is beautiful and I’m obsessed by it”, a dress condemned because it “looks like a torture device”, and, a bit unfathomable this, “you look like a unicorn”. We don’t tune in to this sort of nonsense to see ruffs and beaded tops: we want raw hate and relationship breakdowns. Which is, let’s face it, is what marriage is all about.