Australia's most desperate bachelor finds love is on the air
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Your support makes all the difference.THEY WERE certainly on the same wavelength. Glenn Emerton and Leif Bunyan tied the knot yesterday after a single encounter on the airwaves, listening to an Australian radio promotion called "Two Strangers at a Wedding".
Glenn, 24, won the title of "most desperate bachelor in town". Leif was at the head of the queue of the 300 women who stampeded to the telephones to snap up this unattractively packaged bargain.
The prize - a lifetime to be spent with Glenn - wasn't just there to be given away, however. Leif had to submit first to an on-air grilling. After all, she might not have been worthy and the listeners needed to know crucial facts.
Did she wash her underwear regularly? Was she up to it, sexually? What was her star sign? Glenn's best friends were happy to weigh in with their own toe-curlingly embarrassing questions.
There was a psychiatrist, too. We couldn't have Down Under's most desperate bachelor being handed over to a mad woman.
Glenn, clearly satisfied, popped the question on air and the couple were married yesterday, courtesy of the radio station sponsors, at the Hilton in Sydney.
By now they will be off to their honeymoon in Paris. It could hardly be anywhere else.
An unscrupulous deal cooked up between two bored twentysomethings to get a free holiday and loads of publicity?
Perish the thought. Leif, who works at a management training centre, found the whole experience "very romantic". Glenn, not to be outdone by the complete stranger he had just married, went one better and said he was "ecstatic".
"It's more romantic than marrying someone after going out with them for three years," Leif added defensively.
Well, she would say that, especially after her new mother-in-law, not able to see the romance of it all, called it "an appalling stunt" and a symbol of society's degradation.
As for Glenn, there was no stopping the superlatives on the wedding day.
"God she's beautiful," he breathed. "I couldn't have picked a better bride ..."
But after that, he seemed at a bit of a loss.
It was difficult to go on and on about someone he had only just met on the altar steps, when all he knew was her star sign and the fact that she had clean underwear. "Her personality's just so nice," he added, diplomatically.
The sponsors of the radio station, 2Day FM, who supplied the wedding gowns, the suits and the honeymoon on the other side of the world, said that in an age when a third of Australian marriages ends in divorce, this perfectly matched couple may be better off.
There was just one small setback. Australian law stipulates that notice of marriages must be registered at least one month in advance, so the couple had to settle for a "commitment ceremony". The real thing, off air, is due to take place after the honeymoon.
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