Frankenstein's Wedding (2011)

Filmed at Leeds' Kirkstall Abbey on 19th March, the night I was at Calendar Girls, and broadcast live on BBC3, Frankenstein's Wedding was a curious beast. I know several friends from different 'groups' who went along to be part of the audience on the night, and I would've gone too if I could, but having just got round to watching it now I'm sure I made the right choice. 

A bit of a Frankenstein's monster itself, the show (was it a film at 90 mins? a theatrical play? a TV programme?) roughly updated Mary Shelley's original story to a modern setting and has events take place at Victor Frankenstein's wedding to Elizabeth at Kirkstall Abbey - the audience are playing 'wedding guests' and Reggie Yates introduces the whole thing to begin with and then disappears. So it's not like the characters know they are being filmed. The ceremony takes place in the Abbey itself and then the reception is on a massive stage, where there is a band and throughout the show there are musical numbers, like I Gotta Feeling and stuff by Athlete, sung as part of the wedding entertainment, or not... as Victor sang something while murdering the female monster he'd created in his lab in a room just off the Abbey...

The cast included 'im off the Fast Show, 'er off Eastenders, 'im off Emmerdale, 'er off As If, and 'im off At Home With the Braithwaites, and they were all very good. Any fluffs were down to technical work, wobbly cameramen and the like. I think it all would have worked better if the audience hadn't been there, and the performance had been live and filmed around the Abbey, but with a more theatrical feel. Fewer pantomime elements perhaps. As far as I could tell the massive throng of audience watched most of the action on screens anyway, as only about 20 minutes were staged directly on the stage in front of them, so watching on TV was probably the best way to see it. This was an interesting experiment then, but one that didn't really add up to the sum of its (body) parts.