Up and down the country, July brides will be hoping against rain and praying that the dress, the flowers, the catering, the speeches are perfect.

Many will also be having nightmares about putting a foot wrong on the dance floor. For that first dance is now all too often a choreographed affair – a little showbiz cherry on the icing of the matrimonial cake.

From being a YouTube oddity a few short years ago, the practised first dance has gone viral in real life. There are so many twinkle-toed newlyweds at it that it's become a business. First Dance UK, based in Surrey, claims to be the “first national provider of wedding dance lessons” for those who want their first dance professionally choreographed.

And that firm has compiled a list of the most requested “first dance” songs, topped by Andy Williams' Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You, followed by a sprinkling of crooners like Sinatra and Harry Connick Jr, plus the Dirty Dancing cliché (I've Had) The Time Of My Life. One couple with a sense of humour – or an explosive relationship – even opted for Sophie Ellis Bextor's Murder On The Dance Floor.

Another “unusual” request fielded by First Dance UK was a routine for Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing, which, when we married almost 24 years ago, was “our song” for my wife and me. We were a little too embarrassed to have it as our first dance in the parish hall though. In fact, neither of us can now remember what that first dance was, so little significance was then attached to the ritual.

Those were the days when most couples shuffled inexpertly around the dance floor to some generic slow song best described as a “bum-gripper”.

Those were also the days when you did not tend to go into debt for years to come just to pay for a wedding. Estimates for the average cost of a traditional wedding in the UK range as high as £25,000. That's a one-day event costing almost the same as the average yearly salary.

The curmudgeon in me wonders whether we have this wedding business out of kilter, and whether, in creating so much razzmatazz and opulence around the ceremony, we set people up for disappointment with the mundane business of married life which follows.

Just how much hinges on that one big party is confirmed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. On Polish TV, she said that her paramount consideration right now is not any one of the huge geopolitical issues in her inbox, but the forthcoming wedding of her daughter Chelsea.

“It truly is the most important thing in my life right now,” said Hillary, confessing that she is making email decisions about flower arrangements even as she goes about her duty of making the world a safer place.

Are we, perhaps, investing too much in the wedding, and not enough in the marriage? As our weddings have got more and more elaborate, the chances of 'til death us do part have grown slimmer, haven't they?

Actually, no. I delved through government statistics and found, to my surprise, that the divorce rate in 2008 was the lowest it has been since 1979. Maybe it's the uncertain times we are living in which cause us to cling to the familiar. Or perhaps we now invest so much in the wedding, we are making a more concentrated go of the marriage.

But if more of us are living by the message of the second most popular “first dance” song - Al Green's Let's Stay Together – perhaps it is worth making a proper song and dance about getting hitched.

Ronnie's the new Jacko

Is Cristiano Ronaldo turning into Michael Jackson? We hear this week that the Real Madrid star has had a son by an unnamed mother – believed to be American - and that Ronaldo would have sole custody of this child, to be raised in his native Portugal.

The footballer's sudden acquisition of a son has uncomfortable echoes of the late Jackson's strange motherless brood. Will Ronaldo soon be talking about himself in the third person, wanting to heal the world and sending God-like statues of himself down the Thames?

Come to think of it, Nike's brilliant “Write the future” ad does indeed show Ronaldo immortalised, Jacko-style, in a huge statue. Spooky.

Olympic glory for fatties or pie in the sky idea 

High drama at the annual July 4 hot dog eating contest in Coney Island, New York. After Joey “Jaws” Chestnut had munched his way to victory, six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi stormed on stage and tussled with police.

Kobayashi, nickname “The Tsunami”, had not been competing in the event because he had refused to sign a contract with Major League Eating, which is the professional fast food competition body – a sort of FIFA for fatties, whose logo is a fist clutching a fork.

Now who'd have thought there was a global organisation for the sport of gluttony? Perhaps we Brits are missing a trick here. After all, we are getting fatter at an even greater rate than the Yanks. Forget the World Cup and Wimbledon; it's not too late to turn Wigan into a national centre of pie-eating excellence and make it an Olympic sport for 2012.

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