Your wedding may be relegated by Monday

Wedding forecast issued at 0600, valid for the period Saturday to Sunday 0600. Severn Mouth, Cotswold Reach: engagement rising, moderate or good, occasionally poor near the cake. Fenland, Humber Flats: interest falling slowly, becoming static by the speeches; visibility of the bouquet less than two hundred impressions.

Weddings are increasingly planned around how they will look online. Couples hire dedicated content creators alongside photographers, choose venues and decor for their photographic appeal, and share the day across social platforms while it is still happening. Guests are often asked to keep phones away during ceremonies precisely because filming has become the default. Rating and ranking systems have spread from restaurants and hotels into venues, suppliers and personal events, and wedding costs have risen steadily as expectations have grown.

Shetland Vows, Pennine Top: seating force six, gusting seven at the top table. Outlook for Sunday: fair, with a risk of relegation in the eastern districts. That, under a scheme now proposed by a regional ceremonies authority and one of the larger event-listing platforms, is how a bride would learn each weekend whether her wedding had stayed in the top division. The bulletin would be read at 0548, before the florist arrives, in a voice the authority's procurement notice describes as calm.

The National Ceremony Leaderboard would rank every registered wedding in the country on a rolling seven-day basis, scoring each on guest attendance, reception duration, shares, the average length of a speech and what the authority's technical annex calls sustained dancefloor occupancy. Couples would be sorted into four divisions. Promotion would bring priority booking at municipal venues and a discounted registrar. Relegation would bring a letter. The letter, according to a draft seen by this magazine, would begin with congratulations.

The scheme would formalise a practice already common at ceremonies, where a hired content creator films the first dance for the couple's feed while the couple's parents watch it later on a phone. Under the leaderboard, the creator would also file a match report. Engagement would be measured from the moment the doors open to the moment the last cousin is asked to leave the car park. “We were told the soup was a weak point,” said Lorraine Pettifer, 34, married in April, who had chosen the soup. “They said the soup cost us two places.”

Guests would not escape the table. Each attendee would carry a personal attendance rating, updated after every wedding, reflecting punctuality, gift value relative to declared income and the number of minutes spent at the bar during the vows. A guest with a low rating would find invitations arriving later, or for the evening only. “I've been evening-only since 2038,” said Dean Halloran, 41, a plasterer, who traces the decline to a single speech in Kettering. “It was a good speech. It was just long.”

The forecast itself would shape the calendar. Couples would scan the weekly outlook for a district with light competition, moving a ceremony to a Tuesday in Cumbria where the field is thin, or to a coastal village whose table has been dominated for three seasons by the same golden-wedding couple. The authority would issue a small-craft warning for any weekend on which more than forty ceremonies are booked within one postcode. Registrars around the Wash would, under the draft, be entitled to double their fee on days marked stormy.

Disputes would go to a ceremonies tribunal, sitting on Wednesdays and accepting video. Most appeals in the pilot would concern the weighting of rain. A couple whose marquee collapsed during the vows would argue that the sixteen thousand shares this produced should count in full; the tribunal's guidance would treat a collapse as a non-planned engagement event, scored at half. “We didn't plan it,” said the groom, Marcus Oyelaran, 29. “But we didn't not plan it either. We'd seen the forecast.”

A senior officer at the ceremonies authority, asked whether a marriage could be assessed in a week, said the scheme measured the wedding rather than the marriage, and that the marriage fell outside the reporting period. The bulletin would close each Saturday with the same line, the officer said, in the same voice. Outlook for the coming week: settled, with occasional relegation. Wind in the east. Somewhere in Fenland a bride who had ordered the soup would be listening at 0548, alone in the kitchen, with the radio turned down so as not to wake the groom.