No trailers. No adverts. Straight to the main feature.

Their story

It opens in Manchester, around 2011. Becky had just landed the first job that ever paid her to write. Her new team were lovely — welcoming, warm, and armed with exactly one piece of advice about the senior copywriter who happened to be off that week. Watch out for Tom. He's a bit weird. And he's not great at writing. Reader, both charges have since been dropped.

The following Monday in walked a man in a beige tweed jacket that fitted him properly, a floral tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and — Becky's words, not mine — the best hair she had ever seen on a man. Tom's first impression of Becky was how articulate she was. Within the week he was telling people there was someone interesting at his work.

Then one evening they stood blethering in the office lobby for twenty minutes, and Becky noticed they were standing in exactly the same way. Same lean. Same folded arms. "We're mirroring each other. That must mean I like you." It is the sort of visual shorthand a romantic comedy uses when it only has ninety minutes to work with. These two took fourteen years — but we got there.

Because nothing happened. Not then. They were both with other people, so they went to work, made each other laugh, and got on with it. Tom left for Birmingham; six months later he sent Becky a link to a job going down there, and she took it. When she eventually asked him out, Tom said no — not never, just not yet, because he didn't want to be the rebound and thought she needed time to work out who she was on her own. Six months later he managed the single most Tom proposal of a date in history: "You like me." "Yeah." "So we should do something about that." Off they went bowling, followed by Mexican food, and that was that.

A wee two-bed flat, a four-hundred-pound sofa they were absolutely delighted with, and a commute in together every morning. Then Scotland came calling with a job Becky was convinced she'd blown and of course walked. A house whose photos had put everybody else off. A big white rescue German Shepherd called Ghost, and a judgmental cat named after the only cat in cinema history to survive an entire alien. And in 2024, Astrid — who is two, up at half six, and will sit and draw for an hour because she has watched her mum and dad do exactly that.

Why a cinema

Most couples pick a hotel. A function suite, a carvery, a room that has seen four hundred other weddings and will see four hundred more. Becky and Tom looked at all of that and it simply wasn't them — so they picked the room where the two of them have spent some of the happiest hours of their lives.

It runs deep on both sides. Becky reviewed theatre and dance and always wanted to be a film critic. Tom did creative writing and wanted to be Spielberg — he once painted a piece for Mindhunter, put it on Twitter, and the star of the show bought it and gave it to David Fincher, so somewhere in California there is a house with a Tom on the wall. And the reason Tom loves film at all is his mum, who took him to the cinema again and again and again until a boy who liked films became a man who cannot live without them. She was sitting right there in the third row. Which is, I think, the whole reason we were in that room at all.

And they did not do it by halves. Up on the screen before anybody sat down was a proper one-sheet — the pair of them hand-drawn in full technicolour, sunglasses on, under the title ‘The Wedding’. Presented by the GFT, August 29th 2026. A full supporting cast of parents along the bottom in tiny type, exactly where the studio credits go. And at the very foot of the poster, in the spot reserved for the only job that really matters: Directed by John Paul Fitzpatrick. Thirty-odd years of going to the pictures and I finally got a directing credit. I have never been so pleased to see my own name.

The ceremony

Now. I should declare an interest. I am a films man. I have waited my entire career to stand in front of a proper cinema screen and tell a room there would be no trailers, no adverts, and no twenty minutes of car commercials — that we were going straight to the main feature, and that the certificate was definitely a U. I was, frankly, in heaven.

So I wrote them a script with rather a lot in it. Becky came in to Thomas Newman's "Define Dancing" from WALL·E, with Astrid as flower girl. Tom stood with his back to the door in the traditional Scottish way, and when I told him to turn round, there was only ever one line for it. There was a bigger sofa required, a Zoltar machine that granted a wish, a proposal in a London hotel room the size of a toilet cubicle where they will always have their toilet cubicle, an engagement with no ring — deliberately, because shopping is one of Becky's very favourite things and Tom was not going to rob her of it — an unbroken circle promising to last to infinity and beyond, and a couple who won't need a script for wherever they're going next. Nobody heckled a single one. Tough crowd, in the best way — they got every last one.

For the serious bits: a handfasting, with the cords brought forward by one of Becky's bridal party and the knot pulled tight in front of everyone. A shared set of vows the couple wrote themselves — to work hard when life feels hard work, to keep laughing at the jokes nobody else finds funny for far longer than is reasonable, to be first to say sorry and to make it easy for the other one to say it back. And the detail I loved most: the two people in that building who write for a living kept their very best words off the page. They exchanged their own private vows that morning, alone, before any of us had laid eyes on them. Nobody else will ever hear them. Quite right too.

They left to Prince's "Partyman" from the Batman soundtrack. And because you never leave a cinema before the end credits, I kept the whole room in their seats afterwards for the group photographs — every single guest already sitting in tidy rows, facing the same way, with the lighting sorted. Easiest group shot I have ever been part of.

Marrying at the Glasgow Film Theatre yourself?

My advice from the front of the room. First — the GFT is a genuinely brilliant ceremony space and almost nobody thinks of it. Cinema 2 is raked, so every single guest gets a clean sightline of you, which is more than you can say for most hotel function suites. The red carpet aisle does a lot of work. And the acoustics are built for sound, so nobody at the back is straining to hear the vows.

Second — use the room. Becky and Tom put a popcorn box on every seat and ran a playlist of film scores as guests came in, and it cost them next to nothing for an enormous amount of atmosphere. If your venue has a personality, let it into the ceremony rather than decorating over the top of it. Third — a small practical one. Ask your guests to put the phones away and leave the photography to your photographer. I ask this everywhere, but in a cinema you get to ask it properly, and they will actually do it.

There's more on the room, the logistics and the timings in my Glasgow Film Theatre venue guide, and if you're marrying anywhere in the city, my Glasgow wedding celebrant page is the place to start — I live in Kelvinbridge, so couples booking me for Glasgow weddings pay no travel fees. If the handfasting caught your eye, I've written a full guide to handfasting in Scotland, and there's more on the ritual itself on my handfasting celebrant page. And if you're still hunting for somewhere that feels like you rather than like a wedding, have a wander through unusual Scottish wedding venues from real weddings.