Britain’s first actuality TV couple – nearly 40 years on from fame

Remember Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show that was one of the most-watched series of the 1980s?

To be lampooned in latex on it, up there with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and The Queen, meant you had arrived. You were not just a celebrity, but public property, for better or worse.

Marc Adams-Jones and his wife Karen not only remember tuning in – but watching puppet versions of themselves on it.

‘It was quite funny, actually,’ remembers Karen, 60, who works in mental health nursing.

‘Our puppets were shown in bed, under the covers, then popping up and going: “How was that for you, love? That was fabulous.” I had a very strong Welsh accent. Then, all of a sudden, Desmond pops up between us and says: “Can we do it again?”’

Marc, 66, an environmental health investigator, didn’t think much of his own puppet: ‘I think they’d just adapted the one they’d previously used for [the athlete] Daley Thompson. There was a big moustache.’

Desmond, of course, was the late Desmond Wilcox, the documentary film-maker (and husband of Esther Rantzen) who was responsible for many pieces of ground-breaking television.

In the early 1980s, convinced there was a public appetite for ‘real-life’ drama, he set about finding a young couple the cameras would follow in the run-up to their wedding, and for the year after it. Thousands applied. He chose Marc and Karen – then aged 26 and 20. The term ‘reality TV’ was still years off being used, but as these two became Mr and Mrs in front of the TV cameras, they were cementing the first ‘reality TV marriage’ of our age.

When it aired, in 1986, an astonishing 14 million people, a full quarter of the British population, tuned into The Marriage. It ran for six weeks, going out straight after the BBC News at 9.30pm, and followed Marc and Karen as they embarked on married life.

The show’s theme song, Starting Together by Su Pollard, reached No 2 in the UK singles chart.

And the Great British verdict on the newly-weds chances of lasting love? Well, it was unequivocal: they had no hope.

‘In fact, the headline in The Sun was “WE GIVE IT SIX MONTHS”, remembers Marc. ‘The verdict was – we weren’t suited.’ You sense this was at least in part thanks to their enduring habit of interrupting each other, bickering, and finishing each other’s sentences.

But Karen laughs, and little wonder. Pah to the naysayers. Later this month the couple, who still live in Cardiff, will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary with a trip to see ABBA Voyage and a night at a Premier Inn.

Will there be a romantic gift to each other too? ‘Well, Karen bought me a beer fridge for my last birthday, so I’m hoping for the beer to fill it,’ says Marc, whose love for a pint was highlighted in the series (and not entirely positively framed; one memorable scene from Marc’s stag do saw him vomiting into a pint glass).

What a story to tell the grandchildren. There are three of those now, and another on the way. One, 18-month-old Imogen, is staying with them on the day I catch up with them at their home.

The couple have four children, Nia, Sara, Cerys and William, all in their 30s, all living close by, all with ‘good jobs and in happy relationships’, which, Karen says ‘is all you ever want from life’.

They come across as people who are well aware they have won the jackpot, even though, in monetary terms, they became reality TV royalty about 20 years too early. They were only paid £1,200 for the entire series, ‘to cover costs like the electricity the production team used in our home,’ says Karen. ‘And £600 of that went on tax,’ adds Marc.

It’s hard to get your head around, when the reality stars of today are predominantly brand-savvy influencers with their glory telly moments instantly available for fans to view. But the tapes of Marc and Karen’s unfolding romance sit gathering dust in BBC archives. It was only in the past few years that they got ‘official’ recordings, so their children could watch them back.

‘Actually, the kids still haven’t watched the whole thing, just highlights like the wedding day,’ says Karen. ‘They say: “What’s the point of watching you two just talking, we see that every day?” But it is lovely to have because it was before the days when everyone recorded everything on their phones. There is this wonderful footage of Desmond asking my grandmother, who was in her 70s then, about her wedding night!’

The more they tell their story, however, the more you have to marvel that this pair emerged intact. The truth is they were guinea pigs, utterly unaware of the world they were stepping into when they agreed to open their lives to the cameras.

They reckon Wilcox and his team of film-makers also had no clue about the scale of the impact the show would have — either on them as a couple or on the TV industry.

It turns out the trolling of reality TV stars is not such a modern phenomenon after all. Of course, back then there was no social media, but these two still learned how brutal it can be when the British public feels it owns you.

‘Oh yes, we had trolls,’ says Karen. ‘But the messages we were bombarded with were delivered by the postman. We had some amazing letters, and became friends with the people who wrote them. Some letters found their way to us when they were addressed only to “Marc and Karen, The Marriage, Wales”. But some were unpleasant.’

Like? ‘The ones from dirty old men who liked seeing my boobs,’ says Karen. ‘I’d been filmed in my basque, getting ready on my wedding day. And then there were the people who wrote to say we were boring, or we shouldn’t have got married.

‘We were quite naïve, going into it. We had no idea about things like this. I don’t think the production team did either.’

Marc and Karen’s story begins when they spied an advert in a newspaper asking for couples who were planning to get married and would like to be part of a TV show. She was then a trainee nurse and he worked in catering.

‘There was no payment mentioned, but we thought it could be a bit of fun,’ says Karen.’

The application process involved filling in forms and speaking to members of the production team, until they got down to the final three couples. Then there was a meal out with Wilcox, who later told them he’d chosen them after watching them share food and eat off each other’s plates.

The first day of filming was on their respective stag and hen parties, a week before the wedding.

Marc was 26 at the time, a burly rugby player and enthusiastic drinker, who’d done a bit of travelling and had a few girlfriends. Wilcox, they say, was convinced he was a ‘Jack the Lad’. Karen was 20 and had had a couple of boyfriends, too. ‘But he wasn’t as interested in that,’ she notes. ‘When Desmond was filming, I remember him going through Marc’s photo albums asking about previous girlfriends, and saying things like: “You were a bit of a Ram about Cardiff, weren’t you?”

It was a nickname that stuck (some of his rugby mates still use it).

‘Yes, Marc had had more previous relationships, but I’d had a few boyfriends too, but he never asked to see (i)my(i) albums. I think they wanted to present me as the virginal good girl.’

Marc nods. ‘And I was the scumbag. One newspaper actually said that.’

Eighteen months is a long time for cameras to follow you. The pair got very close to the production team. ‘It still makes me laugh that there is footage of me doing the washing up, but the audience wouldn’t have been aware that I was washing 12 cups because the camera man and the sound man and the rest of the team would be there,’ says Karen.

‘But over the months we did become very close — which Desmond didn’t like. He thought it blurred the lines and wasn’t professional. There were times where he wanted us to go somewhere in a limo but we’d say: “Oh no, we will just go with the crew.”’

They don’t suggest, today, that they were misrepresented in the show – but they do point out that all reality TV involves deliberate editing: ‘So you’d have half a sentence, with the second half cut.’

And the virgin/Jack the Lad narrative was strong throughout.

Mind you, there were incidents – including one infamous one – which absolutely reflected the narrative that poor innocent Karen was going to have her life ruined.

The newly-married Marc had gone to Scotland with the lads to a rugby match. There, he met up with an ex-girlfriend. At home in Wales, Karen was oblivious. When the show aired, the dramatic presentation – with the cameras flitting between events in Scotland and Wales – made things look more ‘knife-edge’ than they had been.

‘It was actually quite innocent,’ remembers Karen. ‘He hadn’t deliberately arranged to meet his ex. She just happened to be there. And nothing happened, but at the time I knew nothing of it. The film crew who were with me did, though, and told me later they’d felt very uncomfortable because they were getting updates from another crew in Scotland.’

Even now, Marc feels guilty about how it unfolded: ‘As I said to Karen then, if I’d been messing about, I wouldn’t have done it with a camera crew in tow, would I? But I was still daft because I didn’t think of how it would affect her.’

The series was actually filmed some time before it aired, but Marc and Karen were floored by the immediate reaction even after the first week’s broadcast. Overnight they became celebrities, with people recognising them every time they left the house.

‘People weren’t afraid to tell you their opinions, whether they loved or hated it,’ says Karen.

‘I was once in a toilet cubicle and I heard two women, one saying, “Did you watch that bloody The Marriage?” saying she hated it. The other said: “But you are still watching it.”’

With public interest came press interest, and this was where things started to get dark. ‘We had agreed with the BBC that all interviews had to go through them, but the local paper was annoyed at this and started digging up exes and there were stories that didn’t present me in a very good light,’ says Marc. Welcome to the world of kiss and tell. ‘They actually invited people who knew us to write in and one letter said “Marc from The Marriage is nothing more than a drunken, beer-swilling, inarticulate simpleton.” That was nice!’

But there were huge positives, too. The couple were whisked to London, and they both still remember being taken for lunch at celebrity haunt Joe Allen. ‘We walked down the stairs and there was another couple in front of us who were being turned away because they had no booking. We didn’t either, so we turned to leave too, but the maître d’ pulled us back and said “Karen and Mark from The Marriage?” We were ushered to a table. There on the next table was Lionel Blair, and at another one was Floella Benjamin.’

They were now firmly on the celeb circuit. They appeared on the Wogan show and Pebble Mill, and even on ABC in the U.S. But seeing themselves on Spitting Image was the most surreal thing of all.

Handled differently, their fame (and their ill-preparedness for it all) could have broken them. Why didn’t it?

‘Although I was only 20, I had a good head,’ says Karen. ‘I realised that if you are going to get upset every time someone says something bad, you are going to spend a lot of time in tears.’

What do they make of those who open their lives to reality TV these days? ‘Making the sort of money they do would be nice,’ says Marc. ‘But it’s a completely different thing. People go into it now to be famous. That never occurred to us.’

They slid back into anonymity and got on with the business of raising a family. They both (even the ‘simpleton’, grins Marc) went back to education in their 40s, both gaining degrees while sharing the childcare workload.

Karen took a second job stacking supermarket shelves to fund hers. No-one offered to make a documentary about that, but then they wouldn’t.

And now here they are, retirement within reach and a successful marriage to celebrate. What has the secret been?

‘Stubbornness,’ says Marc. ‘And the fact that I’ve got a £1,000 bet with Ladbrokes that we will make 40 years. Once that’s done, I’ll cash in my chips.’

Karen answers the question more seriously: ‘We were going through our wedding photographs the other day, and it’s sad how many divorces there have been among those who were there. These days it is very easy to walk away, but my view is that you choose to work through the issues, or you choose to walk away. It’s never going to be just plain sailing and fun, but if you want to make it work, you will.’

And it must help to not marry a scumbag in the first place?

‘I never thought he was,’ she says.