My Big Fat Fake Wedding

Synopsis

It should be the most romantic day in any couple's relationship, but every year hundreds of weddings take place where often the bride and groom barely know each other, and will rarely ever meet again. These are sham marriages - a way for desperate immigrants to stay in the country illegally by paying to marry a stranger with an EU passport.

In this Panorama Special, reporter Richard Bilton exposes a lucrative - and growing - industry. Posing as a wedding photographer, he films a sham wedding and reveals the real human cost at the heart of it; he investigates an Eastern European gang that charges 8,000 pounds to supply teenage prostitutes as bogus brides; the immigration solicitor who will prepare the legal paperwork for sham couples; and he discovers how even the Church of England has been a target of bogus wedding fraudsters.