Wedding - kerching!!

Are we paying too much for weddings? This is the question being posed by the Church of England, which suggests that the average cost of a wedding these days is about £17,000. It's many years now since I had to shell out for my daughter's wedding, but what I remember most vividly is that as soon as you append the word "wedding" to anything, the price immediately doubles or trebles - wedding cake, wedding dress, wedding cars, and the one that really got my goat - wedding photographs. So the question for me is not so much are we paying too much for weddings, but rather - are we being ripped off?