Royal Wedding: What a privilege to share in Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford's happy day

It only took a second’s glance at the happy couple for all cynicism to be swept away. You didn’t have to know them personally to see how much it meant to them. There, side by side, on this, the happiest day of their lives. Sprinkled with stardust, maybe, but just two regular down-to-earth people too. Just Eamonn and Ruth. Ruth and Eamonn.

“Welcome to Windsor,” Eamonn had beamed at the top of ITV’s This Morning Royal Wedding Special, fully an hour-and-a-half before the service started. “Welcome, on this historic morning.”

And he was right. Ever since the BBC turned down the chance to broadcast live coverage of the marriage of an art gallery director and a tequila salesman, this would indeed be an historic morning, not just for Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford, but for Big Brother’s Alison Hammond too, down on Windsor High Street with some Portuguese tourists waving plastic Union Jacks. It was a historic morning for the whole of ITV, and it would not be dimmed even by the sound of the Perspex windows of their temporary studio reverberating in the Storm Callum winds.

And they were just so very, very down to earth. So down to earth in fact, that, in a short pre-recorded segment, they had even been agreed to be interviewed by Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank at Buckingham Palace. Yes, that really did happen. It had, ostensibly been meant to be the other way around but about two minutes into the three-minute package, Eamonn and Ruth really did enquire of the ninth in line to the throne on the occasion of her wedding, whether, “There’s anything you’d like to ask us?”

“Erm…” Jack managed to reply, just after the silence had bounced against the back wall at the outer reaches of the universe and crept back in through the palace window. “What’s, err, what’s err, what’s it like working together?”

Because that’s just what you need to know, the day before your wedding to a member of the Royal Family: What are the challenges of presenting daytime TV as a married couple?

That would nevertheless mark the high point of what would be a full 95 minutes of pre-wedding royal wedding special which was, as they say, all filler, no killer.

Traditionally, at this hour, ITV viewers can expect to get the chance to call TV’s Dr Ranj Singh and regale him with their their latest sexual health woes or, at the very least, watch the live grilling of a prawn kebab lightly marinated in garlic and chilli oil.

It’s possible then, perhaps indeed probable, that many of them will have in fact have been disappointed to instead see Eamonn Holmes breathlessly terminate an interview with three teenage scoliosis sufferers, who had benefited from one of the charities Princess Eugenie supports, to bring the nation live pictures of Robbie Williams’s mother-in-law’s hat blowing off. But we shall never know.

Which brings us conveniently on to the day’s minor characters. Little is known about Princess Eugenie of York and her now husband Jack Brooksbank. Given an already very short interview with them could only be sustained beyond the 120-second mark by the interviewers asking the interviewees if they had any questions themselves, it may be that there simply is very little to know to about them – but if anything bore testament to their characters it was the scale and ambition of the guest list.

Princess Eugenie is a mere 28 years old. Her husband only 32, and here to celebrate with them were fully 850 of their very closest friends. The singer Ricky Martin was there, Liv Tyler, Holly Valance, Ellie Goulding, you name it. Even Stephen Fry, a man very close to twice the age of the bride and groom, which just shows how kind and gregarious and outgoing they are.

The former Blue Peter presenter Richard Bacon dropped by the ITV studio on his way in, and when asked how he knew the happy couple, paused, waited and then when the ground beneath him alas failed to swallow him up said, “From, err, various social occasions,” and then, by way of context: “We first met in Miami at 3am.”

Indeed, if so many of the faces seemed familiar, that might be because they would be familiar to anyone who has ever glanced at the celebrity party pages of a newspaper at any point in the past 10 years.

As Jimmy Carr made his way into the chapel, it occurred to me that the most recent time I have personally laid eyes on him was when he had arrived at an afterparty for a party he had not been invited to, and immediately began questioning the host about why he had not been invited.

In the build-up to the event, questions had been asked about the necessity of the estimated £2m security bill, but, perish the thought, if anything had happened in that grand chapel, it would have spelt the instantaneous end of the entire British canapé industry. The mini Yorkshire pudding and the thin slither of roast beef and horseradish that lies within consigned suddenly to history.

Anyway. It’s their special day, Eugenie and Jack, so it would be unkind to dwell too long on the decision to take a reading from The Great Gatsby, and the wonder of Gatsby’s smile, which anyone who has troubled not even the novel but merely the movie will surely know is a smile that presages a monumental con job.

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it,” sister and maid of honour Princess Beatrice read, doing her best to emit one herself, and I think I have the words down right. “It was a smile that seemed to say, ‘Now listen up Boycie. I’ve got some genuine Russian ex-military camcorders in the back of the van. They usually go for a hundred a piece but I’ll let you have one for a tenner.’”

All of which means we have run out of space to dwell too long on the dress or the page boys or the flower girls or the hats or Harry and Meghan or Wills and Kate or the Queen or Prince Philip or the fundamental questions of the occasion. Of why on earth anyone is meant to be even remotely interested in the wedding of a very, very uninteresting young woman and a very posh tequila salesman who, on the occasion of his own wedding, was described as “a charming boy and all that but not the most intelligent” by none other than his own grandmother.

It was, above all else, just something to do, something to watch. The sun shone, a bit, and the flapjacks and the STIs will be back on Monday.