ABOUT MARK WADDINGTON
More than 20 years of magic, 1,700 weddings and a career I started much earlier than expected.
Hi, I'm Mark.
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I've been performing magic professionally for more than 20 years, although I got started slightly earlier than most. At 12 years old I landed my first professional job at the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds, performing as part of The Good Old Days and becoming the youngest solo performer to appear in the show.
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I loved magic before that, of course, but performing at the City Varieties was probably the first time it occurred to me that this might actually become my job. More than two decades later, I'm still doing it, so apparently 12-year-old me was onto something.
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Since then I've performed in theatres, at private events and for companies including ITV, O2, BMW and Chase de Vere. I'm an Associate of The Inner Magic Circle with Silver Star and I've been lucky enough to win multiple Wedding Entertainer of the Year awards.
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But weddings are where I found my home.
WHY WEDDINGS?
I've now performed at more than 1,700 of them, and I think what I love is that every wedding gives me a completely different room full of people.
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You've got family, childhood friends, university friends, work colleagues, children, grandparents and occasionally people who barely know anybody there. Put all of those people together and magic does something rather useful. It gives them an excuse to laugh and talk to each other.
Over the years that's changed the way I think about what I do. Of course I care enormously about the magic itself, but I'm much more interested in what happens around it. The laughter from a group on the other side of the room, somebody calling their friend over because they have to see what just happened, or two people who didn't know each other suddenly trying to work out how something was possible.
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That's why I don't really think of myself as a magician who happens to work at weddings anymore. I specialise in what magic can do for a wedding.
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And after 1,700 of them, I've also learned quite a lot about how weddings actually work. I know that timings change, photographs overrun, speeches occasionally become considerably longer than advertised and the weather couldn't care less what you've planned. I know how to work alongside photographers, venue teams and caterers, how to read different groups of guests and, importantly, when to step back and let something else happen.
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You shouldn't have to manage me on your wedding day. By this point, I know my way around one.
WHAT YOU'LL GET FROM ME
My style is relaxed, funny and interactive. I like big reactions and I want your guests to have a brilliant time, but never at somebody else's expense.
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I'm not interested in embarrassing people or forcing somebody to take part because I think it'll make a funny moment. Some guests will want to see everything I can possibly show them. Others will be happier watching from the sidelines. Both are absolutely fine.
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There's a level of trust involved when somebody asks me to be part of their wedding. You've chosen the people in that room because they matter to you, and you're trusting me to walk into the middle of them and represent the standard you've set for the rest of your day.
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I take that seriously.
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(I just don't take myself particularly seriously while I'm doing it.)
THE YORKSHIRE WEDDING MAGICIAN
Yorkshire is home and it's where a huge part of my career has been spent. I've performed at weddings across North, West, South and East Yorkshire and at more venues than I could possibly list here.
Over time, weddings became such a big part of what I do that The Yorkshire Wedding Magician stopped being simply a useful description and became the business itself.
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I'm proud of the awards, the Magic Circle membership and everything else I've achieved along the way. But the thing I'm probably proudest of is that after more than 1,700 weddings, I still genuinely look forward to the next one.
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Because however many I've performed at before, yours isn't wedding number 1,701 to you.
It's your wedding.
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And that's how I'll treat it.
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If you'd like me to be part of it, I'd love to hear what you're planning.
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