Wedding Entertainment

Wedding Entertainment Hire

Wedding entertainment hire, sometimes searched as wedding reception entertainment, is mostly about giving guests something to do between the set pieces of the day. The items on this page fall into four groups: indoor games for the lull between the wedding breakfast and the evening do, a staffed photo booth for keepsakes, a couple of outdoor challenges for daytime guests on the lawn, and a party marquee for a garden reception. What suits you depends less on what photographs well and more on your venue, your timings, and whether you are entertaining children, a sit-down crowd or an evening party.

The biggest gap at most weddings is the one between the wedding breakfast and the evening reception, while the photographer borrows the couple and the room gets turned round. Three of the items here are built for filling it. The Atari Pong table is an officially licensed, electromechanical version of the 1972 original, with real paddles moving under the glass and a pair of stools, so people gather round it without much prompting. The cocktail arcade table is the sit-down 60-in-1 cabinet loaded with Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Galaga and the rest, two players head to head, on free play so nobody needs coins. The cash grabber is the clear booth with the fan and the thirty-second timer, which you can fill with play money or printed vouchers for a bit of daft competition. All three stay indoors or in a marquee, run off an ordinary 13amp socket, and come with one of our staff to keep them going.

For something guests take home, the green screen photo booth, sometimes called a chroma key booth, prints on the night and lets people choose from seven backgrounds, anything from a Hollywood red carpet to a plain backdrop if the green screen is not your thing. We add your names and the date to the print layout at no extra charge, and the whole night's photos go onto a USB stick we hand over at the end. It needs a flat indoor or marquee spot about 2.3m wide, and like the games it is staffed throughout, so nobody in your wedding party ends up running it.

If you have the outdoor space and daytime guests who fancy a go at something, the rodeo bull and the laser clay pigeon shooting both work on a flat lawn or paddock. The rodeo is the GS Engineering mechanical bull, run by our operator who sets the speed from slow for a nervous rider up to a proper bucking go, with a padded inflatable floor for the inevitable fall. A lot of couples want the rodeo in a gentler form, and the same base unit takes the rodeo sheep or pig, which sit better with a mixed-age wedding crowd than a full-speed bull. The laser clay uses infrared shotgun replicas and an automatic launcher with a scoreboard, up to five shooting at once, and it wants a fair bit of room: a lane of about 30m by 10m, so it suits a big garden or a field rather than a tight courtyard.

If the reception is at home or in a garden, the party marquees give you covered space that does not hang on the weather. They are Capri frame marquees with a peaked roof and window panels, clear inside with no centre pole, in four sizes from a 20ft by 20ft seating around twenty up to a 28ft by 58ft seating around a hundred and twenty. They need a flat grassed area that will take the anchor pins, so they will not go on concrete or tarmac, and we deliver, set up and come back to take them down. The marquees sit under our sister site Complete Marquees, the same family team, so the lighting, flooring and package detail is all over there.

Wedding venues tend to ask more of a supplier than a back-garden party does. Hotels, barns and country houses with a licence usually want to see an insurance certificate, a risk assessment and a method statement before they let anyone set up, and plenty of small operators are not cleared to work on licensed premises at all. We carry £10 million public liability insurance with the additional licensed-premises cover, and the certificate, risk assessment and method statement are yours on request for the venue's file. We have run Monster Event Hire from our unit in Havant since 2002, covering Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and into London. The kit is all our own rather than sub-hired, and every operator we send has passed the RPII exams, is first-aid trained and holds an enhanced DBS check. The electrics are PAT-tested every year.

Jenny and Mark Buckett had the rodeo at their wedding, the sheep rather than the bull, and wrote afterwards that "it all went perfectly" and thanked the operator, Jamie. When you enquire, tell us the venue and whether it is licensed, the date, your rough timings across the day and the evening, what the ground or floor is like where each item would stand, and roughly how many guests you are expecting. Send a shortlist from the items above and we will tell you what fits the site before anything is confirmed.