The perfect day: brides-to-be use this expression a lot. The perfect couple looking for the perfect wedding on the perfect day. Most of the time we're happy to settle for a little bit of imperfection - a scratch here, a stain there, a ladder in our tights held in place by a dab of nail varnish. But come The Big Day, when you and your betrothed walk up the aisle, nothing but perfection will do!

The problem, of course, is that imperfection has a way of sticking its oar in. Weddings go wrong all the time. No one knows this better than Dave Simms, the man at specialist wedding insurer Ecclesiastical, who's responsible for insuring thousands of weddings every year. As the company's head of wedding insurance, it's Dave's job to understand where the greatest risks to any wedding lie and help couples deal with them - ideally before they have to make a claim.

Over the last 10 years, Dave has become quite an expert at spotting which things are most likely to turn pear-shaped. Based on the claims they get from the couples they insure, there are five big things that can go wrong. Some you can guess quite easily, others are a bit more left field. The key is to know what they are and take what precautions you can. Having a plan B is also a big help.

Here are the top five things that could turn your meticulously planned wedding into a bad episode of EastEnders...

From hotel to no-tel

Ever since the law was changed to allow all sorts of venues to have marriage licences, picking the venue for your wedding and subsequent celebrations has become a tough choice. Now, the local church has to compete with hotels, stately homes, castles, ships and tourist attractions. But the wider the choice of wedding venues, the greater the potential to hit trouble.

Churches don't go bankrupt but hotels and other venues can, leaving brides and grooms in the lurch. A wedding isn't a wedding if there's nowhere to hold it. Similarly, wedding venues can suffer all kinds of problems in the run up to your Big Day: flooding, roof damage, outbreaks of food poisoning. All these things are totally out of the happy couple's control but can wreck a wedding in one fell swoop.

Catering for a disaster

Every wedding has its share of professional suppliers who make the proceedings run smoothly - or at least that's the plan. Caterers, florists, entertainers, chauffeurs: each has their part to play, but each can drive a coach and horses through your dreams - particularly the chauffeur. According to Dave Simms, suppliers are one of the biggest causes of wedding headaches. All too often they go out of business the week before your trip up the aisle. In December last year, Altringham-based Weddings and Honeymoons Abroad closed without warning, throwing some couples' wedding plans into turmoil. Not the kind of memory to look back on.

Making you marquee

Marquees are a standard part of the wedding cocktail so few couples pay much attention to them. After all, it's just a big tent, right? Yes, but big tents are expensive and have an annoying habit of getting ripped or holed during your reception, leaving you liable for a big charge from the hire company. All it takes is one slightly worse for wear guest putting his foot in the wrong place and you end up with a bill of £500 for damage.

The bridge wore...er, red wine actually

A great big red stain all down the front of your ivory organza ruched bodice is the stuff that nightmares are made of. But it happens, frequently. Damage to the wedding party's clothing and jewellery are common problems. Dresses tear or get snagged on door handles; the bride's father bends over and rips his trouser seam; the groom puts his suit and the best man's in a case on his car roof rack...but doesn't secure the case properly and the clothing ends up all over the A2. All these examples are real and increase pre-wedding stress by a factor of 10.

Lights, camera, nervous breakdown

To preserve the happy couple's memories of their perfect day, a battery of photos and videos are needed. These professional portraits and epic movies can be shared with best friends, rolled out on a dull evening or screened for your children in the years to come. That is assuming the photographer actually turns up and the pictures and videos aren't lost during processing. Losing your photographs and having to pay for reshoots on another day is a painfully familiar problem, the effects of which can last for years as the replacement pictures always provoke memories of the lost ones.

These, then, are the five problems that have blighted the weddings of many couples, but they don't have to blight yours. With some foresight and a little sound planning, most of them are avoidable.

Perfection clearly isn't easy to attain and it can come with a price tag attached. But when it comes to organising your special day, one thing is inarguable: perfection will never go out of style.