MEET the “Mamma Mia! brides”, dancing queens of the recession who want a wedding on a Greek island to match the one in their favourite film.

Not content with simply visiting the Greek islands where Mamma Mia! the musical was set, dozens of British fans are marrying there this summer to the accompaniment of songs by Abba.

“It’s a growth industry,” said Jane Palikiras who, with her husband Andreas, runs the Twickenham-based Ionian Weddings travel agency.

Their “Mamma Mia! marriage” packages appear to have struck a chord in Britain, where the feelgood film has overtaken Titanic as the biggest box office hit.

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“A lot of people come to us and say, ‘We love the film. Can you do something like that for us?’ ” said Andreas Palikiras. “We certainly can.”

Sharon Lawrence, 28, a business travel consultant from Colchester, was struggling to decide where to get married until she saw Mamma Mia! The film features Meryl Streep, Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan in an all-singing, all-dancing comic romance.

“As soon as I saw the film I thought: this is it,” she recalled last week. “But I didn’t even know which part of Greece it was in. So I got on the internet and did some research.”

She and Kevin, her husband, a 33-year-old printer, flew to Skiathos, in the Sporades islands, which appears in the film and tied the knot in the town hall on June 2. That night they held a reception for 30 with the same ambience as the one in the film, which is an adaptation of the extraordinarily successful West End show.

The heyday of Abba in the 1970s came before Sharon was born, but she and the other Mamma Mia! brides know most of the songs by heart and like to sing them while dancing.

“I wanted to go down the aisle as the Dancing Queen,” she said, in reference to one of Abba’s greatest hits, “but Kevin wouldn’t let me. He said everyone would think us crazy.”

Many Mamma Mia! brides ask to be married in the white-washed hill-top chapel on Skopelos island that features in the denouement of the film when Donna, played by Streep, agrees to marry Sam, an old boyfriend (Brosnan) and sings, in the words of the Abba song, “I do, I do, I do, I do, I do”.

The chapel is too small for a real wedding, though, and in any case church wedding services are reserved for members of the Greek Orthodox religion. “We tell our customers: Hollywood is one thing, reality is another,” said Andreas Palikiras.

Most brides seem happy with that. Anika Massen, 27, from Nantwich in Cheshire, will ride on horseback to her wedding on Skiathos on August 23. “I couldn’t get a donkey,” she said, referring to the mode of transport used by the bride in the film.

Massen’s wedding website referred to her as a “Mamma Mia! bride” and invited guests who had not already seen the film immediately to do so.

“It’s all about introducing them to the beauty of the island by getting them to see the film,” said Massen, a recruitment consultant who is marrying her boyfriend James Sweeney, a chef.

Palikiras says she and her husband have helped to organise about 100 Greek island weddings this summer. Around half of them had been directly inspired by the film which is about the efforts of a young woman to discover the identity of her father on the eve of her marriage. She ends up sending invitations to three former boyfriends of her mother, who owns a villa on the fictional island of Kalokairi.

The real island is now overwhelmed by Mamma Mia! tourism. One local has pinned up — to the delight of Mamma Mia! fanatics — a pair of flipflops left behind by Brosnan.

Not everyone is happy about the Mamma Mia-mania, however. “To be honest, I think the locals are probably getting a bit sick of it,” said Andreas Palikiras, a native of Corfu.

“Prices have gone up like crazy. A lot of people can’t afford to go out to eat any more like they used to.”

The Mamma Mia! tourists might be the first to sympathise. Economic considerations often play as big a role as their love of Abba in influencing their choice of where to go on holiday and get married.

“The average cost of a wedding in Britain is £22,000,” explained Palikiras. “In Greece it’s just £3,000 and a Mamma Mia! wedding can cost even less. People want rustic simplicity: the same old wooden tables and fairy lights as in the film. They want above all to try to recapture the atmosphere.”

After the DVD was released just before Christmas, “our bookings shot up by 60%”, said Palikiras. “It was bizarre. This was round about the start of the credit crunch.”

They expect to organise even more weddings next year when a five-star hotel opens on Skopelos.

There is another reason for being optimistic about the Mamma Mia! marriage business. Rumour has it that there is the possibility of a sequel being written.

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