Many grooms feel understandably anxious at the prospect of choosing the best man for their wedding. Will he reveal an unmentionable incident in the groom’s past? Will he insult the bride’s mother or pester the bridesmaids?

What nobody really expects is the best man to pocket the money collected for the groom’s stag weekend and spend it on his gambling habit.

But that is precisely what Martyn Galvin did – prompting a judge to describe his behaviour as “the meanest and nastiest” he had come across.

Galvin’s deceit was only discovered when the party of 17 friends turned up at Newcastle airport to discover that neither the flights nor hotel rooms for the stag weekend in Prague had been booked, leaving them £7,945 out of pocket.