Thank The Lord For Your Presence # 24

After Shaun Micallef's show-stopping scene last week (yes, I'm "still gushing about it" - you got a problem with that?!?), pretty much anything this week's episode served up for us was going to look pale and bulimic by comparison. Unfortunately for Akmal Saleh, Dave Hughes, Rebel Wilson and Josh Lawson, this meant they were really "up against it". Still, any episode of Thank God You're Here (TGYH) is a top-notch hour of television, so I certainly wasn't complaining.

Akmal Saleh started us off, and he was playing the part of a criminal profiler, whose new promotion to "Chief of Chief" made him the highest ranking officer in the room. His mantra was, "To catch a criminal, you must ... find him and hold him down with two hands." Of the three victims they were investigating, the first was strangled, the second was poisoned, and the third was shot. When asked what he made of that, Akmal replied, "Well, they're all dead." He hypothesised that the murders had all occurred between 9:30pm and 9:45pm on a Tuesday night because The Footy Show wasn't on at that time (nice little plug for his own network, now that he's on Channel Nine's Mick Molloy yawn-fest, The Nation). He then said he tried to get inside the killer's head ... with a bullet. When shown the composite sketches of their suspects, Akmal answered that the guy in the beanie was, "... the guy on the $20 note," before assuring them that he's long gone and not coming back. When a tape recorder was brought in and a haunting Hannibal Lecter-style message was played, it turned out to be Akmal's roommate wanting him to buy butterflies on his way home. Another cop entered and said the lab results were back, to which Akmah asked, "Leb results? We don't discriminate! We used to, though - that was fun!" When the latest victim's list of injuries were rattled off, ending with a bullet through the skull, Akmal's comment was, "Oooh, he must have a headache!" Finally, when it came to giving their serial killer his own nickname, what was Akmal's suggestion? Why, "Trevor", of course. In the Family Plus Benefit commercial, Akmal said he found the brochure very useful, because he turned it into a makeshift trumpet. The second pre-recorded segment was a filmed in the style of a documentary following a factory boss around for a day while he has to close down the factory and put everyone out of work. When asked how it feels to tell people they're going to be out of work, Akmal said, "Ah, you know, it's something that I kinda learned to enjoy. It's really addictive seeing their faces drop," before laughing cruelly. He asked his assistant if he'd done this before, and when the assistant answered "No", he advised him, "You're gonna have to do it and then just run." Once assembling in front of the employees, the assistant introduced him thus: "How about some applause for our hardworking CEO?", but when the reaction was considerably less than enthusiastic, Akmal said to his assistant, "I don't think they heard you; can you ask them again?" In the group scene, which was set in a TV studio airing a "Global Aid" telecast, Akmal was introduced as a macroclimatologist, which he erroneously described as "a climatologist, but smaller" (he was thinking of a microclimatologist). When asked to explain what we were watching on the large screen behind him, he told us how the pink arrows hitting the globe would stay there for about nine months, and then there'd be a baby. The weather patterns he's discovered - the tasty weather patterns - he called Il Carbonara. Then came the corker: "If we burn my girlfriend for fossil fuels, there'll be no more problem. With her permission, of course; we all have to make sacrifices!" Ouch, Akmal. Ouch.

Eventual winner of the night, Dave Hughes, comedian and radio host from Melbourne, found himself dressed in a rather fetching green and gold tracksuit, so it was clear that he was a sportsman. A retired Olympian, to be exact. He was greeting a class of schoolkids and giving them a talk. When the teacher told him the children were very excited to have him there, he answered, "They should be; I don't like doing this crap." It turned out that his sporting event of choice was the modern pentathalon, which consisted of five different events. When asked to name them, Dave stalled with, "They were five very difficult events - if you could master one of them you'd be a champion. I've mastered all five, so respect me." He then clarified some of the events by saying, "Shooting, the one on the horse (here the teacher said, "Equestrian"), equestrian, yeah - look, I've retired and got on the drugs, so I can't remember the rest." The teacher reminded him of the fencing event, and then asked him what the French name for his fencing sword was. "La sword". His accident during the Opening Ceremony was that he stood too close to the Olympic Flame and his tracksuit almost went up. When it was announced that he'd won the bronze medal and the kids clapped a bit, Dave was unimpressed with their lacklustre attempt: "You could clap a bit more than that; I didn't just get a two-foot putt in, alright? You'd be lucky if you get your crayons inside the lines!" We got a peek inside the inner workings on his mind: while on the dais, he was thinking: "The chick who gave me the medal was hot." Then he shocked the sports community when he told everyone he was actually a woman. Dave followed this ground-breaking moment up by turning to the kids and telling them that men are normally better than women, and telling the young girls to remember that. His own personal brand of Boost Bars apparently boost your ability to live a fun life, and have only 5 grams of fat per serving - although he reminds you that the "serving size is half a peanut". He's most proud of the fact that he once rode a horsey, and was thrown out of the Athletes' Village because he was with a lot of women. His advice to the kids was: "What you're doing today at school will not help you at all." In the Family Plus Benefits commercial, he was standing in a brand new kitchen in a lovely house with a pregnant woman, and claimed that the family plus benefit was great, because he's never had a job, but look at their new house! He then explained to the voiceover artist that the woman isn't going to get pregnant online; "... she needs to be in the room with you". When asked if he felt he deserved the family plus benefit, he said yes, because he's an Australian, and Australians deserve free stuff. In the factory boss documentary, he assured the filmmaker that the employees would react badly; "They always react badly - that's why they've got crap jobs." When standing in front of the doomed employees, David explained "what he always says" ... that small business is like a balloon: "It's full of hot air, and you people are the hot air, and I'm letting you out of the balloon so you can hiss away into society and possibly find jobs where you're not dressed so ridiculously!" In the group scene, Dave played the part of a destitute farmer "doing it tough" working on the land. He said he'd seen some unusual changes, such as the fact that the two black sheep with him were white that morning, because the sun is that harsh out there. Apparently all the dams on his farm are dry, and the bottle of milk in his hand has to last the sheep until 2015. When one of the sheep got a little too excited, he yelled at it to back off, and then said that the highlight of the recent Keith Urban Charity Concert was when he left the stage, because he hates Keith Urban, and then added with a scoff, "Charity? I heard he got paid."

Rebel Wilson was the third to step through the blue door, and she was the wife of a prisoner who was running late for her prison visit with her husband. According to Rebel herself, she was "a bit of a slurry". As the prison guard held her chair out for her to sit down, she stuck her butt out at him in an exaggerated fashion as if to seduce (or at least distract; some might say repulse) him. She told her husband that her kids were asking questions about how he was going in the showers in prison, and if anything happens. This was a gag she returned to twice more during this scene (which I thought was just often enough to be very witty and clever - a fourth such reference would have been one too many, so I was glad to see that she kept to the "magic three" rule of golden comedy). And this girl knows comedy, having performed on The Wedge.* When her husband asked about Jess, she answered that Jess was getting pole dancing lessons ... before learning that "Jess" was the name of their German Shepherd. Hubby then asked her if she knew what the only thing was that's keeping him sane in gaol, and she asked, "The men in the showers?" He quizzed her on the last thing she said to him before he went in there, and she recited the words to the song "We Go Together" from the musical Grease ("We go together like chumalungalunga"). While dancing on the spot, she squeezed her breasts together in a wholly unamusing way, although the audience seemed to love it (maybe they had the Benny Hill crowd in for that episode). She admitted that her husband's threat of what he'd do to her if she cheated on him while he was in prison had her really, really scared (making her rollerskate for kilometres in a bikini for everyone to see), and fair enough - that'd scare me, too. When he asked her if she knew what he did last night, she replied, "Is this about the showers?", which I thought was a great call. She then told him she'd seen an idea on Prison Break, so she planned to tattoo the secret codes to the security alarm on her stomach, because: "I have a big surface area here". When the guard told them her time was up, she asked him, "What if I flash you my tits; do we get some more time?" She then apologised for not being able to make it for her visit next week, because of the dog's pole dancing lessons. When the husband said it was meant to be a conjugal visit and she said it'd have to be done over the phone, he asked how that was meant to work. She replied that she can talk "in a really deep voice." Rebel wasn't as bad as I've been fearing (does anybody have a high opinion of The Wedge??), but she certainly wasn't the strongest of the night. In the Family Plus Benefit commercial, Rebel said she had to run an obstacle course in under thirteen minutes to qualify, and that she'd be spending the $5,000 big screen TV; "... it's not going on the kids". In the factory boss doco segment, she told the filmmaker beforehand that she planned to break the news to the employees about their mass retrenchments through song, and then gave us an examples: "Lalalalalala ... (points) fired." When her assistant entered the room, she instructed the cameraman not to film him, because she's the subject matter of this documentary. She also told the filmmaker that the sacked workers could now audition for Australian Idol, because as we saw from last year, "really anyone can win" - and she said it with the very deliberate and intentional implication that she thinks Damien Leith is crap. (This point is interesting when you consider that the first time I ever saw Rebel was when she and another girl were doing that series of Telstra ads during Idol a few years ago, playing Jenny the stupid and inconsiderate schoolgirl. Remember? They were all set in Jenny's bedroom or basement, and the two actresses even attended one of the semi-finals in character, holding up signs similar to those they'd used throughout the course of the commercials.) As she approached the assembled employees, she pointed to her assistant and whispered to the camera, "He's fired as well." When her assistant told the employees that the factory was going to close, she was standing next to him, where she used her hands to "mime" a set of doors closing. And true to her word, she finished the scene by singing an impromptu song to the employees about their sacking: "Today you were all sacked, and you might be feeling really blue, But tomorrow is a new day, it's just up to you-oo-oo-oo-oo, So exit now, C'mon, get out ..." In the group scene, Rebel was definitely at her weakest of the night. She said she was in Ten's popular new reality series, Big Sister. She did the lamest of lame handstands, but it was meant to be lame, so it was funny to watch her attempting it. When Akmal appeared in the chair next to her, she introduced him as her boyfriend, then took a pretty nasty knock from her "beloved" about her weight and the drain she's personally causing on the environment. No matter how much I might hate her skit show, or how poorly she might have done in this final scene particularly, taking the kind of backhanded insult Akmal served her up was more than a little harsh. (It's one thing for a "fatty" to make fat jokes about themselves; it's quite another thing for someone else to make fat jokes about another person - without their permission, anyway, and Rebel certainly didn't make it clear that she'd okayed it in advance.) I actually enjoyed her performance in her individual scene and the two pre-recorded segments, so I choose to remember those moments as her highlights.

* Please note the sarcasm in that statement.

Finally, Josh Lawson came out to wow us with his female ensemble cast-fondling abilities. This time, he was the owner of a discount airline ("Jetplus" - I wonder who that's a reference to!), being interviewed on a TV talk show. Apparently he did the show once before, back in the 90s, and was amazed to see the female co-host: "Oh, you have not aged well, darling!" He specified that he wanted to be introduced as Sir Nigel Esquire the Fourth (and a half), before the intro music played and he started reading the ensemble cast member's cue cards: "Welcome back - I'm so sorry!" His list of prior jobs included pizza delivery boy and petty theft, and when he was introduced as Sir Nigel Bradford esquire the fourth, he interrupted with a "And a half, I think we'd agreed! Oh dear. Oops!" He was asked to explain his low-cost airline, and answered that question like this: "How many times have you sat at the airport and though, "Argh! There's got to be a better way!"? Well, I've come up with that better way. With Jetplus. (beat) That explains nothing." When questioned about what the advertised "creature comforts" will be included, Josh answered that he'll be there in person on every flight flying Sydney to London, giving passengers foot massages (which he then tried to demonstrate on ensemble cast member Nicola Parry (with whom Josh has a prior theatresports background, as I've mentioned before, and I'd say - both from her panicked reaction and his committed intention to get her boots off so he could "massage" her feet - that he knows she hates it or is extremely tickling or something). For entertainment, the passengers are invited to skydive on the end of a bungee rope. Then, in a brilliant stroke of genius that very few are able to provide, he laughing told the camera that the three of them "have so much fun when I come on the show," before turning to Nicola again and saying, "Tell them that story you told me last time. Don't be shy; she sings an amazing song. She has the voice of an angel that swallowed a nightingale." I'm guessing Nicola misheard or misunderstood what was meant by that comment, because she gave him the deadliest filthy look I think I've ever seen (in character, though). However, I suspect it may have been more about her trying to maintain a deadpan face, rather than sending him a "message" in the glare. Apparently, what we call "flight attendants", he calls "cough cough" (literally). When Nicola asked what she'd have to do if she wanted to become a Jetplus flight attendant, Josh laughed good-naturedly and assured her that she was MUCH too old. Finally, Jetplus' advertising campaign, where they claim that they're fighting childhood obesity, was brought up - and Josh was asked how this could possibly be true. He told them that they offer free lyposuction mid-flight, and when Nicola made the mistake of saying, "Oooh", he scathingly remarked, "Yeah, 'Oooh'; it's got HER attention!" In the Family Plus Benefit commercial, Josh was standing with two young schoolgirls (obviously playing the roles of his daughters), and he told us how he'd sold his computer "... because Mummy left. She thought it'd be fun to go off and have a new Daddy". He said the best thing about the family plus benefit was the smiles on his little girls' faces, although he got their names muddled and cracked it when they corrected him: "Dammit! I want name badges on both of you!" With the $5,000, he said, "Ooh, I think a holiday - how does that sound, girls? Daddy goes to Hawaii and you guys can fend for yourselves? High-five!" Not surprisingly, they didn't respond to the high-five. In the factory boss segment, Josh was asked if this was the toughest thing he's ever had to do, to which he replied, "Yeah," then brightened as he remembered, "... No! At the fun fair I had the hammer (mimes slamming a sledgehammer onto the strength-tester sensor) and got the thing almost to the very top." The filmmaker (who was played by TGYH creator and location director Rob Sitch, by the way - if you were trying to place the voice) then asked him about Josh's own recent pay rise while 75 people were about to lose their jobs; he asked how he justifies that decision. "I try not to," Josh told him, "It's dodgy. DODGY!" Then he looked at the camera. "Is that recording?" His assistant entered and asked Josh if he felt okay, but Josh replied that he'd had a bad "quince" this morning (I couldn't work out if that's the same thing as a quiche, or something else I've never heard of). When his assistant asked if he could get Josh anything for it, Josh said another "quince" would be good. As they all walked to the assembled employees, the filmmaker reminded Josh that his father had started this factory, and asked him how he thought his father would feel about him closing it down ... to which Josh (in a brilliant stroke of genius) replied, "Well, you can ask him," and then turned to his assistant and asked, "Dad, how do you feel about it?" When talking to one of his employees about the tough times he was going to face and how much Josh was sympathetic towards him, he broke into laughing and apologised for not being able to be sincere with him about his bleak prospects. Another employee said he didn't think Josh even knew what they do; Josh further compounded this perception by agreeing that he didn't know what they did, but he pointed to two women in coveralls and hairnets, and asked, "You guys do the Laverne and Shirley re-enactment at the Christmas party, don't you?" In the group scene, he was told via satellite link-up that his was the "greenest" household in Australia, and he got so ridiculously overexcited about it, it was hilarious. He then kissed his "wife" (played by Roz Hammond; the same ensemble cast member he groped twice, last time he appeared on the show). His jubilation turned into jeering, when he snarled into the camera, giving the audience the finger and chanting, "In your face! Ohh, you idiots!" He then took us through the most complicated and hysterical recycling bin system any of us have ever heard; even though it was convoluted, he spoke as if it was the simplest way of doing things that had ever been suggested. Josh is great; he's always great, and he'll always be great. How great Josh art!

The most startling thing about this episode was that it was the first in the history of the show to start WITHOUT any version of the title line. That's right, I listened to it back and forth for about forty minutes (and you KNOW I did), but when Nicola Parry entered the scene and joined Rebel in the "main studio" for the Global Aid broadcast, she only says hello and introduces herself, then they cut to the opening "titles" of the show-within-the-show and continued from there. At no point did anyone say, "Thanks God you're here!", and I think this was because Rebel was meant to be the one to say it. Why else was she left alone on the soundstage for several dead-air seconds with nothing to do and no one to talk to, if not so she could greet the entering Nicola with the opening line? Unsurprisingly, this (simple) point was completely lost on the Wedge actress, who simply said, "Hi".

Oh well, they can't all be geniuses like me.

You can watch Dave’s schoolroom Olympian scene for yourself by visiting the official website.


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