There’ll be no avoiding this one. This is the series that, due to some miracle accident of chemistry, has come from behind like a doped race horse, out of the back end of who-gives-a-fuck to the country’s number one psychodrama. Like most of these shows they extract the pure psycho with a giant syringe by locking the subjects inside a pressure cooker for weeks on end with no phones, no TV, no contact with anyone but the other hand-picked narcissists, diagnosable personality disorders or people who are nice but voted most likely to crack under pressure like the San Andreas fault. The shining neutron star of this series is Laurina. They had her pegged as a stuck-up poodle from the start and have been pushing her buttons ever since. They do this first by throwing her out of a plane – a genius move since they’re not allowed to actually do funny pinchy-grabby things to her face or draw on it or dress her up to look like Maleficent, so they let wind and terminal velocity do the work and get lots of close-ups. And now Bachelor is taking her on a date to the lowest rent corner of the harbour as the other girls have used up all the boats and waterside restaurants and nice islands. After a cheap date in a deserted bowling alley they will go to the famous hot-dog wagon Harry’s Cafe de Wheels which is on the harbour’s south side between the parked naval vessels and the public housing. I know from going here myself you can take your hot dog to the water and see cute families of rats swimming back and forth.

Now about Bachelor. He is looking for love in all the right places, and when he started running low on places they brought in a new busload of girls for him to string along with his flipbook of platitudes, like he is some kind of Stepford Husband with his repeating robot cues and responses. And we know he is also running out of places on Sydney harbour to take his dates on, as Laurina can well attest. The theme of the show seems to be that in preparation for marriage and settling down a man should embark on a 3 month season of philandering. But at least it’s honest in-your-face philandering. Come to think of it, we’re only assuming marriage in Bachelor-world is monagamous and not some kind of harem scene. Have we checked that he is truly not a Mormon or some kind of Arabian prince?

And now Osher, the hairstyle formerly known as Andrew G. He was Cleo magazine’s 2003 Bachelor of the Year. It must be a come down to be this new guy’s valet and bearer of bad tidings. I shouldn’t make fun of Osher’s hair because too many others are doing it.