Singapore. Home to the world’s maddest taxi drivers. Where dead ducks are strung up in shop windows, you throw your peanuts on bar floors and merlions are everywhere. Sweat. Sweat, More sweat. An environment so inconducive to body contact, I am actually amazed that there are five million Singaporeans.
Cue The Bachelorette Australia Season 2 Finale.
The episode opens with Georgia strolling through a Singapore garden, unable to believe she is in Singapore. Me too. I can’t remember sweating as much as I did in Singapore. I can think of few worse places to get dolled up in a long dress and plaster my face with make-up just to watch your eyelashes melt down your cheeks. And to hug someone?
Scoot.com has injected a bit of sponsorship and has given Georgia some sort of “family and potential beaus” package deal. To be honest, there is soooooo much product placement in this episode, I can scarcely concentrate on the agony and the ecstasy that is about to unfold.
Anyway, the whole point of this episode is for the boys to meet Georgia’s family, in the form of older sister Kate who’s there to ask the HARD questions, and Dad (erectile dysfunction specialist) Dr Chris Love, who must be there to administer prostate exams. Kate is most critical of Georgia’s choices on men, because judging by the empty fourth finger of her left hand, Kate is quite the expert on love and marriage.
After a quick, yet poignant video message from her Mum, it’s time to get things under way and Georgia retrieves Matty from the garden bed he has been sitting in since he landed in Singapore. He is now sockless. OMG. It’s one thing to go sans socks in miserable Sydney weather, but to add nervous sweat to Singapore sweat? I can’ even begin to fathom the bacteria soup brewing in those loafers.
Kate wastes no time launching into the hard hitting question.
“How old are you? What is your birth order? Do you like cats?”
From his answers, Katie has gleaned that Matty possibly has a middle child complex and he will tolerate cats. Then she pulls out her BIG one.
“Where are you from?”
Matty pops his cork and then lists every address he has ever had:
“Well first I lived in Port Augusta and then we moved to Brisbane and then I moved to Sydney and then I moved to London and then my sister told me I was going to move back to…um…um…Sydney.”
“Well Sydney isn’t Melbourne,” observes Chris.
“I don’t think my sister would like me moving to Melbourne.”
Gulp. Matty is really regretting the dark long-sleeved shirt and jeans. He has to hug Katie good-bye and not let the dinner-plate sized sweat patches make contact with her skin.
Lesson learned. For Lee’s inquisition, they have moved the whole thing indoors.
Katie has gone the whole tube of red lippy and the cupid bow lips. This means she can accentuate her disdain for Lee by pucking her mouth so that it’s as tight as the arse of a cat with haemorrhoids.
She thinks Lee is too smooth. I think Katie resents having a prettier more successful sister and doesn’t want Georgia to be successful.
The outcome of the inquisition is that Chris is team Lee and Katie is team Matty.
“At this time, Matty would be the front-runner…for me,” says Katie to camera, like she’s devised a plot where Georgia picks Matty, Katie locks Georgia in the boot of a car, drugs Matty, applies her best effort at a smoky eye make-up, crawls into his bed and manages to get him to inseminate her.
Georgia, despite being a journalist, can’t pick up on this, but is confused by the conflicting advice. Best go off on another round of dates.
So the next day Georgia and Matty begin their date at the Bell of Happiness. They dong the big bell and then write a father-of-the-bride toast “To great relationship and eternal happiness” (or something equally as droll) on a little bell and then leave it as a sign of their potential eternal bliss.
The next part of the date sees them zip-lining on Sentosa. They are all harnessed up and ready to go, with a promise of a kiss at the end.
“How’s it hangin’?” asked Georgia before pushing off. What a stupid question. Clearly it’s not hanging at all. There’s a leather harness between his legs and it’s firmly wedged in his throat.
For the evening part of the date, Georgia takes Matty to a butterfly enclosure. Judging by my experience of butterfly enclosures (this recap is brought to you courtesy of Coffs Harbour Butterfly House), the only place more humid and sweaty than Singapore would be a butterfly enclosure in Singapore.
Matty tries to look impressed, but given that he been complaining about butterflies all day, the literal version is probably all a bit too much. He pulls her face close and fixates on her eyes, so that he won’t focus on the moths in drag and she can’t see the sweat patches under his arms.
Lee, on the other hand, seems incapable of sweat. In fact, so confident is he in his coolness, that he turns up with a double layer on his top half.
For their date, Georgia has opted for a tri-shaw. It’s just like a helicopter, except that it has three wheels, only operates on the ground and doesn’t go very fast. But it does have a pilot…well pedaller, which leaves them free to kiss one another.
Night falls very quickly and Georgia has organised a ride on a bumboat (Bum! How hilarious!) which starts off OK until Georgia tells Lee that Kate wasn’t impressed with him because he is too smooth.
“That’s because she’s a bitter, man-hating, cat-loving bitch,” says Lee. Or at least he would have if he wasn’t so smooth. Instead he makes excuses for Katie. She’s protective, blah…blah…blah.
They finish the date with what possibly could be the clincher: a swim in the infinity pool atop the fifty-sixth floor of the Marina Bay Sands overlooking the lights of Singapore. Jeez, those surroundings would make Adolf Hitler irresistible. And she’s up there with Lee. Lee!
And then Lee tells her that he loves her and somewhere a string section reaches a crescendo and I’m pretty sure Lee’s her guy….
…and then I remember the whole Nikki and Alex fiasco. I got nothing.
Finally it’s D-day.
Georgia readies herself by carting a yoga mat around the Botanical Gardens. Sweated out three bottles of champagne just by doing that.
Then suddenly, it’s night time. Georgia has put on her frock and jewels and brushed her teeth with Oral B.
The boys are sprucing themselves up, saving time by eliminating socks, and putting on suits which appear to have been shrunk by the humidity. But I have to make a confession here; there is a point where Lee sprays a bit of Perry Ellis on himself. I’ve never smelt Perry Ellis, but by God, if I didn’t for a split second smell Lee wearing it.
Hubba hubba. Now that’s good product placement.
Osher appears long enough to get paid, then disappears. It’s all up to Georgia now.
She stands, expectantly and nervously at the end of a rose petal path. The first car pulls up and out steps…
… Matty.
And she builds him up: we laughed and we laughed and we played croquet and you caught me on the trapeze and you did your funny little Matty show and did I say we laughed?
“But I’m in love with someone else.”
Well. You can’t spend that much time around Osher without learning some Maths, and Matty realises she’s talking about Lee.
Poor little Matty is heartbroken. He made her a mixed tape. He spent all day colouring in his Get to Know Matty sign.
But in the end, it came down to one thing; they both had overbearing sisters named Kate.
So that only leaves the arrival of Lee, and I can’t help but wonder; do they replenish the rose path? Or does Lee know that he’s the chosen one after seeing the crushed and smeared petal trail left by the dragging feet of a dejected Matty?
The rest is pretty much Bachelorette textbook stuff:
I love you, Lee!
I love you, Georgia!
Smooch.
And I’m happy for them, I truly am. But mostly, I’m just happy that it’s over.
friday night with kath 