Shebangabang's Next Top Model #10

Ooooh, it’s getting pointy with only sex girls left.
Each week, before New Zealand’s Next Top Model screens on my telly, I have to prepare myself for the tension and drama.

Sara Tetro brand industrial-strength hairspray? Check.


Bowl of potato wedges? Check.

Candles, soft music and tissues for scenes involving Chris Sisarich? Check.


Reality check? Sorry. Full.


The Judges.


Sara Tetro
Sara, I tried impersonating your weekly mantra “WHO... will be New Zealand’s Next Top Model?”out loud, and I scared next door’s cat. It’s a microphone, sweetie. It makes things louder so that you don’t have to.
Also: lace. A brooch. Bouffant hair. Horizontal sequins in the afternoon. None of these things have their own chapter in Dress Your Age! A Young-ish Woman’s Guide To Avoiding The Frump. Just saying.


Chris Sisarich
At the close of the shopping challenge, when Chris and the girls are shielding the clothes-changing Christobelle on the street, a shot lingers on Chris’s arse for a total of three seconds. If someone can find the contact details of that particular cameraman, please let me know, as I would like to buy him a beer. Also, Chris? Please say hi to your taller twin, Nigel Barker for me. A quick tongue in the ear will be fine.


Colin Mathura-Jeffree
Oh, Colin Hyphenated-Surname. It’s so good/confusing/terrifying to have you back in form. Let’s tiptoe quietly past the Cover Girl shoot’s green and blue argyle jumper (lest we should wake it and it gets cranky. Er. CrankiER), and head straight to the Eliminarium.


So dapper! So pin-striped! So poised and pinched! So square-haired! So I-just-sucked-on-a-lemon-that-I-plucked-from-my-insanely-large-corsage!


Wait – I think I have a picture of it here somewhere...

Corsage courtesy of Microsoft Paint and thirteen seconds of effort. That’s value, people.

The Icksint.

Whenever I’m writing these incredibly helpful and informative guides to the New Zealand language, I have to say the words out loud before I type them. My housemates think I have both Tourette’s Syndrome and a little bit of mental retardation. TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Top Sex – The last handful of modules still in the competition.

Lummo – A big long car that causes continuous and relentless squealing.

Cover Gew – A young female with flawless skin and sexy eyes who can’t remember her lines for shut.

Wit – what you get when you sit in the ocean in a fancy frock.

Fit – what you get if you don’t keep fut.

Work Ithuck – What you’ll need if you want to stop being fit, get fut, and become a Cover Gew.

Budgetirry Lumutations.

• For the shopping challenge, the girls are each given seventy-five dollars and asked to buy an outfit with it. AND NOT A SAVEMART IN SIGHT. My advice? A dollar over each nipple, fifteen dollars glued around the crotch, and fifty-eight dollars to get a cab to the airport.

• The punishment for the losers of the shopping challenge is to spend three hours in a fishtank in the reception area of the hotel. That’s an actual sentence. Describing something that actually happens. File under: Oh, For Fuck's Sake.

• For this week’s shoot, we’ll take the girls to Santa Monica Pier, a long jetty topped with all manner of colourful, exciting attractions. Then we’ll stick them underneath and get them to wallow around in grey scungy surf, charmingly marbled with rotting kelp and homeless-man’s piss. I only hope the budget can stretch to cover emergency vaccinations.

• The judging desk in the Eliminarium this week appears to be made of two guys crouching on all fours with a pashmina thrown over them. Apparently now Ikea does a range called Lumpy And Moving. Only in Swedish. Obviously.

• Hi, The Standard Hotel. Your sign’s upside down.

Bist Buts.

• There are two episodes in every series of every Top Model mutation that I love so much that I want to melt them down, forge them into something sharp and pierce them through my heart so they’re there permanently. The first, clearly, is the makeover episode, particularly if anyone’s getting their weave removed or their eyebrows bleached. The second is any episode that features a tape-measure. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t love hip-measuring episodes because they shame and humiliate the modules, it’s just that I love them because they shame and humiliate the modules. Oh. Huh. Look at that.

• If you’ve just been told by a modelling agent that you need to lose two inches off your hips, would you:
a) Eat some lettuce and get on a treadmill;
b) Skip the lettuce and get on a treadmill; or
c) Tuck into a plate of potato wedges, because they have less fat than shoestring fries.

Seriously. Ladies. It's like preferring to fall to your death from a cliff covered with spinifex rather than buffalo grass. Either say goodbye to potatoes forever, or say hello to frying them as a career.

• Teryl-Leigh. The red Guess dress. Oh honey, no.

• Next time I want to scare small children away from my backyard, I’m going to set up a screen on the patio that shows looped videos of Teryl-Leigh and Ho(sanna)’s Cover Girl commercials. THE SHORT-CIRCUITING ROBOTS ARE GOING TO EAT YOU, CHILDREN. ‘Saright, but – you’re less fattening than shoestring fries, and odds are they’ll vomit you up again.

• Okay, so Ho(sanna) is short. She’s sort of pretty-ish. She poses for photographs like she’s itchy in four different places at once. She has teeth like closely-parked Holden utes and owns skin-tight leggings with jeans printed on them. Why. Is. She. Still. Here.

Teryl-Leigh is eliminated over Ho(sanna), because someone clearly poked the judges’ eyes out with a sharp stick. NOT DAVOON, GUYS. Not davoon at all.

E haere ra, Teryl-Leigh! Thanks for all the laughs.

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