Joe Hildebrand: Why Kyle Sandilands on The Masked Singer is just what society needs

After a dog of a year, King Kyle’s surprise appearance on The Masked Singer feels like destiny, writes Joe Hildebrand.

There is an old Alexei Sayle joke about a man who buys a horse.

The man takes it back to his farm and takes it for a ride but there’s a tree fallen on the track. He tries to jump it but instead the horse just crashes straight into it.

Puzzled, the man tests the horse again by attempting to jump a fence but again the horse just ploughs straight into it. This time the man takes it up a notch. He points the horse towards the barn wall and digs in his heels. Sure enough the horse gallops at full speed and smashes into the wall.

Furious, the man takes the horse back to the bloke who sold it to him.

“This horse is blind!” he shouts. “You’ve sold me a blind horse!”

“No, it’s not blind,” the salesman calmly assures him. “It just doesn’t give a f***.”

Kyle Sandilands agreed to appear on The Masked Singer - with one condition.

This brings us to the week’s highlight on television. Nay, perhaps the year’s. There are some things you don’t know are missing from your life until you get them.

Kyle Sandilands dressed as a Paw Patrol puppy on The Masked Singer is one of those things.

At the risk of mixing zoological metaphors, 2021 has been a dog of a year. It is now clear, in the cool light of retrospect, that Sandilands pulling off a giant foam puppy head on prime time television is the one thing society needed.

In true Sandilands form, when producers first asked him to name any price for being a contestant on the show he told them to get stuffed because he couldn’t be bothered. Eventually he agreed to doing a one-off cameo, apparently on the proviso that he was allowed to go home between his song and the big reveal.

However, he did at least insist that it was really him singing.

Joe Hildebrand says Kyle Sandilands’ performance was the TV highlight of the week.

Now just imagine if you will a fortune teller predicting that in 2021 amid Australia’s biggest Covid lockdown Kyle Sandilands would perform the song Drops of Jupiter by Train while dressed in a furry dog suit.

No one on Earth could have foreseen it and yet now that it’s happened it feels like it was destiny. Because Kyle Sandilands is the horse that doesn’t give a f***.

And that is the horse we need right now.

Joe Hildebrand is on 2GB Nights with John Stanley on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8pm

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Why Kyle Sandilands on The Masked Singer is just what society needs