Wherein our telly hero learns that the course of true love never did run smooth, dishes the dirt

Bachelor battles to find babe

Who would have thunk it? Turns out the best way to meet the girl of your dreams is not as a participant on a reality TV show. 

“I was in there, fully committed to try and find a partner to spend the rest of my life with. That was my main goal,” The Bachelor SA’s Lee Thompson told Gareth Cliff on Cliff Central, the streaming channel. 

 “What are you? What are you, retarded?” Cliff shot back.

Thompson said he had been ill prepared for the manipulation the producers subjected him to over two months of filming and going on dates with 24 women.

Some of the personal stuff he told his dates (which the producers screened, betraying his confidence) strained things with his mother. He suffered from “mental issues” after the show. And he ended up parting company with his true love (one of two) from the show a month after filming wrapped. 

Hot spit! Holding onto soul mates is hard to do.

Still there is an upside to all the misery. It’s provided grist for a new tell-all book, The Truth Behind The Rose, which according to an IOL report carried in the Daily News is “explosive”. (It’s not clear if anyone from IOL has actually read the book.)

Says Thompson: “I’ll be speaking about some of the women in the book as well. Putting a lot of false rumours to bed.”

Who said the age chivalry is behind us?

Booster control

We all know that South Africa’s motoring hacks go the extra mile when it comes to singing the praises of the cars they are given to try out. But Indy’s Willem van de Putte takes his  boosterism responsibilities so seriously he even does his bit to button up sales for the hard-pressed local auto industry after hours. 

Last week Van de Putte told how he was bearded by a chap who took a shine to his test car and wanted one just like it – “same colour, same spec, everything”.

“And with that I was on the phone speaking to the people at Mercedes-Benz trying to organise a CLA AMG 35 4Matic for a bloke in his late twenties that had walked over to me after I had parked it in the complex where my partner lives.

“Ironically he was on the verge of signing for a CLA 220d before he became all AMG 35 happy,” gushed our scribe.

 More happenstance than irony, really. Still, it’s good to see the power of the press at work, much like a “2.0 litre four cylinder turbo-charged mill that manages to push out 225kW and 400Nm pared [sic] to a sublime seven-speed dual clutch transmission”, you might say.

Too quiet

Sometimes you have to go to the car manufacturers themselves to find criticism of their own products, even if it’s of the self-serving, humble-brag sort. 

According to a Bloomberg report carried in Moneyweb and other outlets, Rolls-Royce discovered a serious fault in their latest Ghost model during development – it’s too quiet. 

Early test audiences reported that the car felt so quiet it was disorienting. “Bordering on nausea,” said the car’s lead engineer, Jon Simms.

The answer lay in lots of engineering to introduce the right kinds of sounds. Among other things, a “soft undertone” was piped into the cabin of the car and Simms and his team tuned the rear seat frames and components in the boot to vibrate at a specific low frequency, “as musicians might tune instruments to a particular pitch”.

It’s puffery really, albeit of a superior sort. 

But if you really want to see how the masters do it, go back a generation to the famous David Ogilvy advert: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.” 

When you’re good, you’re good

“I’m very, very nervous and erratic [in chases] and all sorts of funny stuff [in my head]. I try to hide it. I get very stressed like any player does before playing. I’m proud of my performances, I want to perform for the team and have any impact in us winning games. I want to show the owners I’m here for a good reason.” – Abraham Benjamin de Villiers on hitting an unbeaten 55 off 22 balls to help his IPL team, Royal Challengers Bangalore, to an unlikely victory against Rajasthan Royals on Saturday (as reported widely). 

The three-time ICC one-day international player of the year retired from Proteas duties in 2018, but that could change. Sport24 reminds us that AB is “still potentially available for the Proteas in T20 cricket, and based on what we are seeing in IPL 2020, he still has plenty to offer”. And how.