Christian mud wrestling

In the episode of the TV3 reality series, broadcast at 7.30pm on Friday, 20 August, contestants posed for a female photographer, wearing bikinis and accessories, with their bodies covered in mud.

However, some of the girls posed topless, although their breasts were covered in mud and concealed by steam rising from the pools.

One 16-year-old girl, series runner-up Michaela Steenkamp, said as she prepared to pose topless that though she was a Christian, "I don't think that's going to stop me from a lot of things as long as I have confidence in myself and confidence in the Lord."

Passing over Ms Steenkamp's prediction that her faith will not stop her doing a lot of things, I am impressed by the serendipity of the steam rising from the pools concealing the models' breasts. It reminds me of Pete and Dud:

- You haven’t seen the Rubens? There’s one over there. Yes, lovely, he does all the fat ladies with nothing on. Great big fat ladies, except for a tiny little wisp of gauze always lands on the appropriate place, if you notice that. Always the wind blows a little bit of gauze over you know where, Dud. See it down there, can’t you.

- Of course it must be a million-to-one chance, Pete, that a gauze, you know, lands in the right place at the right time on his painting.

- Of course it is, yeah.

- I bet there’s thousands of paintings that we’re not allowed to see, where the gauze hadn’t landed in the right place, but on the nose or something.

- Well, I suppose if the gauze landed on the wrong place, Dud, you know, landed on the nose or the elbow or somewhere unimportant, what Rubens did was put down his paint and went off to have lunch probably.

- Yeah, or have a good look.

- Of course you don’t get gauze floating around in the air these days, do you, like it did in Renaissance time, there’s always gauze in the air in those days.