Of course the running gag of the Cooking Show is that they don’t actually get around to cooking anything.
Jimeoin “What are we cooking tonight Bob?”
Bob “Jim, before we cook anything…”
They did show us an Irish cocktail (a glass of Guinness with a potato shoved on the side of the glass as a garnish) and Potato Wedgies. (They put tiny undies on potatoes and gave them wedgies.) They also manage to utilise a lot of kitchen utensils, but always in surprising ways.
If you’ve seen them do this on TV (And they’ve done it on the Jimoen show, at a couple of Comedy Galas and at the recent Comic Relief on Channel 7), you know what to expect. A string of creative prop gags from the lame to the glorious, dry non-sequitur’s and Bob occasionally licking a rubber frog.
To break up the two way banter they had an assistant called Marcus who played various roles and had apparently stepped in at the last minute to provide excellent support. One of his personas was the egg-timer dancing boy. He entertains you by shimmying while you wait for your egg to boil for exactly three minutes. There was also a set piece of audience participation called “Guess the Biscuit” in which an audience member was blindfolded, a Tupperware container of assorted biscuits was produced and (you guessed it!) a selected biscuit was given to the participant to guess. They were pretty easy, starting with The Teddybear. To celebrate a correct guess Jimoen, Bob and Marcus put on silly wigs and danced about playing air-guitar to a rock anthem, whilst the blindfolded guest was encouraged to play air-drums. This image proved very amusing indeed. My only criticism was in doing five biscuits rather than three, though fun, it dragged on just a little too long.
They also promoted a bogus cookbook, that had a section called “Cooking for the pissed” – eg. Baked Bean Surprise: You come home from the pub drunk and hungry and find a tin of baked beans in the cupboard you didn’t know you had.
I know that I’ll never get tired of seeing Jimeoin and Bob do their Cooking Show, I love it, if you’ve never seen it, you’re missing a classic comedy team routine that will go down in Australian comedy history.