It’s the only show on TV where you’ll see a giant Kebab go to battle against a massive Baby, Duster, Vampire or Pavlova, and it’s gearing up for its third season.
Fresh from his hosting duties on The Bachelor Australia, Osher Günsberg spoke to 10 play about what to expect for Season 3 of The Masked Singer Australia.
Trading Rose Ceremony whispers for pyrotechnics and extravagant performances, Osher will be once again leading the nation on the most spectacular guessing game around.
“It’s absolutely the perfect escapism,” Osher told 10 play over the phone, “the set-up and reward are all happening in the same episode, it’s the purest form of silly television, which I love.”
Looking back at the first two seasons, there are many standout performances when recalling the weird and wonderful ways the celebrities hiding beneath the glorious masks have lit up the stage. From a giant Cactus singing No Doubt’s ‘Just A Girl’ to Queen’s hauntingly beautiful rendition of ‘I Will Survive’, there are no limits to the production values the team behind-the-scenes will go to in order to wow the guessing panel and us watching at home.
“There are some [performances] on the new season I can’t talk about yet which are just astonishing,” Osher teased. “It just goes beyond anything that you can imagine!”
“There’s a team of people that produce all of those musical numbers, they’re the guys that put together Britney’s show in Las Vegas,” he continued. “They’re absolutely astounding at what they do and they dream up these incredible, bizarre performance pieces and then they hand it to the production team and they go, ‘Can you build this?’ And they go, ‘Yeah… we can build that!’
For those at home that haven’t embraced the wild and wacky world of The Masked Singer, Osher laughed at the idea of their reaction to flicking through channels and seeing for the first time some of the exceptional performances.
Celebrities don the most elaborate outfits and give out extremely cryptic clues to their identity before taking to the stage to belt out tunes, the biggest clue of all being their singing voice. With the guessing panel of Jackie O, Dave Hughes, Dannii Minogue and Urzila Carlson attempting to crack the case and a celebrity ‘unmasked’ each episode, it’s non-stop fun for us at home, and everyone on stage as well.
“Everyone that works on the show — Urzila, Dannii, Jackie, Dave, Me — we’ve all thankfully had great careers in broadcasting and performance, and when you’re performing at that level, you know everything that’s going to happen,” Osher said.
From the moment the camera starts recording to the second you say ‘Good night Australia’, Osher said every single beat is rehearsed, scripted and planned out in advance.
“This is the first show that any of us have worked on that we don’t know everything,” he continued.
“When you see our faces, that’s because we want to know - we normally know everything! The punchline to every gag, we’ve rehearsed everything. So for us to not know is just joyful. I’m playing the game with people watching at home.”
No stranger to having people come up and ask him about the shows he’s hosted over the years, Osher admitted that shockingly fans of The Masked Singer don’t approach him begging for spoilers.
“They don’t want me to tell them, they want to say their guesses to me,” he said, laughing.
“My answer is always the same. Everything’s a guess until the mask comes off!”
The Masked Singer Australia premieres Monday, 13 September At 7.30pm on 10 and 10 play