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Photo: © Channel 5. Source: Digital Spy.

I unashamedly love Neighbours, and one of the reasons is because they love a good comedy storyline. Unlike other soaps, Neighbours doesn’t take itself too seriously, and so we can end up in a situation where we have a ridiculous storyline about a CPR doll that goes on for over a week.

Things on Ramsay Street have been kind of serious since before Christmas. Over the festive period there was the whole prison escape/organ donation/hostage crisis (it isn’t lost on me how bonkers it is to write those three things together, by the way) and then we’ve had all the baby drama with Chloe, Pierce, Aaron and David. The Shane and Dipi breakup has been fun for nobody apart from Gary, and so we were about due some comic relief.

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Hendrix and the blue box. Photo: © Channel 5. Source: Metro.

We got some in the form of Hendrix discovering Karl and Susan’s famous blue box and then giving one of the treasures out of it to Harlow under the pretence that it was a cat toy. The way the ‘cat toy’ was clinking together in the bag he handed it to her in left most of us in little doubt as to what it really was, and Karl’s outrage when he found out was pretty glorious.

Hendrix got to prove his comedy chops again last week as he realised that Harlow had a bit of a crush on him, and so attempted to make her feel as uncomfortable as possible by getting up in her grill with his top off as often as he could. My personal highlight was when he dropped to the floor in the school corridor to do press-ups. Not to be outdone in the trolling stakes, Harlow soon cottoned on to what he was doing and came on very hot and heavy in order to turn the tables and make sure Hendrix was the one left feeling uncomfortable. Bravo, Harlow. I wasn’t sold on the idea of these two as a couple, but I’m coming round to the idea.

But by far the biggest recent comedy plot has been Kyle and his sex doll. Kyle is largely a comedy character anyway – he’s a caricature of what a lot of people think an Australian man is, and he’s not particularly sharp, so he’s the perfect punchline for a joke plot.

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Kyle at the perfectly safe Buddy Club. Photo: © Channel 5. Source: Metro.

Kyle wanted to brush up on his first aid skills for Buddy Club, which is probably a good idea because it seems to be turning out to be a more dangerous pastime for your kids than sending them into the Serengeti in a meat suit, what with kids supergluing their hands together and guns turning up in bags. Anyway, Dr Karl was happy to help with the first aid training and let Kyle borrow a CPR doll to practice on.

Now, for this comedy storyline to land we must all somehow believe that several people on Ramsay Street have managed to reach adulthood without ever having laid eyes on a resuscitation doll before. With our disbelief duly suspended, we saw several different people walk in on Kyle with Bianca the CPR doll and immediately assume he was doing something unspeakable to it. In the middle of the living room. In a house he shares with three other grown-ups and a newborn.

There were a variety of cringeworthy encounters with Kyle and Bianca, from Bea and Finn seeing him walking around the living room with her face pressed to his groin, to Toadie hearing Kyle ask her if she was ready to “go another round”. Toadie also witnessed Kyle chatting away to her in the car, except Kyle was actually talking to his dad and fellow simpleton, Gary, on speakerphone at the time.

The Neighbours were very slow to put two and two together and figure out that a doll without much below the belt anatomy to speak of was not for Kyle to use as a substitute for his ex-girlfriend, and it lead to quite possibly the saddest Kyle we’ve ever seen – up to his waist in Lassiters lake with a face like a wet week while Bea and Finn attempted to assure him that they didn’t really think he was a wrong ‘un.

Just in case you’ve already managed to recover from the secondhand embarrassment, here’s a reminder of the timeless romance between Kyle and Bianca, courtesy of the official Neighbours Twitter account.