The HHDRS’s head of entertainment and gonorrhoea control is also its resident crooner, Philippe. 

Celebrated across the senior cruise industry as one of the best Perry Como-themed cabaret performers on the high seas, Philippe joined the HHDRS team in 2001, following a severe outbreak of chlamydia which forced the closure and eventual bankruptcy of the Poseidon Group. In its court filings, Poseidon’s CEO, Captain Francis de Groot, described Philippe as “gonorrhoea in trousers” and blamed him for the once thriving firm’s collapse.

Born to a one-armed bagpiper and her one-legged baton-twirling cousin in Edinburgh in 1969, Philippe has music and entertainment in his bones. This strong pedigree saw Philippe graduate from the Hibernian Mass Piped Band for Juvenile Delinquents and move straight into southeast Scotland’s energetic cabaret scene, where he established a reputation as that country’s best Englebert Humperdinck tribute act, before migrating to Australia in the late 1980s. 

After living under a false name for several years and earning a living as a human guinea-pig for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer during the day, and as a backing musician and gigolo at night, Philippe secured a job with the ill-fated Costa Concordia, where his one-man ‘Perry Como and the Proclaimers’ tribute show caught the eye of Gina Rinehart.

On the mining magnate’s recommendation, Dr. Truthwright  offered Philippe a trial position alongside the Tony Bartuccio dancers during the Speargun and Snorkel Bistro’s formative years.