Who wouldn’t be shocked and surprised – as the lady above appeared to be – if you were given the keys to a $3 million luxury home just for saying “thank you”.

We at The Bug’s Media Glass House would be. We’re fairly confident you would be too.
So, how did all this come about then?

Co-anchor Melissa Downes kicked off the Nine News 6pm bulletin out of Brisbane on Thursday night with this as she and Andrew Lofthouse read out the bulletin’s main items: “…And a single mum who landed a three million dollar house for saying thank you”.

Well, Channel 9, well done! To paraphrase Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire you had us at “Good evening.”

We simply had to know more and we were prepared to put up with the bulletin’s nightly putdowns of the tired, washed up and discredited Palaszczuk government on a number of fronts, including youth crime, health, housing and for being in power far too long, and not just from Tim Arvier but other reporters as well, to find out this woman’s secret.

And then came another tease towards the end of the second ad break: “The small act of gratitude that changed the life of a south-east family … tonight, the single mum given a three-million dollar home just for saying thank-you”.

Given! You can’t state facts plainer than that! G.I.V.E.N! And just for saying nice things! Where do we all sign up? Let’s all shout “Show me the mansion!” in our best Tom Cruise voice.

The tease continued just before the third ad break: “How saying thank-you put a south-east single mum into a three-million dollar dream house!”

She definitely said it! Is it any wonder we at the MGH were glued to our screens, not even prepared to go for a piss at this stage, even though we knew it would be the bulletin’s last story for the night and we had plenty of time to do that!

And so we waited …. patiently and with great expectations.

And the end result: not a bad yarn, to be fair, but not quite what we’d been led to believe. Well, nothing like it, really.

It turns out that this single mum of two had one lad who got a little bit derailed in his teenage years and had been helped get back on track by a caring organisation whose good deeds an art unions helps fund.

And this single mum, bless her cotton socks, wanted to thank those carers in her own way for what they did for her boy. Sure, she could have made a donation to show her appreciation – and any amount would have been fantastic ‘cos we can assume life remains a bit of a struggle for her – but she decided – and fair enough, too – to show her thanks by way of buying a ticket in the luxury home draw.

She always thought it would be nothing more than a donation … just like millions of Australians have made similar donations to tonight’s Lotto draw with or without troubled offspring.

But guess what?! She won!

Now, we at the MGH will never know if the Channel 9 news crew asked this lucky lady to look surprised and shocked as she was handed the keys to her new home that has well and truly turned her fortunes and that of her family around.

To be fair, as we at The Bug always are, perhaps she wasn’t aware she was going to be handed the keys there and then during the shoot. But on your behalf, we’ll stick with first impressions.

Regardless, we remain in awe of the station’s efforts at creative writing filled with neat little hooks to suck us in – perhaps to disguise the denouement – especially the use of “given” when no such thing was ever done, and that the home was a reward for saying thank you when she said nothing of the sort. She showed her thanks and gratitude by an act, not by words.

Ordinarily, the MGH would salute creative writing of this standard except it probably jars a bit in a news bulletin dedicated to presenting facts in a fair, open and professional way. The vision of her reaction and the ease with which it could be misinterpreted did nothing to undermine the clever if tacky misdirection in play here.

We just hope this lucky single mum has given her son half-ownership in this beautiful home. It’s as much his as it is hers. She couldn’t have won it without him.