Taskmaster The Podcast - Ep 39. Mark Watson – S4 Ep.1

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Mark Watson joins Ed on the podcast this week to chat through the first episode of Series 4. They discuss Noel Fielding’s artistic ability, Mel’s impressive Prize task, Lolly’s underscoring, Joe’s beautiful cake destruction and Hugh’s picture of a fat bald white man.  Get tickets to Ed's Touredgamble.co.uk Pre order Bring me the head of the Taskmaster https://taskmasterstore.com/products/bring-me-the-head-of-the-taskmaster Watch all of the Taskmaster on All 4https://www.channel4.com/programmes/taskmaster Get in touch with Ed and future guests:[e-mail]  Visit the Taskmaster Youtube channelwww.youtube.com/taskmaster  For all your Taskmaster goodies visit www.taskmasterstore.com    Taskmaster the podcast is produced by Daisy Knight for AvalonTelevision Ltd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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It's Ed Gamble here, your host as always for the Taskmaster podcast. And it's a very special day here at the podcast because we are moving on to a new series of Taskmaster. As you all know, we are moving on to a new series of Taskmaster. As you all know we are currently delving back through the archives watching Taskmaster from the beginning in order and would you believe it we have reached series four. This is incredible it doesn't seem like yesterday since we started on this journey but we are here we are at series four. A few more episodes in this series, a bit more time to get in depth with all the characters, all the tasks, all the decisions, where Greg went wrong, if he did go wrong, spoiler warning, I always think Greg goes wrong, and where Greg went right. We'll be chatting to special guests every week about each episode of series four of Taskmaster in depth and I'm very happy to say

that today's special guest is Mark Watson of course not from series four he's from series five but it's going to be a while until we get to series five and we've not had Mark on yet so we thought get him on we know he's a fan of the show good friends with Alex of course so he has to watch it to be supportive so he knows his stuff now obviously we want you to watch along with us there's no point listening to this if you haven't watched this episode recently unless you've got some sort of photographic Taskmaster memory. So go and watch episode one of series four. That is of course available on all four

where you can find all of the episodes of Taskmaster. Watch episode one series four, listen to this episode, watch episode two, come back next week to hear us chat about episode two and so on and so on until the end of time. Essentially what I've done by taking on this podcast is sorted myself a perpetual podcast. This will never end. If they keep making Taskmaster this will never end and I'll be honest I'll just go all the way back to the beginning if I have to. So let's hear Mark Watson chat about episode one series four. Mark Watson chat about episode one, series four.

Welcome Mark Watson to the Taskmaster podcast. Hi Ed, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. Thanks very much for coming on the podcast to chat about series four, episode one. Of course, famously a series that you were not in. Yes, it was the series before. In fact, if anything, the whole series had this kind of holding its breath sense because they knew, they must have known I was coming. Right, the shadow of Watson hangs over the whole thing. It's the shadow of Watson, yeah.

Once or twice you see Greg refer to the shadow of Watson and no one knew what the phrase meant. Actually, I think at the time, I think I was maybe booked for the following series roughly while this one was on or something because I remember watching it thinking god I'd love to do that and also being mates with Horne thinking it's you can't really just out and out ask your friend if you can be on their show but it was getting to that stage yeah I suppose once it's once it's series four

is on it's very much tick tick tock come on alex yeah because at that point it still wasn't certain i mean it was already popular but i didn't know how long it would last if it had come and gone without me ever getting my moment a key having been in the first series of course i mean it wasn't it's not like alex just has full control over it but for a while it didn't matter too much but then you'd be in group conversations and other people asking alex about taskmaster talking about how much they like it and stuff like that and yeah inevitably people would ask when you're gonna be on it and that was very unpleasant for me and alex so i reckon i was just but by series five it was simply too embarrassing not to and you can't really ask alex you can't say alex can you

put me on taskmaster because we're not quite sure how long it's going to last no alex well this format holds up can i can I have a crack at it? But obviously, mind you, these days, people more or less do that because it's such an iconic thing now because it's so established. People will often ask me if I can get them on Taskmaster because I'm friends with Alex. They assume I've got like a tunnel

that I can smuggle them through straight into the Taskmaster house or something. I've had that happen a surprising amount because I think I'd always be, I'd be too ashamed to try and blag my way onto any show via a favor from someone i barely maybe that's how yeah people think it works but um yeah i don't normally take these requests onto alex because it would it would be very strange to try and do that i think for both of us yeah i get and i guess the sort of person

who's asking you is probably someone that alex wouldn't necessarily consider putting on if they're going okay the only way i'm going to get on taskmaster is i'm going straight to watson yeah pass it on to alex presumably watson holds the key yeah maybe i've got friends who the whole friendship has been about cultivating that so that they can one day be on taskmaster but no you're right the irony of it is either the person's probably not on the radar or alex it has already thought about them in which case me saying oh they'd love to do it probably doesn't exactly swing it he's not just waiting for five people to put their hands up so obviously yeah you mentioned your friend friends with alex and of course you do no more jockeys with Alex and Tim Key and you've done

Will We Need Answers in the past as well a strong working relationship going into your series of Taskmaster yeah it made it slightly odd because obviously when you there's a sort of protocol that you don't really discuss the tasks with other contestants and you never see each other basically you don't really talk about the show while you're in it um because it's so there's so much potential for spoilers i suppose so it was odd for me and alex not to know how much to discuss it or not because it's a long filming period of course you can't not talk about something for it's a pretty big elephant in the room if you're yeah making a tv show together for i think my mind was stretched out over about six or seven months because in those days they only made one series a year. So it was, which meant by the time

you watched the tasks back, you barely had any memory of some of them and it would send a shudder down your spine when you realised. But there was one time that Alex, I think I went and stayed at Alex's after a filming day. And looking back, that was the only day that I got. So we generally didn't discuss it very much. And we certainly didn't discuss anything about what the other people have done because that would have felt sort of unholy yeah but um there was a moment which i occasionally look back on where uh we'd had a couple of drinks and he said and what about the text to greg are you still keeping that up and um obviously i didn't think anything of it it didn't ring the alarm bells that it should have done yeah i now know he was especially interested in that because that whole uh that whole task depended on me doing it

obviously yeah there was no there was no way of discussing what other people were doing with that one no that was there was no plan b for that task either it would be in the show wasn't and i do remember just very faintly thinking that's all he doesn't normally directly uh address a task like that but the moment was gone and it only came back to me months later that the reason he was following that story was because uh he had no way of knowing whether that would uh pay off that was the only glimmer i ever had of a of a clue from horn i think about anything that was happening um obviously never told me anything that was coming in the actual tasks it was funny because uh it was sort of futile to try and conceal the fact we were friends. Yeah.

So we sort of lent into it and just politely chatted as mates during a lot of the tasks. But at the same time, he's still there with his clock, his eyes boring into you. So there's a limit to how much like friends you feel. And also, of course, there was that episode where they changed all of the scene and I failed to recognise that it wasn't Alex anymore. It was a complete stranger.

So in some ways, the friendship was tested, suppose by the series yeah exactly and you were you were in the original live Taskmaster as well the the Edinburgh Festival version of Taskmaster um do you have any particular standout memories from that yeah not everyone knows that but Alex trialed the idea as a thing where again none of us knew who the other ones were. You just got an email every month asking you to complete a task and then you'd get scores. So it was all done remotely until the Edinburgh Festival when we all met for the first time.

Well, my main memory of it is that at the time I just had a baby. So every time the email would come in, it would be like, hack the biggest thing to pieces with a chainsaw that you can and i think i just can't do that mate oh yeah it sounds really fun but i just occasionally i would do well in one the best one the one i performed best in was uh he was in melbourne and so was i one one year well that year uh during the month of apr April for the comedy festival yeah so the task for that month was uh find the best thing for Alex to do in Melbourne and because I was there I had a big advantage so I arranged to meet him via a series of notes I lured him to a hotel or

something that wasn't our hotel um and then we just got in a lift and I just made him stay in a lift with me for about an hour and we just went up and down up and down and I'd written a series of postcards about our friendship my feelings about about it stuff like that and I just read them out to him while he listened in silence especially I think I did win that task even though it can't have been his best day in Melbourne no I mean it's no offense Mark but that sounds like a genuinely awful way to spend a day yes I think I sort of had revenge in mind by that point basically yeah what what are your I mean let's let's talk about your highlights from your series and then I want to know your general highlights I mean I'm assuming as a friend of alex you are a dedicated fan of taskmaster and watch every single

minute of everything he does i've watched a fair bit of it yeah um i think i mean my highlights are uh people always talk about the song that nish and i wrote and um i do have fond memories of that but um and certainly with hindsight i'm proud of it because it's probably the most, it's been the most reaction I've had to anything I've done in my life, basically. Well, yeah, I mean, the reaction to that is absolutely amazing. It was sort of, it was quite unexpected.

I mean, we thought the task had gone well and then every time the credits rolled, there was, or the titles at the start, there was a two second clip of us playing it as one of the you know so and every time this and i would look at each other thinking is this gonna is it gonna be in this episode because surely will at least look good doing that yeah but they left it of course to the very very end um and when it was broadcast i was in japan weirdly i was on holiday so i slept

through the actual um broadcast of it um and woke up and my phone was absolutely full of people talking about the song at first I thought I'd forgotten it was even on so I just assumed I'd become an overnight pop sensation

but it wasn't clear how exactly Already in Japan ready for the tour I was going to say maybe something I've done in Japan has turned me into

a J-pop star but weirdly one of my favourite moments is also with Nish the same filming day which was the tipping the yogurt off a cherry picker thing the biggest splat was the task um it's funny occasionally quite often i would dither about um with the reading the task and then thinking i'd burn the first five minutes or something just not knowing what to do whereas other people

you'd see them just launch in um but nish is much more of a sort of feet first type operator as you know in life and in uh yeah it's us so we opened the envelope it was pouring down with rain i remember uh we're in the in the car park there outside the house i read the card i think that said make the biggest splat and instantly nish said well i'm thinking yogurt thinking yoghurt. And as if for months he'd been thinking, if I was called upon to make a splat, it has to be yoghurt. Yeah. So as soon as he said it, I was like, I suppose you're right, yeah. It was one of the fastest game plans I've ever had.

But I think, obviously, the setup was absolutely astonishing. This cherry picker in a public park. People, I think they'd cleared an area, but people sort of were standing to watch, understandably. And then getting a boiler suit on, we discussed who was splatting whom. And I didn't fancy particularly going up on the cherry picker,

but then, and this was quite bullish about it. I thought I've sort of got the easy job if i'm just being spiked i've just got to lie there but then when i got given the boiler suit and especially the mask and visor and stuff like that i thought you'd wear less than this going into war and it's only then i started to ask myself how hard it would hit you at that sort of velocity we all remember what happened to aunt mcpartland so exactly gotta wear the goggles nothing safe i know that wasn't yogurt no but it's a good example of the importance of face coverings yeah well before we knew that

face coverings prevented uh the spread of disease so so i did start to feel quite nervous putting on all that gear um and then and having to lie down in what we thought was the spot all this business um and then there was another dimension to it which was that when he got up there nish started to get quite jittery because it was a lot higher than it sort of looked from the ground so he was i was lying on the floor sort of spread eagled for maximum yogurt coverage and i could just hear kumar going i don't like this actually then i could do it i don't fancy this i'm thinking well i mean someone's got to get that yogurt off there man i thought for a minute we were being an on pass where i would have to either swap places with him or i would have to try and persuade alex to create this which i wouldn't put past myself to just force horn to do it and then the he had he had a trial

cleverly he had a trial go at it where he just tipped a tiny bit of yogurt to sort of get a get a marker like in darts and um it went slightly wide so then i knew where to yeah where to lie all this all this time going through my head it does a lot on taskmaster but it was especially a strong moment of thinking how on earth is this my life and career what really not in a bad way just more like there are people at work now and um it's about three in the afternoon you can never predict what what your career is going to end up as. You really can't. Being pelted with yogurt from Britain's foremost satirist. I remember having that thought quite intensely.

I remember thinking about 20 years ago, I would have been in a sixth form school in some lesson. And if I'd been shown this and said, this is where it ends up, I would have thought, well, is that good news or not? Because I can't really make out what's going on here. But it doesn't look like anything my teachers or careers advisors have been suggesting will happen in the future um and what about what about from across the across all the series do you have a do you have a favorite a favorite moment that sticks out well i think because of being friends with alex um i've always enjoyed uh moments where people put him in very difficult awkward situations which

happens constantly of course so is it I think it's the first series, Roisin made him eat all those pies because you had to work out the contents of the pie without breaching the... I was watching that thinking that's exactly what I would have done. I would have just forced him to read them. But you'd have to know Alex reasonably well to dare to... And at that point, it was the first series.

There wasn't really a precedent of, oh, just get Horn to do it. Yeah, that's very true. And I think that holds true for tim key as well because in that first series he made him eat dog food i think the last task of the first series yeah i think a lot of the a lot of the like little alex horn the beaten down persona he has that was forged in the first series when people just used him as a sort of lackey basically yeah and so greg then i think took sort of encouragement from that and started to uh see him more and more like that himself um and there's been other examples of that um tarbuck shoving alex half naked into a cake everyone one

of the great moments yeah again that's funny for everyone but if you're watching that as alex's mate you know what a difficult few minutes of his life that is. Even in my series, Bob shutting him in the, cuddling him in the boot of the car again. Very, very tricky situation for Alex. There was also the hide and seek. There's been various tasks where you have to either hide from Alex or surprise him or shock him. Things like that I tend to enjoy.

That one where they were creeping up on him in a sort of deserted station, was it in the railway yeah that was pretty great as well atmospherically some of the on location tasks have been great because it always brings a surprise on you when uh suddenly they're in a new location but yeah i think my favorite uh motif is tasks that are basically inconvenience uh or worry in some way. Yeah, exactly. I completely get that. That's the relationship between friends. It is.

And Horne's so funny about it because his expression very, very rarely changes. There was a hide-and-seek game where he accidentally touched someone's tit. Was it Mel? It was Mel, that's right. And again, it is... In Vision, he managed to keep the deadpan thing,

but obviously reviewing it in the studio, it was as close as I've seen to someone actually dying under spotlights. So, yeah, I think at least once a series, there's a moment of supreme discomfort for Horne. And I always look forward to those, yeah. Especially because, I i mean it's especially funny as a mate but even if you've not been his mate by the time you've been on taskmaster yourself you you know alex has put you in all sorts of difficult spots so um that sort of

psychic revenge he does deserve what's coming to him yeah we are kicking off our discussions of series four today uh with episode one as is standard um let's talk about the prize task and as we go through their prize star selections let's sort of briefly introduce the contestants and talk about um why they're good additions to the taskmaster cinema yeah universe um so this prize task is i'd say up top i think one of my favorite top lines for a prize task also very difficult i remember thinking at the time like a tough even obviously you get a bit of, unlike the other tasks,

you do get some prep warning for the Pride task, but I wouldn't have known quite where to start with this one, I don't think. It definitely favours people in more of a celebrity position, I think. Yeah, I think, I mean, there's no way I'm getting David Suchet to sign a bean, realistically. Exactly.

So it's most interesting autograph on the most interesting vegetable. It definitely favours people like Noel Fielding and Mel and Hugh, I guess, at that time, because they probably had more links to the celebrity world. But I think because we get David Suchet on a broad bean, it's all worth it. And I feel like it's in a real sweet spot for Fielding because he seems like not only someone that would have a lot of celebrity links,

but somehow he also seems like someone that would probably have weird veg growing in his garden or have access to them. And furthermore, Fielding seems like he'd ask anyone to sign something. He's just, in a lot of ways, Fielding was a dream Taskmaster contestant because his brain is extremely elastic and inventive.

He's also, he's capable of doing really weird stuff, but then he's also got these all these odd real world skills like art and stuff like that so you saw a lot of sides of him in that series exactly yeah he's an incredible contestant and i think david sushon abroad bean is he just knows exactly how to nail the perfect celebrity and perfect vegetable he has access to not an obvious one to go for very obscure but still very sort of very sort of universal as well it's great yeah and even the notion of signing something as tiny as a broad bean is sort of it's inventive i can't i still

can't i'd love to have been there when he asked i'd love to know the story behind it in terms of was it did he take a broad bean with him to an event and he was going to get someone to sign the broad bean well these are the questions you ask yourself when you see what people have done for the pro tasks. How did that come about? I mean, yeah, you can only think he must have walked around with a broad bean and a sharpie for a while. He can't have known specifically Susho was going to be there

and thought, tell you what, Susho, sign me a bean, because even Noel Fielding isn't as confident as that, surely. But I guess it's the case of a broad bean in the pocket and then turning up to an event, seeing Susha and being like, of course, it's got to be a broad bean. As soon as you see Susha, you think, I'm going to be furious with myself if I don't come out of it this way. But again, Noel's much more well-known than I am.

There's no way I've got the status to do that. I think I'd be at that event thinking i've got my bean who is a celebrity who i love it wouldn't be the end of the world if they thought i was an idiot here i can't imagine suche looking at you blankly as you brandished a broad bean it would be terrifying yeah and also i think you just you take that from noel like if noel fielding came up to you and said can you sign this broad bean you'd be like oh here he is stuff again he doesn't even need to mention it's on Taskmaster. He probably didn't mention it. Yeah, I definitely think any task where Fielding has to call us,

someone is doing something odd. He's got such a, I don't know him very well, but the few times I've met him, I'd totally sign a broad bean for him. I'd follow him into any sort of weird situation. So yeah, this is a task that in a way he should win. But to be fair, the standard was high. Yeah, it was really high. I mean, let's talk about some of the lower standards.

First of all, Hugh Dennis gave a long build-up about being a fan of the American civil rights movement. Yeah. Which we're all on edge. And then claimed that Malcolm X had signed a carrot. It didn't ever seem that likely, really. My experience is, because I put a lot of effort into the prize task on the whole,

because I knew that there were points to be had there that would make up for all the times I'd failed to get a ping pong ball out for two, but whatever the rest of it was. But also, I'd seen the earlier series and i did always think if you do sort of a joke one like pretending something's malcolm x it's it sounds good in your head but then when you're in the studio and you see that everyone else has done it properly yeah you're really furious i think this is the moment that hugh dennis finds out he's really misjudged the entire series precisely what you you can mess

about a bit, and it doesn't matter if you do some task badly, but if there's a sense you've not really engaged with the task, that is punished, and quite rightly, I think. This reminded me of, in Series 7, one of the prize tasks is the best thing beginning with G, and James Acaster claims to have brought in Gandhi's glasses. It's just that.

Yeah. No, it's... Pure invention. It's just that. Yeah. No, it's... Pure invention. It's just... I mean, there's always the chance that Greg will just take a shine to that sort of thing. But I feel like... I also feel like as it's gone on,

the fan base takes the scoring more seriously and everything like that. So I think that that should be scandal if someone did a joke one and got the maximum points. I think you've got to do better than pretending. Now, if you turned up with a real Malcolm X signature, then we're interested, obviously. Sure.

But it just didn't seem likely that, for a lot of reasons, really, that Hugh Dennis could have made that happen. Yeah, especially not on like a marrow or something. I mean, it does sum up Hugh, especially in this episode, of thinking he's come up with a really clever idea and then screwing it up at the last minute because he didn't even do the X properly. It's a really weird X. Yeah.

You've got to, we don't know how Malcolm X did this signature, but surely the X was like an X because that was kind of his trademark. Joe Lysa, I love the story behind this one, getting Greg's signature on a yellow courgette. That's right. Yeah. on a yellow courgette that's right yeah um as we know ourselves you and i um enlisting greg into a task sort of against his knowledge or understanding is is very much a mixed blessing yes yeah exactly i mean he so i think greg would have been more on board with this and would have gone the route of being talking about his own signature being genuinely interesting. If the way that Joe had got that signature hadn't been lying about charity. Yeah. Which again, I mean, it's,

it feels like lying to the taskmaster is kind of one of the no-nos really, because you will meet his wrath on the, again, someone like Lysa who's got that cheek is probably the back of his mind. He might get credit for audacity, but again, when Greg's eyes are on you you don't like having to defend yourself like that no exactly and he hate yeah anything anything that ends up lying about charity as we saw in series one with tim key lying to people about charity to uh to find the um 55 year old yes that's right high five a 55 year old historic

he lied to them about charity and that didn't serve him very well. No, I think Greg probably quite rightly feels that it doesn't reflect well on him as the Taskmaster if people are rewarded for lying about charity. Especially using his name as well. Yeah, you can do quite a lot that's borderline amoral or illegal in Taskmaster.

But just the phrase lying about charity sort of just doesn't, it doesn't ring the right note, especially in early series where the show is still making its way a bit. Definitely. And it really, I think it sums up, knowing Greg quite well as I do,

it really sums up how his brain works, that he signed a yellow courgette and was told it was for a vegetable raffle, then arrived at the Taskmaster studio and was told that the prize task was most interesting signature on the most interesting vegetable. And he did not connect the two. He did not think oh that must have been for that no i mean when when and we'll discuss this probably another time but when you

infamously stole his trousers for me which again is one of my favorite ever moments on taskmaster and i only didn't mention it earlier because i think it's a separate discussion but even then we will have you back mark for the episode when we discuss it on Series 5 and we will do a deep dive. I think it's the sort of thing that these days gets its own podcast. It's deep dive material. And yeah, even then,

because by now Greg's been in, he's been in the throes of Taskmaster for five series. And so again, when his trousers go missing mysteriously I know that the task was not it was about a high octane it wasn't anything as obvious as Nick something from Taskmaster but

by the time we're five series and if I'd been Greg anything odd happened in my life I would have joined the dots somehow Taskmaster but that's again why it was so delightful the reveal was that he genuinely I was having to look back at an incident from his life and think, oh, it's this fucking show again. As with the text, as with everything.

Surely by now, there's been enough series that Greg just lives in a permanent state of fear that something unexplained is going to happen to him. Pure paranoia. Except I don't think he does, because the great thing about Greg is he's 100% taskmaster when he's in the show. But I think he does sort of zone the show out a bit when he's not doing it because otherwise you would live you'd be mad so i think basically

he i don't know greg as well as you do but i do get the impression he forgets about task master just enough that he's always shocked by the things that happen in it yeah i think that's a perfect situation to be in isn't it because obviously he's very busy doing other stuff so he can he can sort of separate that in his mind go in be the task master and then just move on with his life where yeah he he can't be he's got loads of stuff going on greg he can't be every time someone makes an omelette thinking now is this is there something in this and it's part of it i'm not gonna one day give two points for this because i've got food poisoning um let's talk about lolly's prize task this was great as well uh so she was the only one who took the word on uh to mean uh take use

putting the autograph actually and balancing it on top of the vegetables. She mounted it on vegetables. It's a black eyed peas signed CD on some black eyed peas. I thought it was a lovely choice. Artistic really. An early glimpse of Lolly's eye for the visual

I think it's fair to say. Hugh trying to get involved at this point asking if a black IP was a vegetable, after his Malcolm X carrot. Is that disgraceful? He's got no leg to stand on by then. He's hardly going to get more points into that. It is always quite funny when people contest things like that as well.

Ashlyn did it quite a lot in my series. There's normally one person who sort of needles the taskmaster over scoring. And again, it's not really my temperament, but even if it was, I think it very very risky to do that you're only gonna you're risking there will be more points docked off you in the future and this is the first episode as well she's created the worst possible first impression here and continues to throughout yeah in a way it wasn't a misleading impression um mel gedroych i mean i'm such a huge fan of mel's i think she's absolutely brilliant and i think she's very unlucky not to win, really,

given what she accomplished here. She must have been thinking, this is five points in the bag. If I'm showing up with the whole of Take That pretty much on vegetables, I'm very, very confident, yeah. It's even better that the one she couldn't get was Jason Orange. I know. In your head, that's an attainable Take That member, surely. Howard Donald on a horseradish gary

barlow on a butternut squash marco and on a heritage squash and robbie williams on a sweet potato yeah and it's sort of lovely work it's really difficult to picture the conversations i don't know gary barlow but it doesn't seem like it'd be an easy person to approach with a squash necessarily exactly i mean i again we we got no backstory and people just accept that from mel because of her sort of personality. She says things like, Jason's gone AWOL with a ruck tack. And no one questioned what she meant until we get Mel on the Taskmaster podcast. And then that will be discussed.

Well, I do think that among other things, when you get Mel on it, that prize task bears a bit of discussion because I think I wouldn't bat myself to get even one of Take That to sign a visual. Absolutely not. Mel, absolutely not. Mel, vegetable signatures? Yes. I got, um... Howard on a horseradish, Gary on a butternut squash... Oh, my God...Mark on a heritage squash

and Robbie on a sweet potato. No! Couldn't get Jason because he's gone AWOL with a rucksack. That's fine. He with a rucksack. That's fine. He's a fruit. I got it. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost almost anything. So no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats.

But iced tea and ice cream? Yes. We can deliver that. Uber Eats. Get almost almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. We can almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. We can wait for clean water solutions. Or we can engineer access to clean water.

We can acknowledge indigenous cultures. Or we can learn from indigenous voices. We can demand more from the earth. Or we can demand more from ourselves. At York University, we work together to create positive change for a better tomorrow join us at yorku.ca write the future task one destroy this cake most beautiful destruction wins you have 30 minutes your time starts now yeah this is vintage taskmaster first first episode type task like just make a lot of mess basically i love the idea of alex watching this happen uh but not not knowing that one day one

of those cakes would go up his ass that's the almost the best thing about it is if you watch it now with that with benefit of that hindsight it's uh it's even more beautiful yeah i mean it's hard to argue with if we're talking about beauty, I think blowing a cake up with fireworks is... It's a moment of... Lysette does have this about him. He's got a streak of pure, destructive brilliance in him. He does.

And similar to Noel, he's very artistic. He's got a real artistic flair to him. Yeah, to have Lysette and Noel in the same series really was, it was a kind of, this is a kind of, yeah, artistic connoisseurs series in some way. There's a lot of very, kind of very detailed, beautiful approaches in this one. Whereas I think in my series,

there were a lot of route one, hypersexual, expensive and difficult approaches. Yeah, the fireworks was incredible. It looked beautiful. the production team did a lovely job of slow-mo music and all of that stuff i think i think he gave them plenty to work with there uh to turn that into a beautiful little film similar to noel as well cake straight in the washing machine as soon as you saw that you thought why has no one ever put a cake in the washing machine before why have i never seen this happen this is why i need to ask my life

yeah and why didn't everyone just but why didn't we say everyone put the cake in the washing machine yeah feels like the only thing to do i tried to think what i would have done and there's no doubt that taskmaster has provided you with a lot of opportunities for making mess there's you know there's a full set of kitchen stuff there's the bath a small bathroom there was loads you could have done but again it's only noel that instantly thinks that's going in the washing machine. Yeah, yeah, totally. And that is absolute. As soon as you see that, that's carnage.

That's, you know. But then again, Lolly does something sort of creative and almost beautiful with it. I love, I really loved Lolly's. I think if you're looking at the most beautiful destruction, I think hers sort of hits the brief the most perfectly. Yeah, sometimes there are tasks which didn't necessarily get much reward,

but the fans of the series look back, I think, and you get a sort of, it's a moral victory in the long run. I think people probably have fond memories of that. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think it was underscored in this task. I think, I mean, let's talk about the others and I'll give my judgment.

You mentioned that the Taskmaster House provides lots of opportunities to do this task and indeed any other task, which makes it even more impressive that Hugh decided to just cut it up and put it in the shape of a clock. Yeah, a thing which you can do normally with a cake, basically.

Almost the worst thing you can do in this task is just treat the cake like a cake, basically. Almost the worst thing you can do in this task is just treat the cake like a cake, basically. Yeah, at this point, it crosses your mind whether Hugh is deliberately trying to lose the series for his own reasons or because, you know, all I can think there is, there are moments in it where you're given, well, standard 20 minutes and you do totally freeze and Alex is looking at you and you spend

uh as much of as 10 minutes just thinking i literally don't know i've got no idea and yeah so sometimes that accounts for it but it didn't look like he was necessarily panicking it looked like he just decided to do that yeah no i don't think he was panicking at all i think i think he was suffering i don't know how early they filmed that task he was suffering from something that few people have had, where if they get given a task in that room, they feel like they have to stay in the room. Yeah, it's amazing how you start reading in rules

which don't exist. We've seen this a lot of times. In fact, it happens constantly. Something about saying all the information is in the task, it does the opposite of helping you. It makes you suspect that you're missing something. The number of times someone's believed they were trapped were trapped in a room as you say especially that room it it happens yeah i don't know what i would have done but i reckon at the very least i think

i'm chucking it out of the window or there's got to be mess i think it's getting smashed to hell it's not just getting nicely cut up yeah totally um but i certainly wouldn't have thought of actually exploding it essentially either no that i mean that was genius um let's i mean so i think hughes is an example of why sometimes in taskmaster you shouldn't follow your first thought yeah that's right knife and chopping out whereas i think mel's is an example of why sometimes you should absolutely follow your first thought yeah because flipping it up and squat she did that before she even finished her she literally didn't just like right there you go yeah yeah i also there is a satisfaction in that for the for the uh the tasked person there were a couple of tasks i did where 20 minutes were allocated and it's over almost immediately and then you just you just sort of go thank you very

much walk out and it is because the camera crew are all geared up for 20 minutes alex has got his clock i can't remember an example, but there were a couple where I just weirdly worked it out very quickly or, and you do feel, or not even worked it out, just did what Mel did, just did one thing. Yeah. And then just pissed off out of the room. And there's a real,

there's a sense that you've pulled the rug from under them a bit, which it's very rewarding. Yeah. I feel pretty punk, right? Doing that sort of thing. Exactly. Yeah. I think there was, It's very rewarding. Yeah, you feel pretty punk, right, doing that sort of thing? Exactly, yeah.

I think there was definitely one where there was almost only a bonus task, but you had to kick the yoghurt into the middle of the target. And I did it with almost no thought at all. Just put it down. They'd set everything out, the cameras were all ready, and I just, as if it's the sort of thing I did every day, just casually walked up to it, walloped it right into the middle as if I'd been practicing it and then I think I made a thing of just like keeping on walking straight into the house just leaving them out in the garden there as if to say what a feeling and of course it never got me any points but they were generous

enough to actually show it on the yeah show and people weirdly still talk to me about that as well even though it wasn't official time um so, there's something very satisfying about Mel just being, there you go. Yeah. That's that, less than a minute. And I mean, we've got to talk about, I mean, I think this is the most I'd laughed at Taskmaster out loud up until this point, the first time I saw this.

And I've never watched this moment without having to go back and watch it again. It's her being so proud of herself, slowly backing out of the room and then just slightly tripping on a table. That's right, yeah. Even moments of pride in Taskmaster, very, very close to a fall.

It's so funny. It's just that she trips the exact perfect amount. It's so good. I do remember never quite knowing when the cameras were still on you. So you were sort of saying, okay, well, thanks, Alex. See you next time.

And yeah, enjoyed that. And then sometimes that would make it into the actual show. So it was one point for Hugh again. Yeah, and Hugh already is in trouble here, you think. Oh God, that's it. He's flapping. Two points for Lolly. I feel like as much as I enjoyed Mel's,

I feel like when you look at the brief, you look at the task, Lolly's was better than Mel's. I don't know if you'd call it beautiful, exactly. Satisfying, yes. Yeah. So I feel like it should have been three points for lolly but it was three points for mel uh and then you can't really argue with uh four points for noel and five points for joe i guess you could interchange them but they were both yeah and again you're already now getting a picture of two guys that are going to do spectacular things i think during the series yeah and then the opposite for you. Yeah. What cycle did you push it on?

Just the regular one. Yeah, 40. I wasn't trying to clean the case. Pass two, create the best caricature of the person on the other side of the curtain. You may not look at the person. The person may only say yes or no. You'll get a bonus point if you can find out the person's full name you have 10 minutes your time starts now so this is a brilliant task this is the ingenuity of it i loved these sort of tasks i

didn't necessarily love doing them because your brain is fried by it but um this is the sort of thing that is beautiful on taskmaster just so simple, but also devilish. Again, as we've said, Noel comes in with an advantage here because unfortunately for us all, he can, as well as everything else he can do, paint really well. Annoying. Very annoying. Even things like him selecting the chopping board so he stands out a bit more, like he uses a different medium.

It's just... Exactly. I mean, really, who else is thinking about the medium at this stage very clever stuff and um the um the you can only say yes or no thing reminded me a bit of when we had to work out who was who were the fins in an identity parade yeah in a studio task that same thing of trying to get your head around this kind of game a game of bluff and chance while also trying to do a physical task like drawing or painting i mean it is sometimes i'm asked to test a lot of different things at the same time and it's also a tricky one because you you need to ask the right questions and it's so difficult to work out what the right questions would be

um for yes or no questions so obviously there's a moment where joe's just joe asked about eight questions about her necklace yeah and then do you think do you think i'm asking too many questions about your necklace yeah your brain just gets bogged down by one very little detail and you think right well i've got all the information about the necklace but how am i actually gonna uh draw that though um i mean look the the others were grouped together for a reason i mean they all went about it in quite a standard way. And, you know, they were mixed results with the drawings. But we've got to talk about Hugh, who I think this is a really good loophole he finds here.

Hugh did prize the name out of him, didn't he? Yeah, by getting her to write it down, which is great. That's right. That's right that's right yeah and then obviously the mirror i think i think is genius because he then argues with alex that you're not looking you're not looking at yourself and i think he accounts himself very well there but it's absolutely vintage hugh dennis that he does all of that he seems like the cleverest man in the room but he still doesn't come away with the point yeah because the drawing is the worst piece of shit. Yes, I can't help being reminded of when I was the only one to work out the rainbow task by putting the light on, but I still couldn't draw a rainbow for shit, so again.

Well, I had a very similar experience in Series 9 where we had ice lollies. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had to arrange them in order colour of the rainbow. That's right. By taste, but I found the dodo so I could take my blindfold off and then I still didn't know. Still didn't get the rainbow.

I remember that. In fact, when I saw that, I had flashbacks, of course. The rainbow is a dangerous object in Taskmaster. But yeah, this was a great one. We didn't know it at the time, but the looking in the mirror and saying that's not looking at a person was a sort of prefigured, the sort of thing I now hear Tim Key say

on No More Jockeys quite a lot. What seems like a spurious argument, but dug in so hard that you sort of have to respect it. And as you say, brilliant mixture of incompetence and cunning, really, for me. Also, as soon as you see him ask someone to write the name down, it seems so obvious. It's a massive loophole really

but again in the heat of it you just don't think of stuff like that your brain is uh yeah you're worrying about the whether you've got their nose right or something and just and just the worst the worst drawing i think he's so pleased with himself about the mirror thing that he doesn't spend enough time doing the drawing i think similar happened with the rainbow when i'm probably with you with the lollies once you've if you think you've got the key to the task, you forget you've still got to do something well. Yeah, absolutely. So Hugh at this point was as adrift as we've seen a contestant

at this early stage, I think. Not even Nish, you know. Yeah, exactly. He gets two points because he does get the name right and he deserves the point for that. Absolutely, yeah. It's three points for Mel, who also gets the full name, which is very impressive, even though her first guess is John T. Williams. That's right, yeah. It's three points for Mel, who also gets the full name, which is very impressive,

even though her first guess is John T. Williams. That's right, yeah. Yeah, the two people that scored the lowest did get the name, but Fielding wasn't really concerning himself too much with that. He knew he had it for the actual art. Yeah, it's five points for Noel. Four points for Jo. I think Lolly was underscored again here, actually.

I feel like she obviously didn't get the name, but her drawing is way more accurate. Yeah, it's already emerging that Lolly is very handy at various forms of art here. In fact, as I've said, a worrying number of them actually were. Yeah, you can make a case Lolly's unlucky consistently in this episode.

Sometimes that does happen, and then you have this faith that it might be evened out in another episode but that that is giving much too much credit to to greg as the taskmaster there's no um there's no sense that it would spoil it if you ever thought the producers were saying ah you should level that up a bit or something they're definitely not and he comes at each task completely fresh yeah absolutely no i don't think he's even bothered about who's who's winning i think he... So that, the arbitrary nature of it, sometimes people would tweet me and say, you should have got more or you should have got less for that.

And you have to say each time. I'm afraid you must take this up with Greg, but also don't, because he won't remember or really care. Well, yeah, Hugh looked at the image of her in the mirror several times and he drew this. Thank you. I realise... Yeah. It was sitting side-on. Yeah.

Oh, you've got the aspect right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But for you, what we've learnt, Hugh, is that a mirror image takes a black woman into a fat, bald, white man. I mean, in many ways, it is the Michael Jackson story. Task three. Fell all the rubber

ducks. Fastest wins. Your time starts when the first rubber duck falls. And this, of course, is where there's a turnaround, scoring-wise. Finally, Hugh's machinations actually come home to roost. That's not a phrase. Yeah, he wins it by a margin, which is ridiculous when you look at the figure. Yeah, but this is one of those ones where I watched it and thought, of course, that's what you do.

But if I was presented with that, I'd be chucking bowling balls at the fences. It's absolutely the same. There's no way I would have thought laterally about this. I would have just, both me and Nish would have just been throwing everything in the world at it and hoping for the best. Nish would have taken his trousers and pants off

and thrown it at the fence. He certainly would have. Nish would have launched himself out of a cannon out of the ducks but not quite made it. This is a good example of how a cool head can be worth a lot more points than actual effort in Tossmaster.

Yeah, for sure. I think just staying calm, working out the system before you do crack on with it I think is so key in some of these. And Hugh tying so key in some of these and hugh tying ropes around each piece of fence and around the bottom of the ducks there and then just it's just three pulls bang bang bang all done brilliant quite amazing uh bit of logic really because as as it says in the task it's only when the first duck falls that you're being timed so

he had all the time he wanted to tie the fence i wouldn't have thought that i would have been thinking i was been just desperately trying to fell the first gut but that's not how you meant it that's you know this is all about thinking and then action yeah which is not and that's not my uh street at all um i would have done something like joe did he used that time to get to basically lay out a jumble sale on the lawn yeah and then just chuck everything possible i think i'm very similar yeah i'd have emptied that shed of everything i could find and then just chuck everything possible i think i'm very similar yeah i'd have emptied that shed of everything i could find and then just absolutely plaster them out of the ducts which is a way of getting some points no doubt about it i got quite a lot of three pointers for just

doing the crudest but most vaguely effective thing i could but i very rarely did i solve a task like you here that's not quite my wheelhouse oh you'd be i'd be so chuffed if i did that i'd be like well it sort of doesn't matter what happens in any of the other tasks so i'm it's true i have that moment yeah i had that moment with the rainbow but it instantly faded because my rainbow was so shit that i only got three points and i was mocked for much longer than if i'd just done the task badly um noel surprisingly just goes a bit route one with this by throwing tennis balls at the ducks but again you can see he's quite good at throwing, which is another thing.

He is good at everything. It wouldn't have amazed me if that had worked instantly. But again, knowing Noel, it wouldn't have amazed me if he just sort of found a way of talking to the Ducks and persuaded them to fall down or something. Nothing seems beyond him. Mel's was a disaster.

The tennis ball to a piece of rope and using it as a lasso. I mean, as you say that, it does sound quite far-fetched as a solution. And that is one of those moments where we all had these in the house where you're aware that it's just going on longer and longer.

And without knowing how well anyone else has done, you do think, I don't think I'm winning this. I've been doing this for more than five minutes now. And even though the crew and even alex are pretty unobtrusive just because uh because of and because it still is fun but you do become more and more aware that there's like six people standing in there with cameras and stuff waiting for you to do something that you just can't do and that does as soon as that creeps into your head you're in problems lunch yeah exactly yeah you never wanted the last task before lunch to be one that would take you 25 minutes to do

like a twat yeah um so uh eventually even more frustratingly for amel eventually settles on the rope pulley system the the dennis system uh as does uh as does noel i think but it's much too late by then of course yeah it's too late yeah what's impressive is she somehow had that idea immediately yeah it's incredible lolly uh comes up with a good system by moving the fences closer but not too close yeah that's right yeah which is always a difficult thing to see where you see someone come up with a perfect loophole and then not exploit it it's funny isn't it it happens quite a lot i think a part of your brain doesn't believe the loophole can be real so you sabotage yourself you think well it can't be this simple.

But it was in that one. Yeah. Yeah, she used the hose, which I thought was a good idea. But initially, she was just giving the duck sort of a gentle shower. It's a great task because there's so many possible approaches. But again, as a contestant, that does tend to become quite anxiety-inducing. Any task where it was like you may use anything in this shed and you're looking around and there's 45 different items there, you're absolutely panicking. preferred it when there's just one

you're holding one thing and you've got to get it far away or something at least there's only so many ways you can do that yeah once there's loads of props involved you're thinking oh shit and you're looking going well they must have put the perfect thing in here somewhere i don't remember that rake being there before so surely that means something must be a clue yeah once you're over thinking like that you're in big trouble. You have to free your mind of anything like that. So it was one point for Mel, two points for Noel,

three points for Joe, four points for Lolly. And finally, it's the big five for Big Hugh. I'm very satisfied from a viewer's point of view to suddenly see Hugh go from one to five. It gives you a taste of how he's going to be a sort of feast or famine type contestant. I seem to, I mean, we're going to talk about the rest

of the episodes, obviously, in the coming weeks. I seem to remember it was mainly famine. Yeah, there was a fair bit of famine, I think, yeah. Yeah, I can do some good work with that. Yeah, I've gone a bit dizzy. Is this... Oh, shut up.

You could run up with that. Just keeps going. Oh, my God, there's a bowling ball. There's a bloody bowling ball in there. Live task, make the most juice. You must pick one fruit and one tool. If you pick the same tool as someone else, you must juice blindfolded. If you pick the same fruit as someone else, you must juice one-handed.

If you pick the same fruit and tool as someone, you must juice blindfolded, one-handed, and bouncing up and down. You have one minute. This is the sort of thing that if you're reading that in the studio with a live audience, you're thinking, hang on, what is happening? What is going on?

The more clauses are introduced, the more you're thinking, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just going to grab two things and hope for the best here. Now, you said you put a lot of effort into the prize tasks because you knew what you'd done in the pre-recorded tasks. Was there any feeling when it came to the studio task of, I've really got to nail this?

Definitely, especially because a couple of times, I was on the whole scoring better than I expected. So there were a couple of times where I could win or lose an episode on the prize task. And no matter how uncompetitive you are, I loved the idea of actually winning an episode, getting the getting the task, the prizes, all that stuff. And just that moment of so there were, I think, at least two, maybe three live tasks where I did feel genuine pressure, like it was like i was in a sports match or something especially of course quite a large studio audience there as well there's a real atmosphere in the in the room for those moments so yeah i could properly feel the adrenaline

race and i remember that before the prize task and of course you wouldn't you know get this on the telly but there's a quite lengthy camera reset so while they set up the task so i'd be you'd be there for 10 15 minutes thinking you'd see it being maybe you'd see bits of what was happening something would be brought in like in this case fruit and instrument you're starting to guess but you can't really or it's behind a curtain so you can't your brain i say your brain this would normally just be chatting to ashley but I would be there a little bit on my own, just thinking, no, I would often chat to Bob and Sally, but the slightly more serious point scorers, you could see us all thinking,

I wonder what's coming here a bit. Yeah, yeah. And then of course, when it comes out, there's no way you could have mentally prepared for it because it's some bullshit like this. Yeah. I mean, this is a hilarious studio task. It's really good.

It just turns into chaos. I think that's something that Alex is really good at doing, of just being able to think to the last image. So knowing what he needs to ask people to do to create the most chaos at the end of it. And he really does love, for somebody who's so orderly and seems so sensible, and is in some ways,

Alex also adores total mess and chaos as our No More jockeys game show or if he gets to sort of gets the devil in him alex i think yeah one of his i think one of his uh guiding principles is what what will have the most different approaches as i say what what will we get five different ways but without doubt another one of them is just what will cause the most absolute carnage how can we make you Hugh Dennis smash a pineapple on a floor? Certainly one finding is that a pineapple's got maybe slightly less juice in it

than you think unless you properly go at it. And certainly grapes. I think I'd have gone grapes, but of course, there's only a tiny amount per grape in there. Yeah, but I would have done grapes and shoe because then at least you can put the grapes in something and step on it, which is a classic way of getting juice out of a grape.

That's true. That's what they actually do in real life to some extent, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a good point, yeah. Again, you've got to make the decision so quickly. But I think lime is a really brave choice. Instinctively, you don't think that a lime is much of a giver fruit-wise.

But lime and shoe was the perfect choice. Lime and shoe was the dream ticket, it turns out. No one else picked it and easily got seven mils out of it um it was a real game i had a few tasks like they always come up the task of you'll be deducted points if you do the same as someone else and then you are in a sort of then you're in a real fiendish position of trying to read other people's minds when you don't even know them that well yeah so lime with shoe is inspired because lime does seem like probably an unfashionable choice and there's something

about being a comic as well that when you pick the same as someone else you feel wholly unoriginal yeah you're furious you think like i'm meant to i'm meant to be the guy that comes up with yeah there was at least one task i think it was the coconuts on a sledge thing where it was i think you're disqualified if you use anything else anyone else is agonized i was trying much too hard to get into the psychology of someone like Sally Phillips, who I don't think I'd met at the time. Yeah.

Hugo's pineapple with tweezers, but doesn't use the tweezers. There's no way he uses the tweezers. He just smashes it. So I think that should have been points off. This could have been disqualified, yeah, because you're not telling me he gets four mils out of it. No way. With tweezers.

Tweezers is a mad choice.eezers tweezers is a mad choice yeah this is a mad choice but noel does grapes for tweezers but he's only allowed to use one hand but he's clearly using another hand to steady the cup some funny stuff goes on in these live tests and it is quite difficult if you see someone you think has been there was you can't really appeal to the ref in these situations you've just got to hope it gets picked up basically yeah but i so i think lolly actually did use one hand with Grapes with Hammer and got the one point. Noel got two points.

Joe, Pineapple Hammer, good choice, three points. Hugh, Pineapple with nothing, I'd say, four points. And then Lime with Shoe. Yeah, Mel are clear winner. And it is funny. I mean, again, if he'd been disqualified, that's a three or four point swing. Yeah. And in the first episode, maybe it doesn't matter so much,

but you can't help looking at the points mounting up as the episodes go by and thinking, there's a lot on these price charts now. Let's not mess about too much. The final scores of episode one, I think the future leaders of the series have marked themselves out pretty quickly. It's Noel winning on 18, then Joe on 17,

Mel on 16, and Hugh and Lolly on 13, which I think unfair for Lolly and lucky for Hugh. Yeah, it does Lolly a disservice to have tied that episode with Hugh when you look at the entire thing. Absolutely. But yeah, Noel in particular has set himself out as a guy that can turn his hands to a lot of things. I remember Alex telling me that Noel was going to be on it.

I think he'd maybe tried to book him before. And I did feel immediately like that's perhaps the strongest, on paper, the strongest Taskmaster contestant you can think of, really, just because of the combination of his brain and his weird stuff that he can do. Yeah, and I guess Mortimer was a similar booking as well. Yeah, and I thought all along,

I got, in the end, weirdly close to winning it. But I did feel that Mortimer was a similar booking as well. Yeah, and I thought all... I got, in the end, weirdly close to winning it, but I did feel that Mortimer was a likely winner from the outset, just knowing he was... I don't think we know him very well, but occasionally I would fuck up a task and think, that's the sort of thing Mortimer would probably be able to do. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He conveys, I can do odd stuff, and also I will think of odd ideas.

And both so calm as well, similar in that they're creative, very good at a lot of things, and then also just seemingly don't care about winning. Yeah, if you can somehow keep your head in that Tossmaster house, then you will come up with much better ideas. But really, you've got to be someone like Bob Mortimer or not feeling to do that, I think. A normal person cannot open one of those scrolls

without immediately panicking a bit. So we've got some emails, Mark. As I say, a lot of the emails that came in were about the trousers, but we are going to discuss that in a few. Quite rightly. It was a perfect crime, famously. Our deep dive 10 episode series, True Crime.

It's the new series of Serial is about the trousers being stolen. I do think when you look at what some people get 10 episodes of podcasts out of, we've got a chance. Some of them are hilariously specific these questions mark but i i feel like you more than anyone will have answers for i've certainly got very clear memories of almost every moment of it yeah um this is from this is from uh chris uh who lives in the usa hello ed question for mark that has bothered my wife and I since he said it.

In the task that started with opening a briefcase, Mark said something like, well, I'm not supposed to own one of these. What in all, what in all that has ever and will ever existed

does that mean? Why is Mark Watson not supposed to own a briefcase? Now, I don't know. I don't remember saying that, but I can only think it refers to the fact that I'm extremely clumsy with small-scale physical tasks,

as we saw then, because I couldn't open the briefcase and that wasn't the task. It was just... Even Alex, who knows me very well, his jaw was dropping watching me faff about with this briefcase. So all I can think was I must have basically meant a briefcase is not

something i would ever have because i know that even opening the combinations the sort of thing that would frustrate me and um and therefore so i i never i wouldn't let myself own one anything that i think is going to cause me difficulty and frustration i'm just you've got a list of things you're never allowed to i've got a list of blacklisted items yeah and briefcase is exactly the sort of thing that i would look at that mind you i can't see why i would own one i think it probably was my first ever attempt at opening a briefcase i've never well well it didn't exactly it didn't suggest to me that me and briefcases were meant to be no that was a real surreal out of body moment because i was well aware that alex and the cameras and everyone thinking, this is better than we even imagined. The task hasn't started.

This is bonus content. Yeah, this is a good question because I do want to talk a bit more about this. Hi, Ed. My question for Mark is more of a request, really. I'd absolutely love to hear some more of the 148 cheeky texts to Greg. Love, Epek from Istanbul.

Now, you may not have them, Mark, but I do want to talk more about this task. Well, yeah. Somewhere they are all compiled in a little book, which I think Alex has still got. Every Christmas people tweet me or Alex

to ask if they will be released as a Christmas book. And I'm not quite sure what's stopping them from doing that, because there is a noticeable audience for it. The tasks, the checks were I mean yeah I of course I didn't know I was the only one doing it I didn't know what the parameters were I definitely did write 148 of them um there were what not everyone knows is that um I I also filmed this Bear Grylls thing on an island for a month during the Cheeky Texts period. So I had to pre-write about 30 of the text.

But I think what I tended to do was go on a... You came, I'd say, close to dying on that Bear Grylls thing. So that could have been your last thing you left to the world. That could work and i'm not sure how i feel about that given the the uh response to it i'd probably be quite happy with that actually um what i would tend to do was uh the ones they read out were mostly uh either about like it'd be something like can i can i borrow some money or i've got a big dick, which I came back to several times. What I would tend to do is get on a bit of a run of them.

So once I, I think my general idea was the first few would be genuinely cheeky. And then I would just do the one about a big dick. Then I thought, what other forms of cheek are there? So for example, each text that was seen represents quite a long-running um motif so that thing about can i borrow the money for i think that went on for ages i think about 20 texts were just like i sent him my bank details one day right i'd every now and again check back in and

say sorry it's so embarrassing but just about this loan um i'd i'd suggest there was also uh there was one series of texts which was uh i'm in Manchester, if the taskmaster fancies a quick half or something with a winking emoji. I was in Manchester. And I think the next day I went back in London. We could have that half now. And again, I think I did about 10 days of trying. But of course, I genuinely didn't know that I was harassing Greg

to the extent that I was in real life. That was basically... And I remember the final few led right up to the record that I was in real life. That was basically... And I remember the final few led right up to the record day as well. They timed it like that on purpose. So the last few were just saying, can't believe I'm finally going to see you. We'll be together at last.

Or like flirtatious stroke, actually romantic. I think the very last one was something like, see you later, cutie. And that was it. So yeah, they do tell a story. But never a a response never a response never at the glimmer of response which is why i didn't think they could be going to greg's real phone i i thought well this is a producer's getting this and harvesting this and this will just be a funny task but as was revealed on the show because because it was one a day i'd often not remember till just before midnight so

he was very often at like quarter to midnight just getting a text saying, oh, wish you were in bed with me or something like that. And it's what the full majesty of the task is really. Not that it was a trick on me, but it was almost in more of a sense, it was a massive trick on Greg. Yeah, oh, it's perfect.

What I don't think I've ever revealed before is that about two weeks after the studio recording, I did send Greg another text. I sent him a selfie from a train. I was wearing a nice shirt for a corporate gig. And I said, oh, just thought you might like to see what I'm wearing. And for the first time ever, Greg replied and said, ah, now this delights me.

So maybe now we can get something going. Great. Love it. One more question from mallory from tennessee and the people who email in from all over the world mark very rarely do we get an email from the uk yeah i knew taskmaster was it was already popular when i did it but i couldn't have imagined the the global reach of people send me questions about it sometimes from uh very unexpected places yeah taskmaster yeah right my question for mark uh did he ever finish that 4 000 piece puzzle of great place no uh that we never got my my girlfriend did the bulk of that and um that was a prize task which

was uh in theory amazing but would i realized it would be bitten off much too much to chew and and it was a real it was a bit of a kick in the guts getting i think two points for that because even the amount that was done was actually that's a good example of a prize task which if i had the idea for it even a month earlier maybe but then could have got the 4 000 pieces finished and still uh got two points of course that's the that's the beauty and the cruelty of Taskmaster. Mark Watson thank you so much for coming on the Taskmaster podcast at the end of every Taskmaster podcast we ask our guests to rate their experience on the Taskmaster podcast. At the end of every Taskmaster podcast, we ask our guests to rate their experience on the podcast between one and five in the style of the Taskmaster.

So please now give your point score for your appearance on the Taskmaster podcast. I have no hesitation in giving it five because most people's favorite type of podcast is just talking about a popular thing that you did in the past, basically. And occasionally talking about some other stuff that people did.

So in terms of low effort to high enjoyment, hard to argue with it. Also, I know that shitloads of people listen to this podcast, so that already puts it above the podcast you do, where at the end of it you think, I don't know what the point of that was. Yeah, that was an hour of my life. Yeah, we've all done those. I think if you look at all the matrices of popularity of the podcast, the fun of talking about Taskmaster, et cetera,

you've done a very nice job, Ed. Happy with it all. Great. Good to hear. Thank you very much, Mark Watson. Well, there we have it. Another episode of the Taskmaster podcast. We have kicked off with Series 4 in style. Thank you very much to Mark Watson for coming onto the show.

And like I said a couple of times, we're going to have Mark back. You know, there's so much to Mark Watson for coming on to the show and like I said a couple of times we're going to have Mark back you know there's so much to talk about series five is coming up you know after we've done series four uh and I think we can all agree absolute belter of a series so we've got plenty to chat to Mark about there including Trousergate so keep watching Taskmaster on all four watch along with us watch whatever episode you like really just watch it all day watch it all the time check out the YouTube channel youtube.com forward slash Taskmaster check out the Taskmaster store for all your Taskmaster gift needs and of course keep listening to this podcast please email us with any of your questions for future guests Taskmaster podcast at gmail. I will try, I will endeavor in future

to let you know the special guests in advance on my social media and across the Taskmaster social media. But for now, we will see you next week. Goodbye. We'll see you next time.