Taskmaster The Podcast - Ep 62. Mark Watson - S5 Ep.5

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

On the podcast this week Mark Watson returns to chat to Ed. This time however they are talking cheeky texts, stolen trousers, watercooler moments and general TM admin. Listen to find out exactly how Ed was embroiled in the high octane prize task. Enjoy! Watch all of Taskmaster on All 4www.channel4.com/programmes/taskmasterVisit the Taskmaster Store for all your TM goodies!taskmasterstore.comVisit the Taskmaster YouTube Channelyoutube.com/taskmasterGet in touch with Ed and future guests: [e-mail] the Podcast is Produced by Daisy Knight for Avalon Television Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated

category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Hello and welcome to the Taskmaster podcast. Happy New Year from me, Ed Gamble, host of the Taskmaster podcast. Very exciting episode today. We're back talking about Series 5 and we're talking about Series 5, Episode 5. And we have a very special guest for today's episode it's the wonderful mark watson of course one of the stars of series five of taskmaster and this potentially his most eventful episode we're talking trousers we're talking texts so much happens in this episode it's a really it's a really fantastic episode can't

wait to talk to mark about that uh get down to the nitty gritty, chat about the tasks, some backstage goss, that sort of stuff. We might get some facts we've not heard before. It's very exciting. I mean, let's just crack on with it. You guys know the drill by now. You can get all of Taskmaster on all four. You go and find it.

You can watch it, come back here, listen to us, chat about it. That's how it works. Hope you all had a nice Christmas, a new year. We are back into the thick of it now with series five only eight episodes series five so a few more of those left and then we'll just keep this thing rolling but for now this is mark watson welcome back mark watson to the taskmaster podcast. Thank you. Not too many people return, do they? This feels big. Not many returners. You're one of few returners. We, of course, had to have you back on because we're talking about Series 5 at the moment.

And Series 5, Episode 5, specifically, this is pure Watson, this episode. I'd say you're the headlining star of this episode. I don't like using phrases like headlining star or guiding force or the main talent. I saw myself very much as part of a collective, as you know. But it is true that a couple of major turning points occurred in this episode, which people still ask me about

and which they will continue to ask me about long after they've forgotten everything else in my life. Yes, well, when I say headlining star, Mark, I mean you have a couple of real low points. Yeah, the only way to be a headlining star in... They often say that every day on Twitter there's a main character and the trick is not to be it and that is sort of the same with the taskmaster episode as well if you become the talking point something terrible

probably happens yes absolutely look i'm gonna get this out the way straight away mark because obviously we're we're this is a fifth episode talking about um series five and we've had a lot of people message in saying can you stop being mean about mark can you stop saying that mark wasn't very good at these things because mark actually came second in the whole series and this is such an interesting thing mark a real skill of doing things quite well but in a way that's presented as you doing them quite badly yeah my um i project so much negativity and sort of defeatism that people a lot of people have have this sort of Mandela effect thing where they remember in inverted commas that I was last in the series or at least did really badly.

But in fact, I was still in contention to win coming to the last episode. Nish is your man. Nish was the one that was shit at everything. Now, don't you worry. We definitely speak about Nish. To be fair, I have heard that covered as well, yeah. Yeah, as you say, my sort of, I think my unique, well, it's not unique, actually. Other people have done similar, but my legacy on the show is having actually

sort of scored quite well while still leaving people with the memory of someone that couldn't really do anything. Yeah. Which is a real, it is a real skill. Speaking about Nish, I want to get your hot take on this. Nish's main aim from the start of the series seems to be to drag you down with him. And I think that might be it.

I think Nish is so convincing. He even in this episode refers to you and himself as loser's corner. Yeah, something which I never got into, by the way, I wasn't getting a sign printed, put it that way. I mean, yeah. And it's funny, isn't it? Just the, just the psychology of me sitting next to him. There were loads of screen grabs of us that having a hug or a high five or

other things that losers do after a rare moment of triumph um yeah but yeah that obscures the fact that most of the time when this is one came up on the screen i would think thank christ for this he's done this worse than me always always did it worse of course i didn't know this as you as you know you've got no idea what's happening to the rest of the contestants while it's underway so um many times I would leave the house or leave a task thinking well it would be impossible to do it worse than that and um all this time I had a a rival who was making it his business to do it worse but yeah I do think I was tainted by I still am tainted by association um in people's memory especially

because me and Nish did the song and so it became seen as a team in people's minds, especially because me and Nish did the song. And so we became seen as a team in people's minds, which is nice. But I had very little input into some of the things that he did in that show. I mean, even in this episode, we'll find quite a lot of those moments where it's very much, thank God Nish is there for everyone. I don't think that's necessarily just you. I think everyone thought, thank God Nish is there. And that must be from episode one. We had a similar thing with David Baddiel,

where it was very clear from episode one that if you're worried about a coming bottom but deals got you back yeah i remember there were times when this turned out to have done something really well and you felt almost cheated like this wasn't a deal that's not your role yeah two or three times you won a task it was all very well from a sort of romantic underdog point of view but you'd be looking over your shoulder thinking well shit in that case who else has fucked it now there was that one where he um where you had to kick the basketball he tried to boot the basketball in um through the hoop yeah you know they edited it so it appeared he'd done it first time and and then it uh the reveal was that he had taken most of the day to do it.

But yeah, I remember everyone falling for that and thinking, Nish is an occasional genius, we can't have this. But luckily he wasn't. Yes, yeah. I mean, that was quite early on in the series. Yeah. So you've got to put that early in the series when there's still some sort of hope and belief

that Nish might do something well. If you put that in episode six, no one's falling for that. No, you couldn't have sold that later in the series, it's true. No, they're going, oh, you've edited that. You've definitely edited that. There's no way Nisha's narrative arc was clear by that point. Let's crack on and talk about the prize task from this episode.

It's the most high-octane item. I mean, should we get through everyone else's and then talk about yours? Should we wade into yours? How should we do this? Well, I think it's fair to say that history regards the others as almost irrelevant. But mind you, I didn't win the course or anywhere near it because of Greg's punitive approach to the situation.

He's very harsh in this episode, Greg, on everyone I think. He's in a proper sort of like officious mood. Yeah, he really was. So no, I think we should look at the other ones because it was Sally, wasn't she? With something that was absolutely nuts as usual.

Yeah, the high octane feed for show pigs. It's really funny. I mean, I suspect what's happened there because it says high octane on the packet is what's happened. She's Googled high octane and then scrolled about three pages down and found this pig feed.

Yeah, it's hard to see how else you'd come across that i mean as you say it's a bit suspicious that it literally said high octane on it yeah but it's really funny just that i mean and i think she plays quite well into what greg finds really funny that the idea of the pig eating something and then becoming instantly massive is probably right up greg street it really is yeah it was a pleasing image um so yeah i mean it was a it was a great it was a great prize effort she always had stuff like that up her sleeve sally she was probably the most difficult person to guess what she might show up to the studio with i think i mean actually bob as well but at least bob's thing was normally dependably weird in a sort of bob mortimer way

whereas sally yeah as you say she's equally likely to have an ABBA-themed Monopoly or to have found something for pigs online. Yeah, with Bob, you don't know what to expect, but you're right, it's dependable. He's always on target. He's in persona. You know what genre of thing to roughly expect, yeah. Whereas Sally is just like this whirling dervish,

absolute chaos force of chaos exactly chaos yes so it's the high octane feed for show pigs which is equally something you could imagine bob mortimer bringing in um yeah and he would have said that he'd have uttered that phrase with a completely straight face as well yeah well a phrase that he does that with a completely straight face is a rocket bike he made for his son yeah which was an impressive bit of gear and you immediately started thinking if i if i won the episode that's something i probably shouldn't take home with me yes no he did he did very well there i having now interviewed bob on off menu uh and he's about his son on off menu as well um i think always in my head his son's very young but his son is i believe

in his 20s yeah which really sort of reframes the rocket bike it does the something like the rocket bike cements the idea of sort of a six-year-old in your head really but uh yeah logic suggests that bob's son is himself an adult, capable of making a rocket bike himself if he wanted to. Yes, as he is capable himself of eating the cheaper meats without having a sort of presentational spinning device. But it's a rocket bike. You've got to put that quite high up, I think. I think the four points is pretty well deserving. Yes, perhaps unlikely not to win when you think about it.

I mean, you'd have to say that's more high-octane technically than the packet of pig stuff. But there you go. Again, as we said, very specific things tickle the Taskmaster's fancy. We all know that.

Yes, exactly. Aisling brought a custard pie on a garden rake. I really like this. I think Aisling gets quite harshly scored in the prize tasks. And I say harshly scored that we prize tasks and i say how she scored that we're five episodes in in four out of five of the episodes so far she's got the three points

she's been straight down the middle i think she felt that she was harshly done by at times as well yeah maybe he felt you couldn't you couldn't give all five points to a custard pie um but it was clever wasn't it it was really clever it was a lot of fun I like bringing that cartoonish stuff into the real world Custapine and Garden Rake bang I think that's you know maybe she suffers from the top two being the top two really you can't

mess around with a high octane fever show pig no the level was high in this task yeah it was I mean very high we're going to get to yours we'll get to it let's get to yours then i will get to it all right let's i mean let's chat let's get nish out of the way i mean it's another absolutely classic piece of shit from nish it's a shame i often have to say let's get nish out of the way

it was a hands-free mobile phone kit um it's just a massive rubber band uh that uh nish claims cuts off the flow to your brain um yeah i mean you put your phone under it i mean i don't know what i think nish genuinely with these prize tests as well has stuck to the rules that he thinks it should be from his own house he's not gone out and sought out a new thing no i think that's right quite a bit of this stuff had the appearance of having been grabbed by nish quite shortly before his car arrived to take the studio and that's you know if you want to be critical at the highest level of taskmaster that's not going to cut it really not when people are doing things like making rocket bikes or

certainly in my case um in fact one of the reasons why i uh generally scored quite highly on price was because i accepted that i definitely fucked some of the studio stuff up so i immediately started strategizing to claw points back but nish didn't seem to be laboring under any pressure like that i think he knew he'd messed up so many of the tasks that there's no point there's no point trying to claw any of it back he just lent into it instead yeah part of the reason you're such a brilliant contestant on this mark is that you do go the extra step i think more so than any other taskmaster contestant there's that you're always thinking ahead about how you can make things bigger and then yeah i think and scaling things i think alex knew um when i went because because we knew each other that i probably would be in

great trouble with anything where you had to fit one thing into another thing or uh remove something from something else or anything like that throw a thing throw a thing into a thing throw a thing move a thing hold a thing uh yeah i think when tim key on on day one key sent me a text saying something like you should be fine apart from the things where you have to hold things open things uh move things or in any other way manipulate things and uh i basically so yeah i think the um the sort of difference between me and nish was basically i was like a sort of um troubled uh in not very capable or like motor skills contestant but i was like endlessly struggling against my destiny by by trying to like dream big whereas nish uh accepted his destiny and made made it his destiny two very different

approaches to loser's corner basically but you you were not in loser's corner remember that is no which constantly grabbing your head and pulling it towards his chest and going welcome to you're right actually my approach loser's corner was to borrow my way out of it with insane amounts of admin. Well, let's talk about some of that admin now because your price for this was, of course, a pair of trousers that you stole from Greg or, let's be honest, you got me to steal from Greg. Yeah, I mean, this is you you sort of etched yourself

into taskmaster history but before you'd even been a contestant at the time um yeah what's a bit odd about this is i think i mean i i've never said this before but i this is surely the place for this information um the this began as a different as a different task um as in the theft of the trousers was actually for something else um right it was it was a task that was never aired uh where you had to go into a well into the um shed but they'd made it into a sort of weird mystic meg type setup with a crystal ball and the task was to make predictions um right and you had to make I don't know five I think the most far-fetched prediction that came true uh would uh would win so it's a sort of real classic like very much sort of task I liked um because I could see myself over

the course of several months being able to bring something massive to fruition um so I made a series of like predictions that were reasonably wild but which could potentially happen if I if I spent most of the next six months working on it um like something like I predicted that my cat would meet Gary Lineker or something my cat would become a would meet a major household name something like that which I thought was there was a couple of things like that um one of them was that I would be able to lure one of the other contestants to a country that they'd never been before and my plan was to try and get Nish to come to like someone like Belgium or Hungary I can't remember I think it was Hungary I found I established that he'd never been to this European country before

and then started putting things in place to set up a fake gig there basically so I put several like several weeks of work in already um but one of the other predictions I made was that I would be able to steal an item from the taskmaster because i thought yes there's no way i can't accomplish that um and then at a certain point uh we found out the task was getting dropped from the from the show and i i don't know this isn't also not my business but it's some prediction sally made was legally compromising in some way that's all i know um and so um because not even horn would tell me all of the details but they had to they had to remove that entire uh but by then i was really attached to the idea of stealing something and so yeah when this high octane challenge was laid down i thought well this sort of still fits the bill i couldn't think of anything

physically high up in the way that the rocket bike was so I thought conceptually this would be pretty exciting and then I put things in your hands it was trousers was you know much more than I ever ever dreamed of as you know I just asked if you could remove something from his something yeah I mean I've got the I've got the original um twitter uh dms if um just for the sake of history whether I should read something yeah I didn't even have your phone number at the time. This was, you know, I just knew that you were on with him and we vaguely knew each other. And I didn't even know you were a sort of accomplished thief, really. All that was to come later.

So this was straight away. This is from you. Am I right in thinking you're on in Bristol the same night as Greg Davis? And I said, I believe so, for Bristol Comedy Garden, right? And you said, that's right. Do you're on in bristol the same night as greg davis and i said i believe so for bristol comedy garden right and you said that's right do you know the big man well and i said i do do you fancy him because i'd happily take him a love note i've forgotten this preamble imagine if that was the task seduce the taskmaster i suppose you do essentially have something quite similar in this episode as well it's true i was just thinking that yeah um i mean this this is great so as part of taskmaster i have to steal something off him i mean that's interesting the way you pitched it to me was as if the task was steal something

off the taskmaster yeah that was slightly disingenuous of me wasn't it really what i meant was as part of taskmaster i've decided to steal something off him he isn't aware of this i'm wondering if i can elicit you in a plan. I mean, so not even a minute later, I said absolutely. So this was at 2pm on June 6th, 2017. And at 2pm on June 6th, 2017, I said absolutely.

However, yeah, the more spectacular and unexpected, the better. However, I obviously don't want to actually fuck his life up too much. Yeah, well, I mean, looking back, I don't know if i would have added that caveat now there's you give me some more details about it most surprising thing is the key so you've sort of made up a whole task here you're most surprising in quotes yeah that's right i i can't remember if i was deliberately i think i'd basically i'd convinced myself that to fit the bill,

it had to be something pretty... Certainly that would take him by surprise. Yeah. But yeah, you're right. I don't really remember this build-up that well, but it's obvious that I was sort of trying to appeal to your sense of adventure. I mean, look, I've fallen for it, Hootline.

I'm so into it. He didn't take very much persuading, as we've said. Yeah. No, God, no. I say, we'll do do my best I guess when he's on would be best uh I tried to swing a lift but he's driving from elsewhere I reckon I could lift his car keys and get something out of there when he's on again he didn't take long to start thinking like a criminal no and you're very clear just nick anything from him would be a result yeah but I but obviously you don't you don't mean that because if I stole a pen off him,

it wouldn't be very good, would it? No, and I don't think people would still be talking about it in the way that they are about the trousers. So you take a lot of credit for taking this limited brief and really running with it. But I'm so into it. This is a great exchange. This is me.

Slight hitch. He's staying over, so he's parked at the hotel and is walking over, and I'm sure he won't have a coat on that i can ransack and then you you had to reply with okay firstly don't panic nobody ever made it big as a burglar by panicking see what there is to work with this is quite fun and it's true the first rule of uh as far as i know of organized crime is keep your head yeah um and I said it's literally like he knows our only options are baseball cap phone sunglasses pens a pair of trousers and assorted bits of paper with notes on the majority of these things I think he will notice immediately and not leave until he finds I'm tempted to take his trousers and hope he thinks he left them in

his room but that is a very risky scenario here we go and this is where the dream is born like I remember reading that thinking surely he's not getting away with a pair of trousers it does because well i think i remember greg saying on the broadcast who loses their fucking trousers you you've said you've suggested the baseball cap so the baseball cap seems like something you might give up on and i say possibly but he wears it a lot and i'm worried that if he misses something then you will it will look like someone here has swiped it and you reply with it's almost as if i've created a situation that could cause unpleasantness which is is true i think yeah and um god i've forgotten the extent of the dialogue here all

of this over twitter dm oh god there's so much chat while the gig's going on. To be fair, I think not that many major thefts have been executed via DM though. It leaves a paper trail for a start. And we sort of convince ourselves that we're going to do the trousers. And then you actually, I don't know if you remember this, you asked me if I could film a small video to maybe play in the studio. Yes, because I did have an eye on being able to prove that we that we'd done this yeah it didn't matter in the end because i think my only my only worry was um uh the well it'd be difficult to to say definitively these were your trousers but

none of this was a problem because his his uh shock at recognizing them in the studio was absolutely palpable that's why it worked so well and also the fact that he remembered losing his trousers obviously yeah so i mean i do have the the video still on the message conversation so what i will do for listeners of this podcast is when this podcast comes out i will tweet the video of me stealing greg very very good Very, very good. That is exclusive content. That is true exclusive content. And then all I remember is the next day, a runner came over to my flat and picked up Greg Davis's trousers.

Yep, amazing scenes. And then, well, fast forward to the actual day of the recording. And I mean, it's one of the most, it's probably my favourite clip from the series, actually. And the joy of it is just his incomprehension the bit where i say i thought i thought it would be good to steal

something from you his face is so bemused and then yeah you couldn't ask for it i don't think you could have acted it or scripted it better really the way his face clears as he realizes what happened to his trousers that night we're just very lucky that he had a different pair of trousers, basically, at the gig. Very few people arrive at a gig with separate sets of trousers. No, I've not really considered quite how odd that is to turn up with a different set of trousers. It implies you think something really bad is going to happen on stage.

And sometimes I've seen Greg, he's been very much in control of things. But, yeah, if it had been a baseball cap or any... and uh times i've seen greg he's been very much in control of things uh but yeah it does you know if it had been a baseball cap or any uh smaller even if it was an item like the cap he's very fond of it wouldn't be quite the same trousers are such a such an improbable thing to be able to nick off somebody it had a like a visual quality to it really yeah and they're such long trousers as well so the black long trousers against the white background when it gets put up on the screen is is really funny something

really special and it is instant admission that the uh that the trousers were his it was all perfect really and the only sort of sour note is that is that we got one point uh i say weeks half of that point is yours but you know it, but it should have been added to your tally when you were on with it. Or, I mean, deducted is more like it. Or deducted, yeah. So it was one point for you, sadly. Two points for Nish, three points for Aisling,

four points for Bob, and five points for Sally. Bob, it's a rocket bike that I made for my son. Congratulations. Thank you. I did a radio phone-in where I claimed that my son was a fast runner and another parent from the school phoned in and said, not as fast as my son, and he was telling the truth. So I challenged him to speed cycling and this is the rocket bike I made for my son.

Whoa! And your son, you lit it, and it did propel your son? Yes, well, no, he propelled it, but it gave it that kind of vibe of, you know, that feeling of speed. Sort of jazz hands. Yeah, yeah, it was a bike like that, yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about task one.

Put the biggest thing inside this balloon the balloon must be successfully inflated tied and bigger than your head you have 10 minutes your time starts now yeah so here is an example of a task that on paper i could only ever get 1.4 and yet and yet you take from the big four this is one of those this is one of those tasks where you just have to finish it that's the yeah that's the advice that you should give to every person who does taskmaster is just finish it and you never know because it probably will be someone who doesn't yeah it's always sort of people make a joke out of the uh all the information is in the task thing but there's a reason why they say that very very often the the fine print of the task costs people and as you say here

you had to have done all the things um to get on the scoreboard and although um although Alex was certainly been aware of my um intense dislike of balloons and suspicion of them i don't think this was done maliciously but um it was just because of the and it won't have been for everyone but for me this was one of the first tasks of all as well this was my first day really yeah because i i remember thinking ah fuck there's always a sort of, there's always a thing of the series. It turned out to be coconuts, of course. But at the time I thought, what if there's about three balloons every day?

We'd done a preliminary task, which I did quite badly as well, where you had to name celebrities. And that was never used again. I think that was sort of a warmup. But then, yeah, one of my first formal tasks was this. And it was quite a harsh baptism um but it was also in the end a good example of her lateral thinking i suppose in taskmaster because i had literally no option but to uh well get someone to do it for me get someone to do it for you and yet still look i think the

most scared i've ever seen a man look i hated it someone else was someone else was blowing up a balloon and tying it you look like you were watching hereditary at the cinema i do not like to watch balloons being blown up but especially i don't like watching it when when there's you know points at stake the combination of tensions i mean it was awful obviously um the guy guy was the same guy who was to carry me in another episode and then disastrously put me down because I forgot the rubric of the task. So another thing which people talk about constantly to me. So he was a real figure in my time on Taskmaster. And I did talk to Alex about it afterwards and say,

you know, was that all right? Because I sort of didn't really do that. And he basically said, you couldn't have the crew do every task for you within reasonable limits. It was sort of fine. Yeah, because it specifically doesn't say you must inflate the balloon. It says the balloon then must be

successfully inflated it yeah and really avoids that most taskmaster tasks are phrased in that in that sort of passive uh time you know there are plenty of examples of history of people basically subcontracting the work or just paying someone else to do it or whatever so i didn't feel like it was cheating exactly but i also didn't feel like it was cheating exactly, but I also didn't feel like it was very good. I certainly didn't think I'd get up in the high scores because I'd reckon without the idea that most people wouldn't be able to actually complete the task, as you say.

Yeah, I mean, there was failure all around. Bob just doesn't tie up the balloon in time. But again, he's very Bob about the whole thing. He's not bothered really, is he? No. He does his best. He's very funny along the way. And then if he doesn't do it, he doesn't tie up the balloon in time but again it's he's very bob about the whole thing he's not bothered really is he he no he does his best he's very funny along the way and then if he doesn't do it he doesn't care yeah it's kind of amazing that he was actually not amazing i was gonna say it's amazing that he won our series with that attitude but in a sense that is the perfect attitude you want to be capable of genius but also prepared to just uh let some be relaxed enough to not overdo it.

He's in that perfect sweet spot of being mad enough to hug Alex in the boot of his car or something. But also when something went wrong, he didn't mind at all. Yeah. Not at all. And quite often if nothing strikes him with sheer inspiration, he just sort of does quite a good thing, but then just lets it pass

you know yeah they're not worried there were tasks like that where i remember the one where he had to sneeze and both aston and sally just didn't just didn't do it if i remember just couldn't be asked and again when when we were watching that back i found that incompressible because as we've said they chased up every point like a lunatic lunacy um sally uh has a disaster as well um i mean starts off yeah starts off by saying hello there andy it makes you wonder if that was quite early in her taskmaster schedule as well or whether she was just having one of the days when she was mad which did happen a couple of times so she starts by saying hello there, Andy, and then goes very ambitious by trying to get like a bell jar into the balloon

and the little statue of a man and all of this stuff that's clearly never going to fit into a balloon and settles on grapes and then spectacularly fails to blow the balloon up to the size of her head anyway. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sometimes it pays to be that ambitious on Taskmaster but

that was perhaps never going to work yeah no no exactly I mean it's just the same energy as a couple of weeks ago she with the task where you had to get the ball out of the tube she started by for some reason putting a funnel in the top of the tube and then filling it up via the funnel which made absolutely no difference yeah that's. I remember seeing her approach to quite a lot of tasks, initially thinking, is this genius? And then after a couple of minutes of VT, you think, I know, it's fine, it's fine. No, we'll be all right.

It's just another shit way of doing it, but more complicated than our one. With hindsight, it was absolutely inevitable and this would burst a balloon. Obviously it was. Yeah, and I love it so much. And you know what? I'm very surprised to hear this was on people's first days

because when it explodes, there's such a resigned sort of sadness in his eyes that it's almost like it's the last task he did. Well, I think that some people might have had them in different sequences from others because you're right. It doesn't feel like this is Nish's first rodeo when the balloon explodes

and that laugh is the recording of the laugh that they use for his first prize task in episode one which is the loop of his laugh yeah um yes which again again sort of just makes you wonder whether his head was ever in the right place to win prize cast really um but of course someone had to explode it and it was always going to be nish i absolutely love it um and ashling uh gets the victory by filling her i love this lateral thinking of uh putting all the ingredients for a bruschetta into a balloon and me too it's the size of a whole bruschetta that was brilliant deserved the points yeah absolutely it was five points for ashling's bruschetta uh and um blowing up the balloon to the size of her head she managed it she was initially worried as well mark that she wouldn't be able to blow the balloon up but she got stuck in and

she got it done she demonstrated um nerve and ingenuity and also a certain amount of, I suppose, cooking prowess. Yeah, you could say. She deconstructed the baguette and stuck it in a balloon. So you have to say she deserved at least five points. She's almost got more points because three people didn't get any at all. But luckily, that's not how it works. Are you any better with balloons now, Mark? No, not really, but at least I know that if I'm ever tasked

with blowing one up, I'm allowed to look for a kindly bald man nearby and give it to him. So that's a life learning from Taskmaster. Can I say, Taskmaster, I'm a little bit, like, fed up, do you know, because I don't believe Sally blew her balloon up. I did. We never have controversy on the show. This is awesome.

What are you complaining about, Bob? Because Sally's balloon went down. It's these two. The other two. My only problem was tying the balloon. I would say, Bob, that it says inflate, which is from the Latin fiatare, which means to blow. So one could say that water didn't...

I mean, if we're being pedantic. Yeah, well, if we're being pedantic, you put some grapes in it and didn't blow it up. I don't think, Bob, that it says anywhere that you weren't allowed to ask someone else to tie it up. No, but all I'm saying is I don't want any credit for it. I just wanted to say I'm fed up. LAUGHTER any credit for it. I just wanted to say I'm fed up.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes

licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. 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 slash write the future.

Task two, generate a water cooler moment involving this water cooler. Most remarkable water cooler moment wins. You have one hour. Your time starts now. It's another, this is one I think about a lot. Do you want to know what my instinct was the first time I watched this as to what I'd do, Mark? Yeah, what would you, all of us think like this

when we're watching other people's tasks. Yeah. Yeah, my instinct was to try and drink the whole thing. God, that would have been, weirdly that didn't occur to any of us because I suppose that is route one, isn't it? Well, it would have been impossible and I potentially would have died because it's quite a lot yeah but that's that's probably worth at least three points yeah if you've been hospitalized couldn't be more route one i guess that's my skill

in that i i'm so route one i i it it doesn't even occur to other people well and it worked for you that a lot of the time yeah yeah for all the cleverness that taskmaster rewards sometimes you should just do the most stupid thing that immediately pops into your head um there were no no one tried that but there were some incredible uh incredible water cooler moments let's let's talk let's talk now about yours mark well because this is this is an example of your technique on Taskmaster, which is to go high risk, high reward, but then occasionally fail spectacularly.

Yeah, this is an example of that backfiring. So, I mean, it started really well. Finding someone, which I did within the 20 minutes, to come and collect the, or was it 20 minutes I certainly within the time limit I legitimately found someone on Twitter who lived close enough to come and pick up the water cooler in his car so very good start it was very funny watching the gates open and the guy show up and load it into into the boot um and but the the trouble I had was there was a point about, I suppose, halfway through the Taskmaster, or actually more than that, I guess.

But anyway, there was certainly a moment where the water cooler project had stalled quite badly. It made it no further than about Surrey. But also there were these texts every day um at the time i was still trying to work out how to get nish to hungary or wherever it was um there was another task which i won't go to the details of because i reckon they might use it the idea again one day but another task which involved quite a bit of forward planning which i was sort of giving a certain amount of thought to then of course the prize tasks when they came in I put a little bit

of work into as well ordering that hat the jigsaw so there were a couple of mornings when I woke up and the sheer volume of taskmaster admin on my plate was overwhelming and this happens to no other task everyone else films their tasks then there's like a few months before the studio you get to the studio you go oh I don't even remember doing that that's right it was constantly on your mind for months there's no i don't remember doing that for me now i was reliving every task that had gone wrong and desperately trying to engineer every task that still could go right the thing when i look at this again is why i don't i never did deserve the loser's corner thing because when i look at the amount of stress

that Taskmaster did not cause Nish or Bob or really any of them you know I uh of course the classic example is the text which I believe that everyone else was also doing but conceptually that's how I was with all of Taskmaster I believed everyone was living it as much as me so the water cooler thing basically was the one that got away a bit because there were a couple of moments where there were a couple of moments i heard it had been successfully that it successfully changed hands but then there was someone that i just couldn't get in touch with for a couple of months and um i think again i didn't have phone numbers i was trying to do it with a sort of ungodly mixture of twitter and facebook and who knows what and a point came when I just accepted to myself uh the water cooler is not gonna go all the way around Great Britain and come back again

and having made my peace with that I basically thought it's funnier if it if it basically did nothing at all and so we went with that instead it is it is really funny that it goes 33 miles in five months it's very funny yeah i thought the issue is you're relying on other people there yeah and that's such a big so big that's the thing if it had been if i could have well if i could have coordinated it would have been one of the most amazing things ever seen but yeah it was such a even bigger than it seemed really like even watching someone put it in their car brought home how unlikely it was that it could do an entire circuit of the country and it only took one person to think oh shit I've still got this water cooler hopefully he'll forget about that and I didn't

forget but yeah nor could I quite raise it even I couldn't quite fit another project into my life at that point and so the water cooler unfortunately uh as you say, just an average of a few miles a month. And you could have done more just in Ubers, basically. I mean, it's so funny that the comparison of your efforts to Nish in this is the perfect comparison, really. So you tried to orchestrate the water cooler travelling around Great Britain and spent months trying to make that happen.

And Nish ran up to it and kicked it. Yep. Got more points. And got more, crucially, got more points. And this, I actually think Nish's might be even more route one than my thought of drinking it. It is, it's something I talk to Nish about a lot. He gets bored of me bringing this up, this task,

because it makes me laugh so much that in his head, he's gone, I'm going to Kung Fu kick it. kick it it's gonna be brilliant and then he absolutely does not have the physical prowess to pull that off whatsoever yeah this is not an example of nish under doing a task or for comic effect i think he thought this would be one of the moments of the series yeah you can see it in his eyes but alex even says in the studio that after Nish did it he was so he was so happy with it yeah I mean I don't know where he thought the bar was for water cooler moments but uh I don't know it's a it's a fine line between claiming something as a martial arts demonstration and just as you say running up to it and kicking it really and no amount of slow-mo can completely

take you over that threshold I don't think no and no amount of slow-mo can completely take you over that threshold I don't think no and even in the slow-mo you can see I mean they've done they've done so much of an edit on it they're such a good team for making things uh seem better than they are but there's absolutely I mean no that ends up looking about as good as it was yeah yeah I mean it's it's so funny and the fact he gets four points I think Greg's being very generous to interpret that as it being so shit that everyone would be talking about it at work the next day.

Well, I think if that's how we're doing it, mine should have got five points because mine was definitely the least successful. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But it was sort of nice almost to see Nish get points by that stage because with the best one in the world, you weren't looking over your shoulder at him as a contender anymore.

So my mindset by now was almost Nish getting points takes them off of other people, you know, who might be more of a threat. Yeah. Aisling, again, if you're judging it in terms of things going wrong or things being terrible, this deserved more points

because I've got no... It's just the fact she'd set up this scene and you never see where she was truly going to go with it. She's got all the ice and the chocolate and all all of that where's she going to go with that before it all falls over and smashes which is great i love that it smashes yeah yeah but but yeah in the end we'll never know what that would have been basically that was just uh again joins the the taskmaster legacy of things where something just got broken in the end and nothing really happened. It's very funny.

I think, yeah, just such a disaster that it deserved more. And Bob finds an apple on top of the water cooler and then splits the apple into two perfect halves with his bare hands. I mean, look, it's a classic Mortimer trick. I'd say Bob is obviously an amazing Taskmaster contestant, very well-deserved winner in this series.

But this perhaps is the only task where I've seen him phone in a little bit because that is something he has done before and to just put an apple on top of the water. Yeah, if you know that that's in his locker, then that's less impressive, as you say. And yeah, you can imagine it was quite difficult like it wasn't immediately clear what to do obviously like a lot of tasks so yes uh my brain in the end went to the most like extravagant solution but it looks like bob sort of thought about it for five minutes

couldn't really come up with anything and then went fuck it there's nothing i can do with the apple yeah and it is a good thing it is impressive but he he also seems surprised in the studio when he hears that it's had 500,000 views on YouTube so but he didn't realize quite how many people would recognize it from would I lie to you no but the thing is what I like to you is a very successful well-publicized show a lot of people watch a BBC show yeah yeah on the BBC yeah it's on the television yeah I think you can really only you can really only bring that out once in a uh famous national tv show but there you go he got he got some points and that's how you win just keep clocking them up yeah this is this is part of Greg's innate

respect for Bob I think gives him maybe bumps him up a point now and again yeah yeah and also it is impressive and there would have been some people I suppose who hadn't seen it so yeah difficult to argue with but you don't feel like you didn't feel like Bob used the entire 20 minutes on that basically it was an hour actually oh that's right it was that's how I managed to get someone to go and pick it up yeah I don't reckon that's an hour's work no unless quite a lot of it is picking a good apple. Maybe you have to get an entire bushel and sort of pick through them.

Maybe he shinned up into a tree and found an apple there, but then you'd like to see more of that on film if he did. And something else there's no arguments about is the fact that Sally got five points for pretending to have sex with the water cool in the caravan. Yeah, well, this was one of, I think it's fair to say, several moments where Sally solved a problem in a very sexual way.

And few people would have begrudged her the points for it, I think. It was pretty incredible. It was the best one, but also it was fairly clear being around her that she did, she was working some stuff out basically during that.

So I think she, you know, regardless of the points that she just did, she came to work that day, always likely to have sex with something like a water cooler, I think, you know. What I absolutely love is when it finishes playing and you cut back to the studio and of all the people to be sat there having to watch that and then be sat next to the lady who did it uh you Nish and Alex Horne three of the most uncomfortable men around that sort of thing

I could possibly imagine yeah none of us were quite sure what to do with it but at least at least we've been around we've been with sally by now enough to know that this wasn't completely unexpected i think horn's discomfort is the most funny because he'd seen it and knew about it but still still was like that yeah again a lovely job by the team on the edit of that yeah beautiful the water pouring out the door all of that sort of stuff it was great i remember us all being pretty stunned by that VT in the studio, actually. There was no doubt where the points were going on that one. Yes, and the same caravan where I,

but three years later, had sex with a pot of hummus. It's a place where stuff can happen, eh? It's got a certain vibe to it. So it's five points for Sally, four points, amazingly, for Nish's kick, five points for Sally, four points amazingly for Nish's kick, three points for Bob's apple, two points for Aisling's fishing disaster

and sadly one point for your travelling water cooler, Mark. Yeah, I'm really up against it now. One point for that and one point for the theft of Greg's trousers and you're starting to think I'm not going home with the swag here. Your water cooler moment, that was fucking fucking water cooler, wasn't it? I didn't have a better idea. No, you didn't.

And then I kept saying, I probably shouldn't do this. And then you guys, a whole, like a ring of men going, no, I think you probably should do this. Ring of men sounds... Yeah. And then once I'd established that as a kind of theme for the show, but now we're like into episode five, it's kind of almost dull that I did that, isn't it? Not for me. Not for me.

I don't think anyone found it dull, Sally. No, it was incredible. It was definitely unexpected. Gosh, yeah, and quite a climax to the whole thing. This is your bonus task. Send the Taskmaster an anonymous cheeky text message every single day for the next five months. Your time starts now. I mean, this is just... This is heartbreaking heartbreaking what is there to say about this really i mean um yeah i i uh

with hindsight it is difficult as i think i've said to you i might have said before it's difficult to believe that i didn't know because it's not as if it's the only time on Taskmaster someone's been the only person doing a task, but yeah. They do create an atmosphere where you sort of don't, where you don't really question it. And also, I mean, not that implausible that everyone would be doing it because, but as I think I've said, I might've said to you, I might've said it when I was on the podcast the other time, there was with hindsight, a slight clue, which was that when I was out the task uh the podcast the other time there was um with hindsight a slight

clue which was that when i was out for a drink with him one time alex did ask how the how the daily text going and if we'd all been doing that it would have been quite strange for him to ask that um yeah and then but i still didn't i still didn't um clock anything from that. I assumed, and I think we have also discussed this, I didn't think they were going to Greg and disrupting his life either. I assumed that I was just texting the production team or that some unfortunate person was carrying this phone around and they were being logged.

Because again, I thought we were all doing it and there was no way the actual Greg could be getting five of five of those every day but the solution was in a way simpler it was him and it was just me you think about it and of course you are the only person in that lineup that would do it and stick to it well that's also that's also true but I don't I don't think I knew that either because as we've said I was oblivious to how much I was over trying compared with certain other people on the team. Yeah, Nish wouldn't have got beyond the first week, I don't think. Because, of course, it did.

It compromised your life. I was sending them all from a pay-as-you-go phone that they'd given me, so that had to come everywhere with me. I also had the numbers stored onto my phone so that if i did uh forget which did happen sometimes i could send them from my phone um then there was the the inconvenience that i went on bear grills celebrity island for one month the period and i had to pre-write uh 28 texts for my partner to send um and uh i didn't know about that oh yeah i there's there's a there's a whole month of the text which which uh which i had to um i had to leave her with a sheet of 28 texts um oh my god and and mark that i mean that if anyone's seen pay girls the island you were at some stages, I'd say, on death's door.

There'd be times when I was, yeah, sort of shivering from head to foot, considerably under my optimum body weight, hadn't eaten or slept for about six days, and it would come into my head, I hope those texts are still going. What an awful situation if you'd passed away on Bear Grylls' island and then a text still arrives from you the next day yeah I could have been I could have been dead for for well up to

28 days and there'd still be communications from me to Greg saying things like hey cutie I have a big penis yeah and those those would have been technically my last recorded utterances as well so uh really lucky that i did i don't think i'd want that to be my well i was gonna say i don't know if i'd want that to be my sort of final footprint in the world but actually i think i've probably good other than the song with nish the texts are sort of among my most celebrated contributions to human civilization so i suppose i shouldn't be ungrateful really i mean it's just the only way that that could have ended is getting zero i think so i think that makes it that makes it more memorable as well yeah i think it's the perfect stunt for that reason people often assume that i'm um you know bear a grudge about it i think

a part of alex still does he couldn't look me in the face certainly uh during the recording um there was a camera break or something like a reset shortly before we did this I think I suppose because all the cameras were on me for for uh that period and um I remember Alex muttering something like now I don't know how you're going to feel about what happens next and um but I didn't know what he meant because i didn't even know it was the texting task you never know what task is under discussion next i was just aware that i was getting quite a bit of attention from the production crew uh that's it even after alex had said that i i still but then i did start to feel like something wasn't wasn't right. And then I think when they showed the VT with me alone opening the envelope

and reading the 150 texts, I started to realise then, and I was absolutely thrilled, of course. I mean, horrified, but also to be part of a moment like that was brilliant. I couldn't stop laughing. I couldn't get past how stupid and funny it was basically. Hey sexy, just getting in touch. This is the first of 150 messages you're in for a treat. That is quite cheeky but look how I'm not very far into the book now of your 150 texts

and yet page 12 I have a big dick. LAUGHTER It's cheeky, isn't it? Is that cheeky? I think it's the sort of edgier side of cheeky, yeah. There are different sorts of cheeky as well. You said, can you lend me 50 quid? LAUGHTER

Cheeky could... I thought it might just mean impertinent Are you going to give him a point? You asked him to 150, he did 148 Oh, then I can give him no points Let's do task three, which is Make the tallest tower of cans on this table Highest tower wins Also, whilst building your tower, you must shake Alex's hand

And say you're from a different country once every 10 seconds alex will blow his whistle every 10 seconds your time ends when you fail to shake alex's hand and say you're from a different country before alex blows his whistle your time starts when alex blows his whistle now this this is in a way very much up my street because i knew i would not run out of countries um but on the other hand as we've seen something like constructing a very basic structure out of cans is not up my street so this is a classic um clash of styles between someone that didn't really bother with the task but could easily make a tower and um yeah I well I think it came up i mentioned i managed to name half of the countries in the world but could never get the tower of i couldn't even get one more you know it was a brilliant

it's classic taskmaster this i think a real um sisyphean task the number of times i returned to that table only for the tower to collapse again was uh 92 countries you named 92 countries yeah i've got six cans yeah incredible really if you put me and bob together you it would have been you know you could have accomplished a tower of literally any height in the world i would have thought but um i was i think part of it was i mean i love sort of you know geographical trivia and stuff like that so i was i was thinking i was so focused on each country as it came along that i that every time i went up to the tech like a like a dog or something like an animal again and again failing to learn a lesson in an experiment i every time

i went up to the tower i think i shit shit the tower um but of course you had to get back in time to shake his hand every time is this is one of my favorite tasks because of the number of task master elements that it brings together. Basically it's, it's classic horn this really to make you do think about so many things at once. I was terrified of not getting back in time to shake his hand. I was terrified of panicking and saying Dubai or something.

It wasn't technically a country, which I think someone did get away with, but not really, you know. And so in the middle of that, the architecture of the tower, I never got beyond the basics. Yeah, but you still got the five points, and it was very impressive that you named 92 countries versus Bob's three, who are just a very confident display from Bob. The only person, and this is something else that makes it a classic task master task.

The only person to spot that the standing in the noose was not a necessary part of the task. Astonishing. I mean, yeah, if I, that's, it's the equivalent of me realizing you put the light on in the rainbow painting task, I suppose you do have these moments of clarity and, but again, it's's it was probably I wouldn't be surprised if it occurred to viewers um about the noose or at least quite a lot of viewers because you know it's fair it's a real elephant in the room that that's not part of the

wording but again in the heat of it especially with with like within blowing that whistle again and again you do you've lost your marbles quite quickly but yeah i look back with fondness on that on that country's task i that was very much the sort of thing uh that i liked doing taskmaster for although again when it when it was played back again i assumed everyone would have had no trouble naming countries um but just struggled with the actual architecture because again you you don't remember that everyone isn't like you so when the vt went on pretty well yeah this did pretty well with the countries he's uh you know that's the sort of thing this is good at as well but again uh not so good at the building but he's still got five points which is pretty good a rare three points he he tends to be uh hanging around at the lower end normally

the occasional five points um sally i mean this is a confident display of absolute nonsense from sally this is the person you're referring to when you uh when you mentioned dubai i think yeah most countries she names aren't countries or yeah which was she does name she then immediately repeats very much part of the task not to do that yeah um it's so funny that the first three that she names two of them are Italy yeah I feel like you know sort of lucky to survive that really yeah I think most people including Sally could name more countries than Italy twice given that opportunity so you have to one but yeah as we've said the the brief was a was complicated the task was complicated i could see how you'd lose it slightly in that situation yeah i think she just went she

just remembered one thing which is the cans and countries and she just did a sort of approximation of that it wasn't the only time sally would do some of the tasks but leave out a crucial bit everyone was guilty of that but yeah yeah uh it's very funny um and ash poor ashling let's talk about ashling this is another absolute harsh judgment from greg i think yeah it's so it's so funny though the fact she gets one can in misses the first handshake and they let her carry on and they she names so many countries and they didn't even show it yeah yeah she she was very harshly dealt with here i think especially given what other people did get away with on the same task yeah yeah oh the fact it's just the fact they

they only say you named all these countries and you got a really high tower and they didn't even show an edit of it she's so upset there are times when uh i mean i don't think anyone's got a leg to stand on complaining wise when you think about that text thing again, just to briefly go back to that. But there are times for all of us on Taskmaster where you yeah, it's acknowledged that you did something really well, but you don't even get

to see it, and it really is bittersweet that, knowing the viewing public just has to imagine it. So it was sadly one point for Aisling's one can, two points for Sally's two cans, three points for Nish's five cans, and six cans for you and Bob,

and that was the five points. But if it was done on countries, you'd win by some considerable distance, 92 versus three. Still proud of that, though, that turned things around for me on the episode. Oh, you... buggers. proud of that though that that to turn things around for me on the year and the episode oh you I am from Italy Australia from Italy from Alaska Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi? Abu Dhabi. From Dubai. Beirut. Oh!

From, er, er, Kuala Lumpur. Portugal. Portugal. Poland. Denmark. Georgia. Poland. Denmark.

Georgia. Doha. Please, God, let that be a country. let's talk about find the fins the live task find the fins you must you may each ask one question to one person your question must not pertain to the nationality of the people you must then write which number you think is a fin most accurate fin finder wins again quintessential quintessential Taskmaster stuff, this, really. A Scandinavian. There's a Scandinavian person you have to find.

Very Taskmaster. Very Taskmaster, this. And classic high-stakes stuff as well, because despite all of my misfortunes on this episode, you're thinking, I'm just a fin away from Gloria. And you got it. You got the five points. You found the fins.

Aisling and Nish got the four points bob and sally got two points i don't want to talk about this too much it's fairly straightforward you know i think everyone asked decent questions i think though was it sally asked someone how to say something in finnish which yeah i don't i think if something pertains to someone's nationality that's probably quite high up, isn't it? For sure, yeah. And you'd think that would have been enough to do it, really. Yeah. And also, yeah, I don't quite know how, looking back, I did. But I do remember feeling fairly confident about the Finns.

I don't think i factored in the questions that much i think i just at least one really you just saw them and you were like those two are finished at least one of them i there was one just difficult to be more scientific than this but just looked so finished i just couldn't see past that is that a skill that you've employed since taskmaster could you spot a fin on the street or pick one up since taskmaster i have i've been to finland went there the following year on holiday but it's not much of a skill there of course because uh mostly there it's not really seen as a party trick um no actually i tried though i'd imagine when you when you arrived of course i did a bit of it in the airport, but it soon wore off, yeah.

No, actually, like a lot of the things that I demonstrated surprise prowess on in Taskmaster, it's not a very transferable skill, unfortunately. And that's just not me, that's everyone. You might come away from Taskmaster sort of having found that you're incredibly good at making a machine for throwing coconuts or disguising yourself. But actually but actually yeah very few of these tasks um stand you in good stead really but i was it was a great feeling when the fin when the reveal happened though um and uh

yeah of course it won you the episodes incredibly despite everything despite all of the tribulations of this episode, yeah. But this is what I'm talking about, Mark. You had such a, on the face of it was a disastrous episode and you still somehow won. Yeah, it's, I do remember feeling quite proud.

And actually, and feeling quite competitive. I remember looking hard at those fins thinking, you know, I deserve this. I deserve this redemption story. This will be, uh, and, um,

yeah, so this is probably my most memorable episode because, and again, this is what we talk about, you know, about, um, people's perceptions.

No one remembers. I don't think that I won the same episode that I was cheated of the trousers. Yeah. It's amazing. But that is 16, 16 points. It's a story of human triumph over adversity, basically.

Yeah. Again, when you look at the effort levels, the accumulated effort levels of all those tasks, me versus Mortimer, you'd have to say I earned that episode. Definitely. It was 16 points for the victory. Aisling, second, 15 points.

Bob and Sally on 14 points. And of course, thank God for Nish, it's him on 13 points at the bottom. And at the moment, Mark, five episodes in, you're in the lead. You're in the lead in the series by five points. I know, mad, really, to think about. And

I didn't even do that badly in the final episode, but Bob just had a bit too much for me. I think, still going to the end of that episode, would just had a bit too much for me i think still going to the end of that episode still had a mathematical chance though yeah yeah um i mean god knows what would have happened if i'd won and gone through to the champion of champions because i don't think i would have've we've covered they're about all the things that you could uh you could imagine they're about yes i had one from chris christian in

virginia in america um really having a go at me for for sort of lumping you in with Nish and how you could have won and don't do our boy dirty Christian ended the email we don't want to say that over here thanks Christian thanks for your protectiveness hopefully this episode has gone some

way to me undirtying the boy it really has I mean the episodes of this i've heard before i didn't feel that i've been done that much for disservice really but people you know people can be very defensive uh sometimes that's that's uh the reward i get for uh endlessly doing myself down i think um this is from katie in scotland we'll just we'll just do this all because i really like this email um when tim key was on the podcast he said that him and alex have hugged once and they both hated it so much they vowed never to do it again mark had had you ever hugged alex before the cuddle alex task because it felt like

watching two strangers who have never touched each other before trying to cuddle and not two people who've known each other for 20 years i think i think that is accurate yeah i don't recall any hugs i could have just just given Alex a regular hug and said that does count as a special hug between us by the standards of the past 15 years. I'm now actively thinking about, I'm thinking about stuff like, you know, stag nights and other,

we've certainly been in situations where it would have been normal. There might have been drunken hugs, but no, both of us were sort of out of practice, it's fair to say. And the suit didn't really help either. He wasn't very huggably dressed, I didn't think. So yeah, I think Tim and Alex and I

have done many things together, but at no point have we had a proper day of hugging. No, it's fair to say. And that does come across in the task, it's true. Yeah, very good friends. You work together very well, but I'll tell you what, when lockdown came around and you got the opportunity to do things distanced.

I'm absolutely delighted. You guys really leapt at it. Your chemistry really comes alive when you're in separate rooms. Couldn't be happier doing Zoom stuff and not having to ever see each other again. It's the format we were always looking for really uh mark thank you so much for coming back on the taskmaster podcast we of course always ask our guests to rate their experience on the podcast between one and five points this has obviously uh been um quite an episode for you a

lot of memories dredged up i I don't know if that's affected your point score of your experience on the podcast, but let's hear your points, please, Mark. Last time I awarded it five without hesitation. And I've had an equally nice time this time, but I think I'm going to say

two points this time. In the spirit of being swindled out of points, which this episode is about, just so that you can feel a tiny bit of the hurt and betrayal. And hopefully listeners as well will feel you know uncomfortable and sad about that and they again will be sharing um some of what i had to live with that day thank you very

much mark lovely episode actually with mark big fan of that episode uh lots to talk about lots to say um i will be tweeting that video of me throwing my trousers into the boot of my car once i've worked out how to blur out my number plate although it's an old car which i think's been scrapped so i don't know the legality behind that. But I will be tweeting that video as extra content to this podcast. It's rare that we do extra content because the podcast is itself extra content. Anyway, come back next week. We'll be talking about series five,

episode six with another fantastic special guest. Email us taskmasterpodcast at gmail.com with your questions about that episode, about the series, about Taskmaster in general, or any guests that you'd like to see on in the future ask some questions in advance and then when we interview them we can ask them those questions thank you very much for listening goodbye you Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence.

Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store

and ACAS Creative.