>> TK: Alright. Welcome to the post-episode review, here in the Transformative Taskmaster podcast. Obviously, you are here if you have watched episode one of series 19 or “season” 19 as some call it, but also go listen to the official Transf- the official Transformative Taskmas-. That's us. You're here. Good job. Go listen to… go listen to the official Taskmaster podcast this week with Ed Gamble and Nick Mohammed in the caravan. You can also watch the entire interview on YouTube, so that's new and exciting. 
>> Lewis: I love it.
>> TK: Obviously they go through the episode in detail, which obviously we're not going to do that same thing. We are going to go through the episode, but we're going to be talking a bit about things that Ed hasn't talked about, but also that wasn't necessarily brought up in the episode itself, and they just kind of glossed over it.
>> Lewis: They do that a lot.
>> TK: I have some notes here. Starting with the intro to the episode, Greg says that all of the contestants have been put through their “rigorous 12 step hygiene program. And now they smell great.” And then that's the bit. And then they move right on. So I liked that.
>> Lewis: I love that he forgot his intro again.
>> TK: I love when he does that because I say stuff like that all the time where I'll say something ridiculous and then I'll say, “...which is a sentence that just came out of my mouth.” So when he said, “is a bit that I forgot I wrote,” yeah, I feel you. 
>> Lewis: I love when he does that so much.
>> TK: I think that the 12 step hygiene program, I really want more lore on that. I think that's part of the Taskmaster lore that we get of the in-universe bit where Alex trims his dead skin off his feet and all this kind of stuff.
>> Lewis: What is it, I think it’s 12 Monkeys that I’m picturing where he gets this horrific scrub-down. I think that’s what it is, where he’s brought back to his point in the future so they have to scrub all the past germs off of him. That’s what I pictured when he said that. They’re just lined up being scrubbed with a broom.
>> TK: That's really funny. So there's a little bit of lore that we know nothing about and we'll never know anything about ever again but the bit that he says is that they're competing for “daddy's golden head of destiny, which is a sentence that I forgot I wrote.” Which is amazing. 
>>Lewis: I love that.
>>TK: What was Jamali's series? I always forget. 
>> Lewis: He was on 11.
>> TK: Yeah, so in series 11 was when the whole “daddy” thing started because Greg initially was like, “No, I don't like that. Actually, come over here and say it again.”
>> Lewis: “Thank you daddy.”
>> TK: “Thank you daddy.”
>> Lewis: No, that would have been series 6 with Asim Chowdry.
>> TK: Oh, sorry, Jamali. Oh my gosh, you're right. 
>> Lewis: Because series 11 they weren’t allowed to touch.
>> TK: Oh, yeah, you're right. I don't know why I was thinking Jamali. In my brain Jamali and Asim look very similar, I guess.
>> Lewis: I mean, that’s me with Rob Beckett and Russell Howard. Just blonde sets of teeth.
>> TK: I guess since series six, that's been slowly building up and now I think it's just part of his lingo.
>> Lewis: His identity.
>> TK: His identity, yep. The first task, the prize task, as someone who also used to be a teacher for 13 years and then quit to do something else, I was like, “Good times of school.” [said sarcastically] But something that is very different from… [water running] can you hear that? Hold on.
>> Lewis: Is it water running?
>> TK: Oh, I gotta go fix this really quick. Hold up. [goes to fix podcast cat’s water fountain]
>> Lewis: [holding up a pelican] Here’s a pelican I painted. Isn’t he cool? He lives in my spider plant. Have we found out why the cat was wet?
>> Podcast Cat: [yells]
>> TK: Sorry! Not my fault I had to refill your fucking water fountain. It starts being really loud if it's low on water.
>> Lewis: I thought I heard water running and I was like, “What the hell is that?”
>> TK: I thought it was her slurping out of the sink or something.
>> Lewis: Did we find out why she’s wet?
>> TK: The reason why she's wet is because she jumped in the bathtub after I was done taking a shower. I know for a fact that's what she does because I've seen her do it.
>> Lewis: What a dork.
>> TK: Anyway, so something that's very different between being a teacher in the UK and in the US is that you're not allowed to drink in the middle of the day in the US.
>> Lewis: I don’t think they are in the UK either, honestly.
>> TK: I mean, right, but there is – to be fair, there is a kind of social thing in the UK that I noticed when I lived in Edinburgh for a semester. Which was that – 'cause we went every Monday night to a brass band, and we would play in the brass band and then we would have a break, 'cause it's a two hour rehearsal, and then we would come back for the rest of it, but we were right next to a pub. In fact, I think we might have been connected to a pub. So literally during every single break everybody went over to the pub to have a pint and then came back to resume the second part of the rehearsal. We do not do [that] in the US. That does not happen. Maybe if you want to have an after– But even post rehearsal you don't go drinking. Maybe post concert but even then, only with people that you're really familiar with. So he's like, “I had a five pint lunch,” and I'm like, “Bro, I wish I could have a five pint lunch and then go back to teaching.”
>> Lewis: There was one thing that struck me out about Jason’s prize task, ‘cause he brought in the map. And as soon as they pulled it down, I said “That’s the wrong map.” You probably might have twigged this in the back of your brain as well… America wasn’t in the center with Asia awkwardly divided. That’s how maps looked when I was in school. I think Jason’s around my age. Maybe a bit older. I don’t know – I haven’t actually looked into him. He’s more grey than I am at any rate. It was always a thing where America was in the center and then Asia was just divided down the middle because the scale of Asia doesn’t fuckin’ matter I guess. And even as a kid, I was like, “Well that’s weird. Surely you could just shift it over and then everything’s visible.”
>> TK: I feel like our maps where I grew up was more like a western side and an eastern side. And on the western side was the US and then, well, not the US, but North America, South America. And then it divided in the middle and then it was the UK and Asia and all that kind of stuff.
>> Lewis: That’s how the one that we have up on our wall here is now. It’s got the Americas on the left and everything else on the right. But growing up that’s not how maps looked in my classrooms. We even had some teachers try to justify it. And it was just like, “What?” They’d say that Asia was too big to fit on the map. And I was like, “What?”
>> TK: Skill issue. It's weird to think about how different things used to be when we were kids learning stuff in school because I grew up learning that Pluto was a planet and then as a teacher they were like, “Haha jk, Pluto's not a planet.” And I'm like, “I don't like this because this just teaches me that nothing is real.”
>> Lewis: It’s like the feathered T-rexes, which I love, but apparently people fuckin’ hate the feathered T-rexes.
>> TK: No, I like that theory because it does make a lot of sense. Because if you look at birds today, and you just strip the birds down to their bones…
>> Lewis: Anybody who’s come across a cassowary or even a chicken knows those things are dinosaurs. That rooster will fuck you up.
>> TK: So that's the first task. I don't really have anything else much to say. Oh wait, I do have something to say 'cause I think maybe Ed brought this up or maybe Greg brought this up. Which was: Rosie brought in a tray with “school dinner” is I think what they're called in the UK. We call it “school lunch.” I don't know why you call it dinner because dinner for us is in the evening so you're never eating dinner at school.
>> Lewis: My grandmother used to call it dinner and then we had supper at night.
>> TK: That's interesting. I wonder what the difference is between dinner and supper.
>> Lewis: Where you’re from.
>> TK: I guess yeah, but anyway, so they –
>> Lewis: My family is Norwegian so that’s probably why.
>> TK: Yeah, but they said, somebody said that – they were like, “That tray was weird because it was divided into sections,” and I was like, “Yeah, are your school trays not divided into sections? How do you eat your food then?” Because they were like, “It feels like a prison tray,” and I was like, “Yeah I always grew up with trays that were divided into sections 'cause you put your drink in this thing that had a little circle in it. And then you put your vegetables in this square and then you put your main meal in this rectangle and then you put your dessert in this square.” And they were like, “Oh, it's so weird that they had divided sections in the tray.” And I'm like, “What kind of tray are you using?”
>> Lewis: I don’t think ours did either. Maybe when I was in grade school, but I know that in high school, in junior high, we got everything served in paper bowls or things like that. So we just had the regular tray. At my junior high we had a flippin’ salad bar.
>> TK: That's fancy. See, I don't even call it junior high, I call it middle school.
>> Lewis: Mine was junior high. That’s what it was called.
>> TK: Mine was middle school. So this is a funny story. The school that I went to, it was a school district and it only had an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. And that was the whole district, and they all shared one parking lot. That's how small my school was that I grew up in. My graduating class was 40 people.
>> Lewis: That is small.
>> TK: Yeah. Really, really tiny. Everybody knew everybody else.
>> Lewis: We moved around a lot, so I went to junior high in a district that was like that. The grade school and the high school were on the same campus, and then the junior high was way up on the mountain, and I don’t know why they weren’t all on the same campus. I went through junior high there and then we moved, and the district that we moved to did middle school, and the way they divided it I ended up skipping a year. It was like, “What the hell is going on? I don’t quite understand.”
>> TK: So were you 17 when you graduated?
>> Lewis: No, I was still 18 but I also feel like I went through 19 years of school or something weird because I definitely repeated grades because I went through five school districts growing up. So that was weird.
>> TK: I graduated at 17, but that's just because I'm born in October, so my parents were like, "You're four years old, you're going to kindergarten." Also I was bullied out of pronouncing “ele-ment-ary school,” because that's how I grew up saying it, because in upstate New York, you pronounce it “ele-ment-ary school,” and in apparently literally everywhere else, you pronounce it “elementry” school, but I went to college in Pennsylvania, and of course I went for education, music education, so I had to say the word “elementary” a lot, and I kept getting bullied, and so now I say “elementry”, I can't say “ele-ment-ary” anymore 'cause PTSD. [laughs]
>> Lewis: I’d bully you too, honestly. Oh. What was Alex’s magic trick?
>> TK: Oh, his pens?
>> Lewis: I could kind of understand it but then it was that weird kind of esoteric – what do you mean it’s magic, kind of thing? Obviously you’re an idiot. What I love is that Greg is so used to this, he knew there would be a fourth pen. And then he said, “I don’t think you’ve done a fifth.” And then he pulls out a fifth. But it’s not signed.
>> TK: There's got to be a twist. Let's move on to the first task, which – the very first thing that I noticed about this task is – obviously there are hand prints on the table on either side of the table. You're supposed to put your hands on the hand prints. Just that alone is very kinky. 
>> Lewis: Yeah, I was watching that and I was going, “What the hell are they doing?” Put your hands on the handprints…
>> TK: That's gonna be a fic for sure if it is not already. “Put your hands on the hand prints, close your eyes, bend over.” I mean, good lord. What's it called when you're put into… in the kink scene, if you're put into situations where it's purposely hard to get out of… do you know what I'm talking about? 
>> Lewis: Predicament bondage.
>> TK: Predicament bondage, yeah. It's like that. That's what that reminded me of.
>> Lewis: I was watching it again today on the YouTube cut without the ad breaks (sad) but I was looking at it like, “Are those Alex’s hand prints?”
>> TK: That's a good question, actually… or I wonder if they just… that is a good question. Are they drawn on the table or are they…?
>> Lewis: They’re definitely a cricket-cut decal, but I was wondering because of the way the fingers are splayed really weirdly. I don’t know. They looked like his hand prints to me. I don’t know if they were, but they looked like it.
>> TK: I wouldn't be surprised. One thing about this show is, it's been made very clear that they have a very small crew. And the thing that I like in talking to Alex previously is that it's very apparent that they do a lot of their own DIY stuff where they could easily order hand prints online. It would not surprise me at all if Alex was like, “Okay, here's my hand, draw a thing around it. We can do this ourselves,” type of thing. 'Cause he keeps saying – there's been a ton of interviews with him and Greg that have come out recently and also just him. But a lot of what he's been saying in these interviews is, “We have a very small team. It's a very culty niche thing.” Despite having millions of subscribers and views on YouTube. He's like, “It's very… it's just very niche,” and I'm like, “I mean I guess, but.”
>> Lewis: I can give you some insight on this. Because Adobe stock is one of the bigger ones out there. There’s also Shutterstock and a few others. The average stock image is about thirty dollars.
>> TK: That seems very expensive.
>> Lewis: It is expensive. So what you’ll do is, you have packages of credits that you can use. And you get 10 credits a month and they all roll over, which is how I do it. Or you can just spend per image and it’s so much more expensive to do that. So just based off of the cost of stock images, I wouldn’t be surprised if he just scanned his hand and they traced over it in Illustrator.
>> TK: That's fair. I don't have any other notes on the first task that haven't already been talked about.
>> Lewis: I did really like this one though, because like you said, it’s a weirdly kinky one. I had the same thought that Stevie did: “Oh, did you piss in these jars?”
>> TK: Which also makes it seem like it was warm liquid, but I feel like vinegar wouldn't have been warm. So I don't know… you know what I mean? Nobody pisses in a jar and then chucks it in the fridge.
>> Lewis: It must have either been really diluted or something because I have malt vinegar in my fridge and it’s not that colour.
>> TK: Vinegar to me is clear.
>> Lewis: Malt vinegar is dark.
>> TK: I don't know anything about cooking ever, so don't ask me what the differences are between types of vinegars. 
>> Lewis: Salt and vinegar on your chips, man, come on.
>> TK: No, I hate vinegar. I can't do salt and vinegar chips. It's too, um, too vinegary. It cuts up my mouth. I don't like it.
>> Lewis: Well that’s because the potato chips that you get, I do think those over here use white vinegar. Because they don’t taste right. But I’m talking the chips that you make by chopping up a potato and throwing them in some oil.
>> TK: Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, the second task, which is the “Do something cool and then do it backwards.” Here is the thing. We are 19 series into this show by this point, not counting Champion of Champions one, two, and three, and not counting literally every other… New Year's Treats and Junior Taskmaster and all the international iterations. If you open a task, and before I finish my thought, I will say that to their credit, not all of them are the John Robins type of people who know Taskmaster in and out and all this kind of stuff, that's fine. But if you open up a task and it does not have a win condition, you better be expecting a second task. 
>> Lewis: Yeah, for real.
>> TK: Because if it does not say “fastest wins” or “coolest thing wins” or literally anything like that, or “fewest guesses wins” or whatever. If it does not give you a win condition, there is a second part to the task. Now also to be fair…
>> Lewis: And it might not be coming immediately. Some of them have done the second task well after the fact. There’s always a second half.
>> TK: And also to be fair, there's no way to know what the second part is unless you're in the pea-lympics and you're like, “Throw a pea the farthest. Yeah, okay, I'm gonna throw it right here so I know exactly where it is.” So obviously, by that point, at least Fatiha has caught on to the whole shtick of, “I know what you're going to ask me to do next.” So it's not like there were any clues in the “do something cool” that said that you would then have to do it backwards; the text wasn't backwards on the task itself or anything like that. So to be fair, there's no way that you could have predicted what it was. Now, let's talk a little bit about cool Alex because I love cool Alex so much.
>> Lewis: I agree. I agree with some of the people in the chat that he was just cosplaying Joe Cool there.
>> TK: I really liked that because he does have a jumper that he wears a lot that's the Joe Cool Snoopy with glasses and a backwards baseball hat on and I really hope that that was intentional, that he actually did that because – and even if it wasn't intentional, I bet you anything that his subconscious was like, “Cool. Snoopy. Glasses backwards hat, let's go.” I love cool Alex. And also those glasses are so cool. I love those glasses, the little reflection shades or whatever. Those are peak coolness to me.
>> Lewis: I have to say that when they read the task and it was “Do something cool” my mind immediately went to series 12 with the “eat toast in the coolest way” or whatever it was. I can’t remember how it was, but I was like, “Oh we’re back to this.” I was wondering how they’re gonna spin it so that it’s not the same task.” But what I found was that Victoria’s existential crisis: “Who decides what’s cool?” was repeated this time. Who decides that? Well, obviously the Taskmaster does.
>> TK: ‘Cause it's definitely a “coolness is in the eye of the beholder” type of thing because I could go down to the – I'm gonna go down to my local game store and play D&D this afternoon and somebody shows up with a custom painted mini and I'm like, “That is so cool!” But obviously this is the nerdiest thing you've ever heard of. But Nick Mohammed in the official Taskmaster podcast says that he would have gotten in the fridge and I'm like, “Yeah, that's smart. That’s good.”
>> Lewis: That was what Morgana did, was she just got in the freezer, basically.
>> TK: I don't think Ed said what he would do which is a bummer because I would have liked to know what he would have done but I was thinking about it and I can do this thing with my eyes where I can shake them back and forth really quick and I think that's cool because it freaks people out and then they were like, “Do it backwards,” and I'm like, “Easy. Just do the same exact thing.”
>> Lewis: I was thinking, it’s very cool to be able to just create something. So I would have got a canvas and some paint and done some quick abstract thing and bullshit the deep meaning. Which, then, to undo that, easy. Just white paint it. And then when you play it in reverse, it looks like you’re painting it.
>> TK: Or get your laptop out and type a little story and then just, "Delete." Just hold down the delete button.
>> Lewis: Make it look like you’re really flying with that words per minute.
>> TK: Yeah, really. I liked that. That was really good. After that, something happens where… I forget what Alex says to Greg, but he says something, and then he goes, "It's funny, it's clever, and it winds Greg up. Tick, tick, tick." [laughs] That’s definitely his…
>> Lewis: Was that about the fish tank?
>> TK: Yeah, it was about the fish tank, which I should have put earlier in my notes, but I wrote multiple sets of notes, so of course it's out of order. That was like, "It's funny, it's clever, and it winds Greg up,” and…
>> Lewis: And even Greg’s like, “Yeah, fair.”
>> TK: That's your MO. I don't know what to tell you. We also get a couple of nicknames for Alex this episode. 
>> Lewis: Fuckin’ “Muppet Features.”
>> TK: “Cylindrical little piglet” was a new one.
>> Lewis: He didn’t mind that!
>> TK: He didn't mind it. That's a new one. We got “Muppet Features,” which is hilarious. And I did not catch her saying that the first time, because I think something about the way she says it, or maybe somebody cuts her off or something, but I didn't clock that that's what she said.
>> Lewis: The way he responded to that though was like, “I’m sorry, what? That’s the most insulting thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
>> TK: So funny. We've got “Muppet Features,” we've got another “Sweet Cheeks,” which makes Alex just light up on stage, which is so sweet. I loved that. 
>> Lewis: He loves that.
>> TK: And also, for those of you playing at home who don't have access to the ad breaks, we also get the Playful Wrestling Sessions bit, which I can tell you, as someone who went to the premiere of this episode in New York City, we did not get the ad breaks, and you better believe we would have screamed the roof off the top of that building if we had gotten them, because – excuse me, playful wrestling sessions? And also, I would like to shout out Greg, for correctly… I don't know what the word is in the vernacular of whenever you're talking about you and another person and it is a possessive. A lot of people will say “TK’s and I’s blah blah blah.” Obviously that's not correct. But what Greg says is “Alex's and my playful wrestling sessions,” which is the correct way to say it, because it is really hard to do that on the fly, which is, “Somebody else's and my blah, blah, blah,” so shout out to him for doing that correctly.
>> Lewis: He said that he did used to teach English before he went into drama, so maybe some of that stayed in.
>> TK: I can definitely imagine him typing it out and then being like, “That's not right. How do I do this correctly?” I guess you could say “Mine and Alex's” but then “mine” doesn't really work in that situation so it’d be “my and Alex's” but that also sounds really weird, so anyway.
>> Lewis: It’s “Alex’s and my.” On the ad breaks last series, I feel like they were almost calling Jazz’s ad break videos out when they released their own video of the lost ad break links. I was almost hoping that we’d get the ad breaks this series, that they’d come back, and they haven’t. And it’s like, “You guys are so close!”
>> TK: I kind of get why you're doing it and we will have Jazz on to talk about ad breaks in an upcoming episode of this podcast. So keep an ear out for that.
>> Lewis: Soon-ish. I don’t have the schedule in front of me.
>> TK: I kind of get why they're doing it, but also, we are missing critical lore and if you're not gonna put them out, then at least put them out in the “lost whatever's,” on YouTube. 'Cause right now, I think they only have just the one series, right? And I'm like, “Okay, but where's all of the other ones?”
>> Lewis: But they only did it for the last series. We’re missing so much.
>> TK: We have to do that ourselves now, which is really annoying. I mean “we” – Jazz does it. And I'm sure it's annoying for Jazz but go subscribe to Jazz.
>> Lewis: It’s definitely annoying when they get those four second copyright claims, and it’s like, “Why that? Why that little bit right here?”
>> TK: Pretty annoying. The only other thing that I had in my notes was… Well for one thing, Stevie's outfit is one of my all-time favorite outfits ever. Her task outfit because it is clean. It is crisp. It looks so good on her and I love a black and gold. I love a black and gold.
>> Lewis: I don’t quite want to say that it's a tracksuit but it's tracksuit adjacent.
>> TK: Yeah, it's very classy.
>> Lewis: I think that’s only the third one we’ve had. There was Tim and there was Aisling. I can’t remember anyone else that wore a tracksuit. There’s a lot of boiler suits. Dara’s got a flight suit. For some reason the tracksuits don’t get used very much, when they seem like the ones that would be the best for doing tasks.
>> TK: Right. I love her outfit. I mean, it's so crisp. It's so good.
>> Lewis: Why don’t we go through all of them? They all have some pretty interesting outfits that they’re wearing.
>> TK: We've got, so Stevie obviously, crisp, clean, gorgeous. We've got Mat Baynton. We don't need to talk a lot about Mat because it's already been said, but good lord.
>> Lewis: Some of the spoilers I’ve read or seen, or something, I don’t know. 
>> TK: The behind the scenes stuff.
>> Lewis: Before a new series, we’re so overwhelmed with new information. Apparently there will be blurring, which, I can’t wait for that.
>> TK: But also he says they didn't need to blur anything because nothing happened, which is funny. I think they did it for comedic effect or something, but I think it's gonna be hilarious.
>> Lewis: I would have rather had them blurred Wang than Mat.
>> TK: Which, don't they do that for the kids’ version? I think they do actually.
>> Lewis: I’ve heard that some of it is weirdly unwatchable on the bleeped version.
>> TK: So funny, oh my gosh. Okay, what else? Who else? What's Jason wear?
>> Lewis: Jason wears his clothes. 
>> TK: Cool. 
>> Lewis: Same thing apparently he wears all the time.
>> TK: Great. So we've got typical Jason, we've got… 
>> Lewis: Rosie's has this really –
>> TK: Rosie’s gorgeous, gorgeous.
>> Lewis: What would you call that?
>> TK: Oh, I would call it. Um, oh my gosh, why is my brain blanking?
>> Lewis: I can’t remember if it’s one piece or two.
>> TK: I think it’s one, because it’s all one type of fabric.
>> Lewis: Yeah, I can’t remember.
>> TK: But anyway.
>> Lewis: And I literally just watched it an hour ago.
>> TK: My brain is saying bodysuit, but I don't think that's right. But whatever it is.
>> Lewis: Desiree wore a bodysuit as well.
>> TK: I mean, it's gorgeous, and when when when Rosie is doing the, the break dancing on the rug –
>> Lewis: And she blends in with that rug.
>> TK: And it completely matches. It's so cool. I love her outfit, it’s gorgeous. Yeah and then we've got Fatiha who is –
>> Lewis: Fatiha [pronouncing it differently]
>> TK: I have heard her pronounce it Fa-TEE-hah, with the emphasis on the “ti”. So that's what I'm going to go for. And I know everyone pronounces it differently. But as someone whose name never gets pronounced correctly, except for two weeks in the middle of the summer, because that's the only place people know how to pronounce my name correctly, I want to go by what she says and not what other people say. 
>> Lewis: Fair. I thought it was kinda interesting she went for something more subdued, ‘cause a lot of the times I'll see her in really bright, virant hijabs, and really colourful outfits underneath, and I think it was on The Quiz this year where she was complaining that she was told not to wear red, and she brought something in red anyway and they said “You can’t wear that,” and then David Mitchel said well, “They told me not to wear blue. I wonder why?” and back behind him was blue. I don’t know why my light is doing this.
>> TK: Yeah, so she's got a pretty casual outfit on. But she's gorgeous. Her makeup is immaculate. 
>> Lewis: Yes.
>> TK: But yeah, she's really pretty.
>> Lewis: During the live task, I’ve seen a lot of discussion about this. My initial thought was that she looked at what the task was, she looked at what other people were doing and just said, “No, there’s no way to maintain dignity while doing that,” and then I saw someone else say that she was possibly worried about her hijab slipping and that would also play into that. The one thing I will say is, I don’t believe for a second that she did it, or that she didn’t participate because of her shoes. That was just a quick thing that she could say that would get a laugh, whether or not it was accurate. But at the same time, I don’t mind people deciding, “No, I’m not going to do this task.” I know that really annoys some people where people just nope out, but Jo Brand did that a lot, just, “No I’m not going to do that.” Liza Tarbuck did that a few times as well. She admitted “No, I was just in a bad mood, I didn’t want to do that task, so I crushed that little wind up man because he annoyed me.”
>> TK: Even in series one, we've got Roisin doing the horse task differently because she's like, “I'm not gonna ride a horse.”
>> Lewis: And that one I could really understand as well, because horses are big, and they’re scary and they’re dangerous. Don’t get on a horse if you don’t feel comfortable getting on the horse.
>> TK: I don't know if you're caught up with Australia.
>> Lewis: No, I’ve not seen the most recent one.
>> TK: Okay, well, spoilers, if you haven't seen – I'll try to keep it relatively spoiler-free. 
>> Lewis: I will forget!
>> TK: You will, but the listeners who might not know…
>> Lewis: Spoil me daddy.
>> TK: Don't call me that. I don't like that. Actually come over here and say it. [laughs] So in the latest episode of Taskmaster Australia… Oh, do you remember in series, is it 16 with Julian Clary?
>> Lewis: Yeah.
>> TK: So they do this task, which is, they blindfold them and then they have to crawl around on the floor and avoid getting hit by the little wind up animals. Do you remember that?
>> Lewis: Yeah, it was the rubbish robots.
>> TK: And it was a complete dud of a task. So it's almost like that, but they've modified it to be a little better.
>> Lewis: Way less crap.
>> TK: So it's kind of like that where the contestants are blindfolded, but then they have to stay in one place and then they have to pet the dog that's taped on a Roomba that's going around. And so obviously they can't see it. But Tommy Little apparently is terrified of the dark. And he really did not like putting on the blindfold, to the point where he was the first out, because he was like, “I can't, I can't do this.” And there's a very sweet moment of Tom rubbing his back afterwards. It's really sweet. So yeah, it's kind of one of those, no one ever has to do a task if they don't want to. I think even Ed brings that up in the podcast episode with Nick which is like, you don't have to do – there isn't a contract that you have to sign that says you will do every single task that they give you.
>> Lewis: I think people not wanting to do the task is a built-in part of the show because I feel like there’s been someone every single series someone has said, either explicitly or implicitly, “No, I’m not doing this.” But one thing I’ve been talking to my husband recently about, which we see that here with Fatiha, the main reason Mark Watson got second place was because he was really good at just doing the task the bare minimum. Just don’t fuck it up. Even if that’s putting a single pebble into the balloon and then giving it to the sound man to blow up. He got four points for that!
>> TK: Just finish the task. 
>> Lewis: He got. Four. Points. For a single pebble. Because, the other three that weren’t Rose, not Rose, Ashling, she got the bruschetta in there, Mark put a single pebble, and then the other three failed the task. And I feel like we’re going to see a lot of that from Fatiha, again where she, [mimics throwing something very closely] with the pea, which, she found that pea immediately because she knew where it was. And I love those.
>> TK: And that was smart of her to be like, "I know you're gonna make me go find it.”
>> Lewis: Yeah, just throw that one if that means a guaranteed win for the next.
>> TK: Yeah, and it's funny. I don't know why I keep bringing up Tommy Little from Australia, probably because I just watched the episode yesterday or two days ago, but there is a task in the latest episode where Tommy is like, “I'm gonna wait ‘til the last possible second for the effect,” and then he misses and gets disqualified and it's like, “No dude, you can't do that! You have to just complete the task.”
>> Lewis: I think Jack Dee pulled that off really well when they had to disarm the robot, because yeah, he was drawing it out, because he knew, don’t wait ‘til there’s one second on the timer. Just do it later for the suspense. That was another one where just pissing about and, not really caring, just making sure that you actually do it right, not necessarily fast, got them a lot of points because, I think it was only… He got points, Rosie got points because Alex was fucking around, and asked three times, “Are you sure that one, are sure, are you sure?” “Yes!”
>> TK: Yeah, and she's like, "I just didn't get it on time because this asshole was fucking around."
>> Lewis: But I love those kind of plays, where they aren’t necessarily playing to win, they’re just playing to complete. And I would love – my bucket list item for any series of Taskmaster is a loser-club winner. Someone who doesn’t win a single episode, but gets the trophy. Because it is mathematically possible. Romesh came within one point of doing it in the very first series. I’d love to actually see that happen. I won’t say that this could be the series – potentially any series could. But that’s a hard call up until that very last episode.
>> TK: So let's wrap up by talking about our contestant thoughts. I have some predictions on each contestant and how they're going to do in the series. And I also have a prediction of who's gonna win. Let's just go down the line. First we have Fatiha which I think that she is going to maybe get third place-ish because I do think that she will try a lot on tasks but I also think that she can't be fucked to do some of them. And I think because of that she'll probably place somewhere in the middle. That's my prediction for her. 
>> Lewis: I can see that.
>> TK: Is Jason next? Jason I think is going to try really hard and I think he's going to do really well. I think he's gonna get second place.
>> Lewis: I don’t see him going for the win. He’s here because he wants to be on Taskmaster. He wants to be entertaining. I think a few contestants have shown that entertaining doesn’t mean winning, it means entertaining.
>> TK: I think that Jason is a little bit too chaotic to let that chaotic bit of him slide enough for him to try to go for the win, so I think that he's going to rather do something that's more chaotic and risk getting fewer points than the other way around.
>> Lewis: I do also wonder a little bit – it's early to tell from just the first episode – there’s been a lot of emphasis about how he’s the first international contestant. And, people will say, “What about Desiree?”, “What about Mae?” But he is the first one who travelled and did this show at a loss, just because he wanted to do it. 
>> TK: A lot of what people don't realize is that, yes, Desiree was already over there, Mae was already over there, every other person that was not from the UK originally was already over in the UK. Jason traveled from another country to go to be on Taskmaster. So that's what they're talking about.
>> Lewis: I do wonder how much that’s going to affect him, because we see that little peek of it, right at the top of the episode.
>> TK: “Series, Jason.”
>> Lewis: Where he’s corrected. I do wonder how much of that language barrier is going to affect him because every time, every new series, there’s always someone on Reddit going: “I don’t understand this task”, or, what one sticks in my mind is Alex measuring things in Double Deckers. He does it twice. One time he’s talking about the bus, and then there’s another time where he’s talking about the chocolate bar: a Double Decker. And that confused so many people on Reddit. And the thing with the squash and the Ribena. Americans don’t know what the fuck that is.
>> TK: I can tell you for a fact that there is at least one big thing that happens to Jason this series because at the Q&A in New York City they brought up the fact that in the UK they call what we call bowling pins they call those skittles and so they were like, “Do something with skittles” and Jason is looking around for the candy.
>> Lewis: I don’t know how ubiquitous that is, just because – I’m gonna pull another completely unrelated although somewhat related fandom in here. The Yogscast. I used to watch them a whole bunch, I still do occasionally. They were doing a GTA race on it that had bowling pins about. And most of the people in the Yogscast are British. And Lewis on the Yogscast was just ranting and bitching about the skittles everywhere. And he’s my age, Lewis is, and the rest of them are all a bit younger. So he’s complaining about these skittles and his fellow Brits are like “What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody calls them skittles.” So I’m wondering just how ubiquitous that is.
>> TK: Yeah, that's interesting because you never really think about, of course in whatever country you're in, you have different language for the different generations. I don't understand anything of what Gen Z is saying. 
>> Lewis: Oh my god.
>> TK: I guess you don't really think about that that's probably true for other countries as well so that's interesting. But also “snooker” and was it Desiree that was like snuh-ker?
>> Lewis: Snuh-ker.
>> TK: Snooker, snuh-ker snooker, because I would have called it snooker like she did and then they're like “It's snoo-ker, obviously.”
>> Lewis: Book, took…
>> TK: Yeah exactly. 
>> Lewis: The funny thing is, that’s how Rob Brydon pronounces it: s-nook-er
>> TK: That's interesting.
>> Lewis: Yeah, exactly. He tried to claim it as a Welsh thing, because that was also on The Quiz. To which Greg said, “All of my relatives are Welsh, what the fuck are you talking about?”
>>TK: “You can't pull the Welsh card on me.”
>> Lewis: It’s also kind of a joke that Rob Brydon’s a bad Welshman. Because he completely lost his accent and apparently he doesn’t really speak Welsh to begin with. So other Welsh comedians kind of shit on him a little bit for that. But her saying snuh-ker was not the first time I’d heard it.
>> TK: I'm really excited to see what other stuff Jason says wrong and then is corrected by, because it's so funny to me. Okay, moving on to Mat.
>> Lewis: Real quick, do you think they’re gonna upload the entire series as “season 19”?
>> TK: I hope so, because that was hilarious. That was so funny that their YouTube did that. So funny.
>> Lewis: It breaks my brain a little bit, but it is funny.
>> TK: Moving on to Mat, Mat's gonna do real bad. I wanted Mat to do so good.
>> Lewis: He’s gonna be the fail man.
>> TK: He is going to be the fail man and it's going to be so sad to watch and I am so upset because I really, really wanted him to do well, because he was one of the very few across all 19 series of Taskmaster contestants that I actually knew who he was before he went on the show. Because I watched him in Ghosts and he was my favorite ghost. And I really wanted him to do well but it is clear that he's gonna do really bad because he says it himself in the studio. So he's going to come fifth, fourth.
>> Lewis: I’d be surprised if he’s any higher than fourth.
>> TK: Yeah, big same.
>> Lewis: I can almost see four, because I half expect Rosie to just crash out.
>> TK: Rosie's the one that I don't know how she's going to do. I don't know where she's going to end up because I was like -- “oh maybe she'll be second”, and then I was like, “oh no maybe she'd be fourth”. So I'm yeah I'm going to tentatively put Rosie in third or fourth between her and Fatiha those are going to be– I don't really have a good read on her yet and I know that obviously her husband went on Taskmaster and he can probably tell her, “Just make sure you do this” and “watch out for this”, and all that kind of stuff, but I don't know. She's hard to read for me for now.
>> Lewis: Well didn’t she also work on Taskmaster for a while?
>> TK: It's possible.
>> Lewis: I feel like I remember hearing Chris say that. But she has this energy about her that I can’t quite articulate, that’s just very happy and excited to do these things, but there’s an air of Nish about her.
>> TK: Almost a Jenny Eclair type of: very excited to be there, but, maybe she is– Very much with Jenny, Jenny started a task, and then she was like, “I’m just going to enjoy myself because this is amazing. This is the best day of my life putting potatoes in a hat.” It's like, “I
don't care how I do, I'm just gonna have fun with it.”
>> Lewis: Here’s a question for Jack Bernhardt, but there’s been Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont and I’m trying to think if there have been any other couples that have been on independently like that. I can’t think of any, but I feel like there has been at least one. I’m very curious to see what the stats say regarding couples that go on. Which half is typically the better half? Is it divided by gender? Is it divided by who goes on first? Because I do feel like there may be a trend in there, but there’s not enough data to really extrapolate it.
>> TK: Yeah, not a lot of people. That is a good question. And then finally, we have Stevie, who I think is going to pull out the first. I think she's going to pull out the win.
>> Lewis: Yeah, I agree.
>> TK: She seems very competent and competitive enough that she will want to try her best. 'Cause even though she was disqualified for putting the pea under the pillow, she was like, "Fuck!"
>> Lewis: So we were watching that and this was one of those moments where my husband thought I was from Mars because as soon as Fatiha said that there was 26 pillows, I said, “Oh then you have to check under number 16.” And he was like “What, why?” And it’s because that’s what number P is in the alphabet, it’s 16. And he just couldn’t get his head ‘round that. And then, oh look, that’s where it was, under number 16 because you weren’t finding a pea necessarily, you were finding “P”.
>> TK: Even Nick on the official podcast says, “If somebody said ‘there are 26 pillows, find the pea’, I would have obviously been able to figure it out.” But yeah, the second she said 26, I was like, I know where it is. I mean, I knew where it was anyway, because I had watched the
premiere. 
>> Lewis: So, trying to think of how to word this question. How did watching it now at release compare to watching it at the premiere?
>> TK: Dude, you always gotta watch Taskmaster, new episodes, with a crowd of 1500 people that are just excited as you to be there. Because it was so much fun watching it at the premiere because everyone else there was obviously a huge fan. So we were all laughing at the in-jokes. We were all screaming at the appropriate places because we were in America for the premiere. Whenever Jason came out, we were screaming and shouting and clapping for him. And it was so nice, because it almost felt like you were part of the studio audience, in the show itself, which was kind of meta. But that's what it felt like, was you were watching it as part of a studio audience, which we kind of were. So watching it back, I've watched it three times now. At the premiere, and then our little group chat had a watch along that I got to be there for most of. I always love watching live with our group chat because people that haven't seen it are always like “Oh my gosh, they did this!” But also we get the ad breaks that we the New York people haven't seen, the 14 of us that were in there. We haven't seen those so we get to freak out about those. And then I watched it another time with my partner because he was like “okay we need to watch the episode that you saw in New York” and he of course really loved it and so usually the way that I watch new episodes is with my partner and it's just us two and it's fun. Sometimes he'll be like, “you have to pause and go back because what did they just say?” and he'll do that with the Australian Taskmaster too. There were a few moments in this latest episode that we were like “excuse me?” I definitely think that watching it with as many people as you can who also love Taskmaster is the way to go because it's really fun.
>> Lewis: I was so annoyed that I wasn’t able to do that properly this week because my fucking media PC took an hour to boot up. 
>> TK: Rude.
>> Lewis: And that was the signal to just completely wipe it because it used to be my husband’s gaming PC. And when I turned it into the media centre, I was like “okay well I don’t want to completely wipe Windows because (indecipherable) and it’s already got everything I need on it. I just need to plug the hard drive in.” And it became very apparent, relatively quickly, that I should have wiped it. And then I just put it off because then I’d have to reinstall the server and after that it’s like, “no, we can’t do this, this is cancer.”
>> TK: Yeah, that's a pain.
>> Lewis: But next week… 
>> TK: Hopefully.
>> TK: Because I’ve watched it now twice on Channel 4 and I will say that the way they cut around the ad breaks is usually done well, because you don’t notice. It took me several series of watching it on YouTube because it took me a while to realise, wait where are the ad breaks? And I noticed it from a gifset on Tumblr. Because there’s one that goes ‘round where there’s an earlier series where Greg is draped over his throne in series, I think 10, and he says, “This is most bored I’ve ever been”. And in 11, he tells Alex to drape himself over his throne in a way he finds sexy and Alex exactly mimics that pose. And it’s like “Wait. What the fuck is this? Where’s that from? I’ve never seen this”. And it’s like “Oh it’s from an outtake or it’s from an ad break that they’re not uploading now. Wait, What?”
>> TK: Yeah, annoying.
>> Lewis: And I’ve mentioned this before, although I think the episode isn’t gone out yet, but I watched it backwards. I started with series 11 and watched that and then was “Okay that’s cool,” watched 10, and then I went backwards like a psychopath. I didn’t really notice right away that something was wrong. What I did notice after getting to 10 was that all of a sudden it seemed like there were extra bits. And I had convinced myself, no I’m imagining that they weren’t there. They obviously were there, I just wasn’t paying attention. And then I didn’t notice as they continued to upload more that those ad breaks were gone. And it’s like, “Wait, what?”
>> TK: Yeah. What a pain.
>> Lewis: Bring ‘em back.
>> TK: Bring ‘em back!
>> Lewis: They’re important. 
>> TK: Yes. Well, that's been our episode debrief. [sings a musical riff, then laughs]
>> Lewis: Oh, real quick. Sorry, what do we think about Nick’s prediction?
>> TK: What do we think about what? 
>> Lewis: What did he say? Nick made his own prediction. What was it? Six ones and one six.
>> TK: Yeah I don’t know, he’s magic. I trust him.
>> Lewis: That’s one aspect I never learned was how to do the numerology because my brain just doesn’t work. I can do mentalism, cold reading, I mean anyone can, and I do a lot of table magic and some stage magic. I never got my head around the numerology.
>> TK: I guess we’ll find out. We’ll see. [pause] Outro.
>> Lewis: Yeah I can’t think of anything else that I wanted to bring up. I didn’t take notes either.
>> TK: Go check us out on Patreon. We've got exclusive posts, behind the scenes scenes.
>> Lewis: And we’ve got a post up that you can purchase to be able to do it. Honestly we’re operating at a significant loss, so please go check out our Patreon. We are taking questions right now. Vague kind of wishy-washy questions. If you have a question that might be better for someone other than Greg or Alex to ask, ask them on our Patreon because that’s going to help us finalise the next block of episodes going out.
>> TK:  Exciting guests are coming on.
>> Lewis: We can’t say anything yet but we have some really cool things coming up.
>> TK: I’m so excited.
>> Lewis: Same.
>> TK: Alright y'all, see ya next time.