Ep 205. Jason Mantzoukas - Series 19 Ep.5

Hello, it's Ed Gamble here from the Taskmaster podcast.

And if you live in a specific place in Europe or indeed America, I'm doing my first ever international tour.

Go to edgamble.co.uk for details on the date.

I'm coming to the Netherlands, I'm coming to Norway, I'm coming to Denmark, I'm coming to Portugal, I'm coming to Gibraltar.

That's all in November this year, and I'm popping to the US next year.

Dates are going to be added all the time, but at the moment, you can go to LA, you can go to Brooklyn, and see me in February next year.

Ed Gamble Live!

edgamble.co.uk for tickets.

Bye-bye.

Hello and welcome to the Taskmaster podcast with me, Ed Gamble.

I'm back in the caravan, baby.

But something you should know, this episode is not actually recorded in the caravan because of our special guest's location.

That should give you a clue as to who it is.

We're going to be talking about Taskmaster Series 19, episode 5, with Jason Manzoukis, who, of course, is not in this country, he is in America.

So it'll be a Zoom episode.

It's a fantastic episode.

We've done it already.

I'm now in the caravan recording this intro just because I like to be here and hang out.

What a brilliant series this is.

What a brilliant contestant Jason is.

Let's get on with it.

This is Taskmaster Series 19, Episode 5, as discussed by Jason Manzoukis.

Welcome, Jason, to the Taskmaster Podcast.

Wow, wow, wow.

Here we are.

Great to see you, Ed.

What a delight.

What a delight it is to see you.

Now, of course, you're obviously not in the caravan with me.

We've been brought some of these in the caravan.

A difficult commute for you, though.

We thought it might be a very difficult commute.

And also, watching as the guests get progressively sweatier and sweatier in the roasting hot van, I can only assume by the end of the season, everybody will come out like in a fully baked, a

roasted podcast.

Yeah, it's been, I mean, and that was when it wasn't too hot.

And there is a bit of a heat wave at the moment in the UK.

So I think the last few episodes of it are going to be pretty dreadful.

And there's a huge ladybird infestation.

So it's really the worst place anyone could ever record a podcast.

And not for nothing, the caravan itself is disgusting.

Yes.

I don't think people can truly understand that it is dilapidated.

It should be condemned.

It should be torn to the ground.

I did my best to tear it to the ground.

I tried to light it on fire, as did Stevie.

Listen, the whole thing should be raised.

Yeah,

I don't know where they got that caravan from, but I'm assuming it was a police auction.

Yeah,

either a police auction or it just, they found it.

It was just there.

I would believe that.

I would believe that.

And I would believe it if it was like on top of like a grave, like some sort of unmarked grave.

Was it exciting for you to to go to the house?

Because, you know, I don't think we're telling tales outside of school.

You were a fan of the show before you agreed to do the show.

So actually seeing

cool.

Yeah, man.

It was cool as hell.

I will be honest.

You know, I'm not too cool to say I like the show.

So it really was to go over.

There's something about watching a show that you feel so removed from.

You know, it's not just, oh, I'm a fan of the show, but I'm a fan of this show that is in England, that I am very detached from.

So to watch it and see the house and the caravan, all those like iconic elements, to drive up the first day, it was nuts.

I was so excited in a way that I felt like they didn't believe.

Like, like, like Andy, at one point, one of the Andies caught me like in the hallway, just alone taking pictures of things on the wall and like taking a selfie with stuff in the background.

And he was like,

You really like the show, huh?

And I was like, yes, that's why I'm here.

He just couldn't believe that I was that interested in the show, the show that they make.

Yeah, the show they make, the show that you actively wanted to do.

It would be crazy for you to come and do the show from the States when you are, you know, a busy and successful man to be like, I'm gonna go and do this show, and I've not seen one second of it.

Yeah, can you imagine

what a crazy person that would be?

Like, for them to assume that I would be like, What's all this shit about?

How did you first get into Taskmaster?

Do you remember where you first saw it?

I feel like I saw bits of it around, like, you know, clips would be around and I saw pieces of it, but I never really saw it until they started, saw it like full episodes and in some sort of like I could watch a full season or something until they started putting it on YouTube.

You know, it really for us here, it is not really accessible until that YouTube channel truly had everything.

And that hit right at a time that was like, oh, wow, I can get, there's all of this stuff.

And there's the

clips that they make were great.

But then the ability to watch full seasons, really, I just crushed so many seasons in so little time.

I think maybe there was 13 seasons at the time or 12 seasons or something.

I just plowed through all of that.

So for me, it was like, oh, wow.

I'm going to say maybe six, seven years ago,

six years ago, maybe.

Do you have like a

standout season or competitor that you, and I'm

letting

no i'm not trying to do that trophy in the background well well well

i'm not doing that but obviously present company excluded we know that that i'm your fave but who else you know i i mean sam campbell i think is was truly hysterically funny i think bob mortimer is some kind of genius like and not just taskmaster but writ large i think he's incredible but i mean like i'm like the i mean season five i just adore because I know Nish and Ashling, and I think that that was fun to watch them.

It was fun.

James, your co-host, James Acaster, that season, what is that, seven?

Seven.

Seven, I think, is great.

What's the season with Rose Matafeo?

I think that season is fantastic.

I mean, they're all great.

A lot of people call that the season with Ed Gamble, but you know, it's okay to watch.

No, yeah, that is your season.

I thought she won.

Hmm.

I guess when I think of winners, I think of Rose and I think of Nish as the two big winners of Taskmaster.

Wow, that really speaks to how you approach the show, actually.

It really does.

Now, we should talk about your general sort of need for destruction.

You seem to head into the house from the very first day, as we see in one of the tasks in this episode, with

a real fury and you're ready to destroy the house.

I really wanted to set the tone.

I really wanted to make sure that Alex understood from the jump, this is not going to be easy for him.

You know, that he is, that he is truly under threat.

I wanted him to acknowledge and understand that I could dismantle him at any point, physically and mentally.

I mean, the fact that you brought a lockpicking set with you, did you bring in sort of tools to help you in the task or do you did you just have a lock picking set?

I just had it with me.

I just had it because it's in a little, I keep like a little tool pouch in my backpack all the time.

You know, it's got like, and listen, let's be honest, the lock pick set is easily the least used or, or, or, you know, accessed thing.

It's more often than not the tweezers or the little roll of duct tape or, you know, stuff like that.

That's useful.

But, but as I was thinking of like, oh, what's a cool thing?

What could be cool?

I was like, oh, what about picking a lock?

That would be very cool, Magnum PI style.

So it seemed like, and I was very happy that I had my toolkit with me.

But because otherwise I just would have done some dumb bullshit, you know?

So why not?

So I have, it's over there.

I have a toolkit that's got a ton of stuff.

So are you, I mean, are you a survivalist?

Is this what we're talking about?

Is this?

Am I a survivalist?

That's great.

I mean, not really, but I am.

I did very much internalize the ethos of the Boy Scouts, which is be prepared.

You know, that idea of like, oh, whatever might happen, especially if I'm on the road in a foreign country where I'm being treated as an enemy, maybe it's good to have some tools on hand.

Maybe I don't trust these fuckers.

I don't know what they're up to.

Sorry, so you saw being on Taskmaster as being in a foreign country and in danger all of the time.

Yeah, I felt under duress.

I felt like if I wanted to leave, I couldn't.

They seemed to have control of me.

They had control of my papers.

I didn't like that.

That's what a lot of people don't know, is that when you sign up to Taskmaster, they take your passport, don't they?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, Vicki takes that passport straight away, and she's like, You'll get this back later.

But then she does like she sorts breakfast out and stuff, so you kind of yeah, she's like, Do you I assume you want the same Nando's order?

And I'm like, Yeah, absolutely.

Is that what you is that what you were going for?

I mean, look, we don't normally ask guests this, Jason, but uh, is it what was your what was your Nando's order at lunch?

You know, I had I had a cheeky Nando's, uh,

I believe.

Uh, my Nando's order was very simple because of my egg allergy, I figured out if I could eat the simplest Nando's order, I was safe.

So I just ate that every day, which was just medium-spiced chicken, like a vegetable, and I think rice.

It was very simple.

The egg allergy, we should mention that briefly because it is

a proper bad allergy to eggs.

Oh, yeah.

Were you scared going into Taskmaster with eggs being so prevalent in the show?

I wasn't scared, but it really was

the only maybe genuinely sincere, like, hey, heads heads up conversation I had that wasn't like, isn't this fun?

We're going to have a great time, blah, blah, blah.

I had to be like, ooh, I should let you know, because you guys use eggs constantly, I cannot do any of that.

And there was like, and any, so anytime there was also like, we needed to eat something or something like that, there was a bit of like a, okay, let's check the ingredients, let's make sure that this is a safe version of whatever I might ingest.

So there was a little bit of, let's make sure everything's fine, but they were all very cool about it.

But I was worried because eggs are so prevalent in past seasons.

So prevalent.

I mean, that is very funny that you're going in there absolutely with a destructive streak and doing everything completely over the top.

And then you do have to stop the whole thing and go, but I'm being serious now, guys.

If an egg comes up,

if I squeeze this tube into my mouth, I will be very vulnerable.

I'm putting my life in your hands.

Let's get into this episode.

This is episode five.

The title is Maybe We're the Monsters, which we will get to later.

An incredible moment in the episode.

So good.

Let's talk about the prize task.

The best object to bestow in your will to a relative against who you are seeking revenge.

A lot of people say they're running out of ideas for the prize tasks, but this, beautifully simple and not over detailed at all.

Really, really strong prize task category.

Let's talk about your painting first of all, Jason.

Oh, yeah.

The

haunted painting of horrible children.

You collect

bodiless, just disembodied heads floating around.

Really unsettling.

Truly, really like a nightmare, like truly like a nightmare you might have.

And you genuinely bought this painting for yourself.

I did.

The thing that's really scary about it is, I don't remember actually purchasing it.

I remember seeing it on the website and being like, I don't want that.

That looks too crazy.

And then some weeks later, it just arriving.

So I must have purchased it, but boy, the fact that I can't remember clicking purchase or going through the process at all really makes me feel like that painting like just wanted to come here.

And so I've always felt like I can't, it doesn't hang in my house.

I was like, this is my perfect opportunity to get rid of it earnestly in a way that feels like I can pass on a curse.

Yeah, and also the painting would accept that.

So it's not one of the, it's not like when when someone throws something away and then you wake up the next morning and it's back in your house.

No, I'm bestowing it upon somebody and now it's their problem to deal with.

Unfortunately, though,

the curse bit you back because you won the episode.

I mean,

what a wild turnaround.

I couldn't believe that I won the episode where I have to now take my own haunted painting home.

It knew.

I would so much rather have lost the episode.

No, it knew.

Now talk to me.

Brutal.

Do you mind talking to me about the paintings behind you, Jason?

Yes.

Obviously, you prefer these because these are up in your house, but they

do hang in my house.

Yeah.

They don't not have a haunted quality.

Wait, you think that?

So you think that's haunted?

You think she's haunted?

To describe it to the listener, it's kind of this that I initially thought was Jim Morrison, but

no eyes.

Yeah, no,

it's a woman in a striped shirt.

I don't even know how to explain this.

She just looks nervous.

She looks nervous like she's thinking, she's like thinking, her internal monologue is like, are you painting me?

You know, like, she looks like, you better not be painting me.

She looks scared, like you caught her afraid.

Like 1970s striped shirt.

And then the girl on the other side, I don't know, she seems just like a angelic ghost child or something.

I don't know what she's up to, but she is also quite haunted.

She's got the vibe of like a Chucky doll.

She looks like the same.

Or like one of the Keene paintings, the Margaret Keene big eye paintings, you know.

We're just doing an art walk on this podcast, everybody.

Yeah, this is good at home with Jason Manzukas.

I like it.

Oh, my God.

This is what you lose when you do it in the caravan.

Yeah, exactly.

You can't walk around people's houses.

We get people to bring all their stuff with them sometimes.

Bring a bunch of weird shit.

Bring everything from your house so we can talk about it, please.

But no, this prize did very well.

I think it really played to what Greg enjoys, which is quite sort of creepy things that no one would ever buy.

No, I think so.

And I think it is so upsetting upon first, it's such a good initial reveal, you know, that I was pretty confident

it would land well with

Greg and the audience, frankly.

Because anytime I've shown it to people, they're like, whoa, no.

I don't want to have seen that.

It's a bit of like, it feels like the ring or the grudge or something.

Like, somehow, like, I feel like these kids might crawl out of this painting, you know?

It's got a real creepy quality to it.

I've recently become obsessed with, and I'm sure you've seen these,

Ghanaian mobile cinema posters.

No.

Oh, my God.

Put it on the screen.

Put it on the screen.

So there's these mobile cinemas in Ghana where

initially there was just like one of them, I think, and then it became a real business.

So they had to stand out for everyone in the villages.

Oh, yeah, sure.

So they'd make posters for the films, and they'd get local artists to do the posters.

But the local artists had not seen the films.

So they'd have to sort of show them pictures of things that happened.

But then to stand out above all the other posters, they'd just add loads of like sex masks.

I love that.

I love that.

You can buy,

they are proper haunted as well, but they're great.

Oh, that's great.

So your next late night shopping trip, trip, I think that's

by the way.

I'm about to spend so much money.

Let's talk about the other efforts here.

Let's talk about Matthews, the 1,000-piece jigsaw of the Mona Mesa with one piece missing.

Really?

One piece missing.

Very clever from Matthew.

He's a clever player, isn't he?

Yeah, great.

And I love that.

My only problem with a couple of these is that, you know, Matthew says it, and I think Rosie says it, their prize requires them to convince the person through repeated actions while living that they are obsessed with this thing whether it's the chocolate cake or the puzzle like matthew is like i'm gonna make sure that relative knows that i'm obsessed with this puzzle and i love making puzzles and i do puzzles all the time i'm like you're giving too much power to this relative like you look at all that time you're investing in the setup you know yeah

especially rosie's where it involved her baking brownies for this relative multiple amazing learning how to make amazing brownies, and then baking them for someone you hate the whole time.

Imagine, imagine you hate someone so much that you are seeking revenge against them, and that revenge means while you're alive, you spend hours, hours of your life dedicated to convincing them you're good at baking?

Come on, insane for an outcome that I mean, it's the same for all of these, but especially in that situation, that you never get to, you never get to see that moment where they bite into the coffee.

No, you never, you will never get to to because there is no afterlife.

We are all just in the ground turning into dust.

But also, I mean, look, I don't consider myself a hugely intelligent person, but I think if someone gave me a brownie, none of us do.

I put a spoon.

Fucking walked into that.

If someone gave me a brownie, I put a spoon into it and it collapsed like a puck of coffee grounds.

I wouldn't think it was a brownie.

Yeah, you'd be like, what's this shit?

Nice try.

Nice try.

Can you imagine Rosie having done all of that preliminary work?

Yeah.

Dies.

The person, the person's put the thing right in front of them, and they're like, this is bullshit.

It's a trick.

I see the trick.

Yeah.

And I mean, with Matthews, I think I would hate it even with all the pieces.

I don't think I'd do the puzzle.

Oh, interesting.

I would do the puzzle happily.

I love doing a puzzle, but that's just me.

What sort of fucked-up puzzles do you buy, though?

Crazy, haunted-looking ones.

Not crazy, haunted-looking ones, but I do.

Ed, you've really stumbled into it.

I do these puzzles that

I'm part of a puzzle, like Netflix for Puzzles, a puzzle club where they send me a puzzle.

They're like these wooden like thick wood puzzles that are like beautiful old Impressionist paintings or stuff like that.

I don't know what the picture is.

It arrives in a plain box.

I do the puzzle, I send it back, and they send me another puzzle.

Elm's puzzles.

Shout out to Elm's Puzzles.

Hang on.

You have to send the puzzle back completed.

No.

No, no, no.

You take it apart.

You make it for yourself.

You take it apart.

You send it back.

Because it's that idea of like, I don't need to own this, you know?

Sure.

And because I've done it now, so I'm sending it back.

So you are basically renting the puzzle

essentially, but the puzzles, this is where it gets really wild.

The puzzles themselves, were you to purchase one, are so prohibitively expensive that it makes no sense to buy a puzzle because like a thousand-piece puzzle costs, and I'm not kidding here, like $1,600.

What?

Oh, yeah.

Elm's puzzles, look it up.

Let's look it up.

Let's take this time on the pod to look

Elm's puzzles.

Anyway, Elm's puzzles.

I am going to look it up, Jason.

I'm sorry.

If you don't, I would be furious.

$1,600 for a puzzle.

Depending on the size, they can be, yes, they can be more.

They're so beautiful and they're hand cut and it's like a very high-end, crazy item.

But that's, so they have this, like, rental program that's terrific.

Oh, and they're made to order.

Yeah.

Oh, no, you can make it to order.

You can do that.

But they have...

They have ones that are just done.

You can make one.

If I wanted to make one to celebrate your win, I could make one of you and the Taskmaster trophy head.

Right, okay.

I mean,

even the initial ones that you see are over £100.

Oh, yes, that is mad.

In my mind, initially, when you said it, I thought you had to send it back to them fully completed to prove that you've done the puzzle.

Yeah.

Which is not a bad idea for a business.

I feel like, Ed, that's the difference between us.

You were like, I'm going to prove it to them that I definitely made this puzzle.

You only received it as, make sure they know I did it.

it.

Yeah.

I don't want to be told off.

I don't want to send it back and have them be like, this fucking guy didn't even do it.

I bet he didn't even do the puzzle.

Well, there you go.

I mean, look, so you're a fan of this because, because obviously you're a puzzle head.

But

you're a puzzle head.

And, of course, you got the same points.

You both got the five points.

I know.

So funny.

I was delighted by that.

Stevie, she has a brilliant episode in terms of entertainment.

I mean, not good for her points-wise, but I really feel like Stevie's in her funniest

area when she's having a total meltdown.

Oh, when she is just increasingly underwater, it becomes only funnier and funnier to me.

It's so good.

How was it being on a team with Stevie?

Loved it.

Loved every minute of it.

We had, I'm not kidding, a blast.

And like from the jump, from that first task where she arrived and we had to do the one of you's clapping, one of you's, you know, the marbles on a plate one.

That was our first task together.

And we just, from then, it immediately was like, yes, we're great.

Let's go.

And we just, I felt like we were having sometimes like too much fun.

You two are really great.

You're a really, really good team.

I mean, you're chaotic.

I would say this series is potentially the most chaotic series of Taskmaster ever.

Without a doubt.

Without a doubt.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I'm really leaning in.

Yeah, you lean in, and definitely some of the blame/slash credit, depending on how you look at it, can be laid at your door.

But also, I think Stevie is an absolute chaos demon as well.

Oh, as is everyone.

Everyone at some point is...

Plati is absolutely mental.

It's so funny.

I laughed so hard throughout at her.

There are, everybody is at times completely unhinged.

And that is that really, I'm, that's what I'm really enjoying about the season.

And that's what I enjoyed about doing it, especially because, and I don't know if you found this,

but when you're there, you know, in studio, when you're recording the studio component of the show, you are what you watch the screen and they have edited together the package of the task.

So you go from participant, I'm on stage, I'm I'm shooting a television show right now, to looking at the screen and I'm like, I'm just a fan.

I'm watching TV now, you know?

And it's a real mental trick that I had to keep being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm on camera.

I have to remember I'm on camera right now because just watching it, we were having so much fun just bullshitting around while watching.

It was a blast.

Had you seen much of anyone's work before you met them all?

Only Matthew.

Only matthew um i'd seen ghosts um and i'd seen uh

some of the show he'd done with james cordon the name of which i'm forgetting wrong man's wrong men wrong men's yeah thank you um

and so and and then um when i found out people who was in my cast i went and looked up people's stuff uh on like youtube i saw like uh a stand-up clip of uh fatia i'd say i i just checked out everybody's stuff what i could find um but i previously i wasn't aware of anybody.

Well, look, you and Stevie, I think it was a perfect team.

But let's talk about Stevie's.

Let's talk about Stevie's prize task, which was, I mean, she goes into it with no confidence, is the issue sometimes.

And with prize tasks, you have to be like, great, this, guys, this is what I brought.

You're going to love this.

And you can see in her eyes, she's not happy with it.

An interesting envelope filled with glitter and a note reading, ha ha, you're a twat.

Yeah, very funny.

Very funny.

And I will say, as the person who won and exploded the glitter in a shower all over myself,

the

genuine panic that everybody got into about like now we need to get all of that glitter because that was show one of that day.

So they were like, you have so much glitter in your beard and hair.

We're going to, it's going to take so long to get it was like trying, it was like, it was as if like a dog had gotten into like something and multiple people had to like be scraping the glitter out of my beard and hair.

It was crazy.

It was, I was finding glitter on my body for weeks.

In my hair and body, little flecks of glitter would fall out for weeks.

But I think they should have just lent into it because it's the episode after, right?

So you can be

call back to the previous episode and say this is this is the glitter situation.

This is why it was a good prize.

I don't think it's pulling the curtain back too much

to tell you that in every single episode, I did callbacks to the previous episode that have been so far cut from the show.

to audiences who were not present for it and, of course, have not seen the edited episode yet.

I would love for there to be, I feel like, and I don't think they've ever done this.

Have they ever done like director's cuts or long cuts?

Because the true shame to me when I watch these, and these episodes I have loved and have been fantastic, but boy, when we like, because we would shoot for three and a half hours to edit it down to this 45 minutes, and a chunk of that is just tasks.

The studio stuff that has been cut is some of the funniest shit that people are never going to see.

So much of the prize tasks alone would take 20, 30 minutes to get through just because of how much relentless, crazy, constant, just like roasting was going on.

It was an absolute blast.

And all that stuff people deserve to see.

So let them know they need to release the director's cut.

And or no, don't actually, no, not the director's cut.

Release the contestants cut.

Let me do the cut.

Yeah, your cut.

You mean your cut?

I don't want Andy to do it.

I believe he is involved in the edit.

We see the director's cut.

You know what?

You know what?

I take it back.

You're right.

Fuck Andy, fuck Alex, fuck all those guys.

Let me do the cut.

Three and a half.

Release Jason's cut.

Jason Manzukis uncut.

That's what we're going to call it.

No mention of Taskmaster.

I think they will release

they'll release extra stuff on YouTube.

So you might get to see a little bit of that stuff, but it will not be.

I can't stress this enough.

Jason's cut.

Very Fatia prize from Fatia, of course.

Pillows

with a note reading, I hope you have a good night's sleep because I'll be seeing in your dreams, bish.

Every one of her stories

are just like whether, because the item is pointless, but the story behind it is always haunted and absolutely insane.

And that's what I love.

This one is a great one about her aunt who she hates

for buying her pillows every year.

For buying her pillows every year.

Wait, does this episode, right?

This episode also has the ghost story of the lamb and a lamb?

The goat and the goat, yeah.

The goat and a goat.

That's what it was.

Holy shit.

Like everything,

you're gaining access to like really incredible stories that I just, I was like, give me this all day, every day.

Also, that pillow story, and I'd say this is true of quite a lot of Fatty's stories, and I would say it to her face, she always starts off by the other person is unreasonable in the story.

But the way she tells the story, it's clear that she is being the unreasonable one.

Oh, she is the problem.

I mean, she's the common denominator in all these stories.

Oh, for sure.

Oh, but I love her.

I just, there is nobody funnier on that stage.

She's so funny.

I'd love pillows every year.

I don't know about you, Jason.

Pillows?

Fresh pillows every year is a gift?

Interesting.

See, I disagree.

And the only reason I disagree is because I find pillows to be so particular that I would want to pick my pillow.

I would always want to be picking my pillow.

You know, I don't want to be given a pillow because I feel like it's going to be too soft or too, you know, too something.

Well, I think...

Pillow is too personal.

Yeah, maybe, maybe.

I mean, if you told the person and they knew which one you wanted and then every year.

Do you want a pillow?

Is that what this is?

I love a pillow.

Don't you guys have sponsors on this?

Don't you have some sort of my pillow kind of situation?

No, we don't.

You're not sponsored by the my pillow psychopath?

I would love to be sponsored by the my pillow guy.

What's he up to?

He seems like a cool guy.

We've not had the mattress guy either.

Do you remember a a lot of podcasts were sponsored by the like

lumbar support mattresses for a bit?

Well, we, I mean, like, oh, yeah, podcasts have survived almost exclusively on mattresses that arrive in a tiny box.

As if, as if the methodology of delivery is worth the purchase.

Yeah.

It's like, can you believe it comes in such a small box?

It's not comfortable, but can you believe it arrives in such a small box?

Well, look, I would love a pillow to anyone listening and I would love a pillow Jesus Christ this is

my pillows look disgusting Jason

you're a successful comedian you won task man you don't have to beg for pillows this is beneath you I feel I can't go back in the pillow shop now I go I go too often I need someone else to go for me you're too famous to pillow shop man I can't they just look I take the the pillowcase off it's gross in there yeah oh yeah I believe that do you guys have pillow stores over there?

I didn't see any.

That's what I think of your country.

Just full of ye old pillow shop.

We have specific shops for everything.

There's only one shop for every item.

But yes, it was good work from Fatia, but sadly, only two points.

Stevie got the one point.

Rosie got the three points.

And you and Matthew got the five points.

So we're off to a great start, Jason.

Pretty exciting.

pretty exciting stuff.

So let me give you the context, right?

I've got an auntie who's a bitch.

And basically, for three birthdays on the trot, the bitch has got me pillows.

Is that the one reason she's a bitch?

Yes.

Because she buys you pillows.

Yeah.

So she hasn't done any, she's not been rude to you.

No!

She cooks the best couscous in the world, but I won't eat it.

The first time you got the pillows, were you you happy with that?

Yeah, I was happy.

Right.

Because I mentioned once that I need pillows.

So, you've always got two longer.

Yeah, but not three times.

Well, this is your mistake.

You should be seeing

things that you need next year.

Yeah.

This year, I need a kettle.

A kettle?

What the hell am I?

A 70-year-old woman.

Get ready to receive a painting, lady.

Now, I would not class you as a competitive man, certainly

in this scenario.

I don't think you're that bothered about the points.

You're just bothered about having a good time and smashing stuff up, right?

It's pretty true.

Yeah, I did not, you know, when I was kind of watching the show, at first I was watching the show like, what a blast.

I'm having so much fun.

And then I started to watch the show as if, like, oh, I want to do that.

I want to be having that fun in there.

I could be inside.

I wonder if I can get inside this show.

And so my whole desire, the reason I reached out to Alex, the reason I wanted to do it was because genuinely, it looked like the kind of fun that I recognize from doing live podcasts or live improv shows or like that same kind of loose, shaggy energy of funny people being on stage, being funny together.

That to me is what was compelling about the show.

That is what's compelling about the show for me.

So that's the part of it that I was most interested in participating in.

Because let's be honest, points are worthless in this game.

You know, like you're whether or not you do the task well does not mean you're gonna get points from Greg, who is a whimsical asshole.

You know, you really are at you are at his mercy in a way that is like whether you've done it well or not means nothing.

So, I'm gonna at least have as much fun as I can.

I don't know.

There's other ways of looking at it.

Oh boy.

Oh boy.

And just for the listener, Ed Ed is stroking his trophy?

I think sometimes if you approach it properly and you do everything well, then you get rewarded with the requisite points

and then you win the show.

Oh boy.

Wow.

You really can't even stifle that big grin.

Yeah.

So genuinely for me, like being competitive, I couldn't have cared less.

You know, it really was,

because I was too busy having fun and fucking with Alex.

If I could fuck, there are, but then that being said, there are tasks, or there are, yeah, there are tasks that, boy, do I wish I had like

done better at, or was I frustrated with, or, you know, not to say that I was, you know, not trying or anything like that.

I very much am.

You are watching me, in most instances, do my best and fail, you know, but there are some, like that pillow task, um,

that pillow task in the, in the, in the, in the park, you know, where Rosie falls and I go behind Alex.

Yeah, that, that task haunted me

because I was right.

I had a good lateral thinking solution.

And then I just kind of had like terrible jet lag and just like futzed out and was kind of like, oh, I don't think I can do what I thought I could do.

So I'll just kind of bail.

And that destroyed me afterwards.

I was so mad at myself for not just following through.

So I do care.

I don't want to be like, I'm not trying to be glib, you know, like who cares?

But I'm like, I'm not there for points, I guess, is what I mean.

I mean, yeah, just to let you know, however mad you were at yourself in that pillow task, I was more angry at you.

I can only assume that my behavior is making you crazy.

I can only assume you watching the show is you being like, oh, come on, you're so close.

At one point on stage, I don't think it's in the cut because I think it's already passed and I haven't seen it.

We were doing the live task and it wasn't teams, it was just individuals.

And I got out for some reason.

And Stevie was like, come on, Jason.

I think Stevie was mad at me because I think she thought I wasn't trying hard enough, which was very funny.

I was like, what?

You can do this.

I know, I know.

Take a breath.

Oh, man.

Let's talk about task one.

Be the least annoying person around the campfire.

You must either sing a folk song, tell a ghost story, or recite a beat poem and not be annoying.

Your song, story, or poem must either be about fast cars, barbecues, or DIY, and it can contain no more than 100 words.

You must perform your song, story, or poem in 10 minutes from now.

You are, as Greg says.

Just so annoying immediately before the timer started.

I believe you say you're just trying to get it out your system, right?

Yeah, that's a tough one for me.

The minute it tells me not to be something, it really, there is that part of me that's like, I got to do, I got to lean into that.

It's saying, don't be annoying.

I have to figure out a way to be annoying and make it work for me.

Like, that's where my head, that's where my head goes.

And so, yeah, there's that initial part where I'm trying to like exercise it out, get it out before, because I've got whatever it says, 10 minutes before we start.

So I'm trying to get it out.

But it's also like, you don't quite see it, but there's all these

instruments and so forth littered around the grotto there.

So part of it is just like oh, what am I gonna do?

You know that feeling you get where you're like sometimes I will say and I don't know how you feel the tasks where you have a period of time to think about it can really be the be more difficult than the ones where you're like go go immediately because you are all you're almost giving yourself too much time to consider and talk yourself out of something.

You know, there's something to be said for just barreling straight through pell mell, you know, so but to have this, so for me, once I found that keyboard that had presets, game over.

There's no way I wasn't going to be annoying.

Once I found something that was so annoying, that I was like, this is it.

We're just doing this now.

And improvising it as well.

There was no way you were going to sit down and write it.

Yeah.

No.

I would say a lot's been made in the past of how similar you and Nish look to each other.

I would say in that moment where you found the key.

If people want, they can currently just Google the picture where Nish and I went as each other together for Halloween to a party in 2019, dressed as each other.

Very, very similar looking gentleman.

I would say in that moment where you found the preset beat on the keyboard, you were also the spitting image of his personality.

Yeah, just that big, big, huge reveal.

Yeah.

So excited.

So excited by the thing.

Like, that's it.

You've forgotten the task, basically, because you found it.

But that's it.

In that that moment.

You are seeing me make a discovery that erases my success, my possible success in the task.

You are like, the joy and the glee you see in my face is my any and all planning that I'm doing to succeed at the task just evaporating because now we're just now we're just gonna do this.

The real problem is, and you don't see it in the edit a lot, is if I'm if Alex, if I can make Alex laugh, if I can break Alex that I think I'm doing well but they cut all that out so I just look like a fucking idiot

but also that's yeah it depends how you define doing well I suppose because when Alex really laughed at what I was doing when I was doing Taskmaster it was when I was doing spectacularly badly at something oh and getting

I'm like I would just be do like I would just keep going at him until I broke him and then I'd be like all right I guess I'll move on to the task.

And he'd be like, it's over.

Done.

You forgot.

I mean, you completely forgot that the song had to be about fast cars, barbecues, and DIY.

Totally.

Totally forgot.

Tried to back-engineer it by saying you mentioned a train and that was the train cars.

Train cars.

Clearly bullshit.

Seemingly didn't work at all.

Didn't make any headway with Greg.

No weird.

And you propose to Alex and he says no.

I mean,

a total disaster if you're looking for points.

Devastating.

Devastating both if I'm looking for points and if I'm looking for a life partner.

Yeah.

A more successful effort from Rosie,

who uses the tambourine.

Great.

Sing a song about having barbecue for tea.

Greg made this point, and I did think this initially, that I do find nothing more annoying than people who can sing well, singing well.

I agree.

I agree so much so that I genuinely believe Taskmasters should not allow for people to be good at things.

Yeah.

You know, it shouldn't support people's genuine hobbies or talents.

That being said, I felt the same as Greg for both Rosie and Matthew.

I thought these songs were great.

I thought they were great.

Really strong, really strong songs from both of them.

But I do agree that if there's a singing task and you're known to be a good singer, you should immediately get a handicap.

points-wise.

Yes, agree.

And art.

Art's a classic one as well.

We had Casey Wicks on Series 9, who's very good at art, and

her art's been exhibited in proper galleries.

Oh, wow.

Joe Lysett on a previous series as well.

And Noel Fielding,

both proper artists.

I think they should have been docked points.

Oh, no.

I will say I can't remember, frankly, how many of the art tasks we've seen so far this season, but in every single one of them, I ate shit.

I have no facility with that medium whatsoever.

Me neither.

That's why I enjoyed them because

there was no chance of me doing well, so I could just

let fly.

Matthew's song is a DIY song.

It is a beautiful song.

He's written it very well.

He's machine-tooled the amount of words that he's going to use and then clearly throws in an improvised to everybody.

Everybody.

Boy.

And again,

there's something, the show moves so quick and it's so great and they do such a great job editing it.

But the, that, that moment of discovery in the studio was devastating and was so funny.

And we sat in it for so long.

That's the thing you're missing when you just watch the show is how long, how many rounds we go when we have these discoveries.

Like when, when, when, in the episode where Stevie does the invisible jump rope episode, right?

I mean, we must have shown that clip, that that simple clip, I'm going to say a dozen times that day, over and over.

And we would call for it in other tasks at other times.

We would just call for that to be shown, and they would show it, you know?

That's the kind of, there's a lot of the chaos of the studio that's missing just to keep the game going.

But boy, there was so much funny stuff.

And that moment where Matthew realizes his sweet improvised kind of line about everybody is what dinged him.

Incredible reveal.

It was huge.

I mean, I think that will be a classic Taskmaster moment.

It's got all the ingredients for a classic Taskmaster moment, doesn't it?

Because it was so good.

He did such a good job.

And then I get points?

Not only you, Stevie also got points for four points she got for a really short story about maybe seeing a ghost at a barbecue.

Which is crazy.

It was boring, though.

It was perfectly

not not annoying.

It was not annoying, even with the sausage song at the end.

Oh, man.

Which Greg claimed annoyed him, but I know for a fact that is exactly the sort of thing that Greg enjoys.

So much so.

And I can tell you that, again,

that little refrain kept coming back throughout the studio episode.

I think it even could have, it might have even come back in the next episode because that was, we did it the same day, I think.

Right?

I think this is episode, this is show one of that.

Yeah, so I think it came back in the, there was a bunch of times where people would do callbacks to the previous episode that the, and it would be that moment, I don't know if this happened when you were doing it, where you'd make a callback and it'd be dead, except for the people on stage, and you'd be like, oh, wait a minute, that was none of these, none of these people saw that.

God, I'm dying up here.

Let's talk about Fatty as you've already mentioned it briefly at the top of the episode.

I mean, it was supposed to be a ghost story.

I think she just went with scary story

about her family slaughtering a goat, and there was a baby goat in the goat.

And the phrase that really got me was, was it her auntie or grandmother or someone was waving?

Her baby auntie.

Her auntie waving the baby goat around like a flag.

That she picked it up like this.

Yeah.

The physicality where she's demonstrating how she picked it up like this was chilling.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's more horrible than any ghost story I've ever heard.

I loved it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

But

it was 200, over 200 words.

And

I love that Alex keeps warning her.

You're at 90 words.

I don't care.

I'm going to keep.

And her

utter disdain.

Just, I'm going to keep barreling through.

Loved it.

At one point, she said, I'm going to have to finish the story because people want to hear it.

Oh, and she's right.

She knows the audience.

People do want to hear it.

I think she could have really cut down the words.

There's a lot of faff in between each of the main points of the story, I think.

Asking Alex to eat to me, then just calling him Bruv and all of that stuff really, really.

Oh, that's the other thing that's been cut is how much everybody else started saying bruv.

Yeah.

How much In It and Bruv became part of like a bit of

introduced to the show's lexicon.

Yeah.

And is that something you've taken back to the States with you?

Oh, yeah, I do it all the time now, Bruv.

it sounds good coming out of my mouth, innit?

It sounds perfect and it sounds so natural.

That's what I like about it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Matt gets naught points, Fatia gets naught points, Jason.

Somehow you get two points.

Stevie gets four points.

Stevie gets four points.

And Rosie gets a well-deserved five points.

Oh, you, you monster.

I mean, it's the worst deal I've ever heard in my life.

Did you mistake ghost story for goat story?

That's the only explanation.

Because there were no ghosts in there, weren't there?

No, but that was the only scary thing I could think of.

It's just awful.

Was it annoying though, Greg?

Yo, Christ, yes.

Just checking.

Just checking.

There's only one thing that can make me feel better and to make me forget that, and it's

going to get us out of here.

Anything to make me forget her.

You'll never forget me.

Task two, another chaotic one.

Draw the monster.

You must not turn around or leave the car.

If you fail to honk your horn when you see a lollipop lady, you must surrender your picture for 30 seconds.

Most accurate monster picture wins.

You have five minutes.

Your time starts now.

This is one of these ones where you're like, I don't know what the seed of the idea was with Alex.

I don't know how he started thinking about this.

And I certainly don't know how he ended up at this point.

One of the things I feel like

that was very present in the doing of the task that you don't quite see in the edit is primarily when you could see the monster it was in the mirrors you were always having to look backwards without because you couldn't turn around you're instructed to not turn around and so there was just a lot of frantic kind of looking around and trying to do the paint to trying to do the drawing um

the all the all the nuts stuff with the multiple people like you see a police officer come and give people tickets that happened multiple times They were getting in and out of the car There was just so much else going on And not for nothing I really was for a long time genuinely like what is and when will a lollipop lady arrive

I do want to talk about this more because when you said what what is a lollipop lady I then assumed that they would cut Alex would explain to you what a lollipop lady was and then you'd carry on with the task.

Nope, not at all.

Not at all.

And something like this would happen quite often

where I would not understand a component and Alex would just be like, good luck.

Just like genuinely not help me at all, which I was grateful for.

I think it makes it much better.

So very funny.

And then, of course, when the lollipop lady arrives, perfect, great, thrilled.

So you knew immediately that that was a lollipop lady because in your head, you said you imagined a lady who was selling lollipops, right?

Something, yeah.

Like, well, here's the thing: that, that thing she's carrying, the placard or whatever you call that, here it doesn't look like lollipops.

Yeah, you call it a lollipop, I guess, actually.

I mean, that's absolutely insane, but um,

we don't have something that looks like that, so I'm not imagining lollipop lady, like, I don't know what that truly, I only know lollipop as the lollipop.

So, I was like, we're gonna figure this out.

It's just something a little bit whimsical.

So, obviously, road safety safety can be quite boring,

but sometimes you need the kids to be a bit more focused, and the best way to do that is with a lollipop lady or lollipop.

Absolutely, yeah, for sure.

Oh, yeah, thank god.

Yeah, make it sound like candy, make it sound like candy, not a boring old crossing guard, or whatever you guys have, exactly, thank you.

Crossing guard is exactly what it is because they are on guard protecting you, not offering you candy like a fucking creep.

Hey, kid.

Hey, kid, come here in the middle of the road and get candy.

Hey, I've got a lollipop over here in the middle of the road.

A huge lollipop.

It's big enough for all the kids to have a list.

Yeah, see, it is creepy nice.

You're proving my point.

It's Creep City.

I mean, it obviously goes mad.

There's so many different

members of the crew running around dressed as different animals all over the place.

I mean, you sort of, everyone eventually gets something to paper that looks vaguely like the monster.

Everyone realizes that.

Except for, is it Fatih's that's like, like, really kind of amorphous, just looks like a Muppet or something?

Fatih's doesn't have a head, it's sort of just like a tube.

Oh, that, right, right, right.

Somebody else was it.

Oh, Rosie's.

Rosie's, yeah.

Rosie's was.

Yeah, it wasn't ideal.

It looked like it had sort of like six penises emanating from it.

And

And also she's the only one who found the driving license.

Yeah, and it helped her not

at all.

Well, because it turns out then she said she woke up sweating about the task and we're all thinking well because she saw it on the driving license She should have just drawn from that she thought that the message of the whole task was that we are we are the monsters

She figured it out afterwards that all she had to do probably was to draw a picture of herself and then she would have won and that my and that my belief that she thought that we would do this task and be revealed that we all got it and drew pictures of ourselves and that she would be revealed to be the fool.

And in fact, not even remotely the case.

No, of course not.

She was, well, she was still the fool, but for a different reason.

Of course.

She thought that it was some sort of like play where the end is humans are the monsters.

Like, yes, like, like, like, like a soctra play, like, you know, some, I don't know, some sort of French nonsense.

Yeah.

Where, you know, people are trapped in a building,

there's monsters knocking at the door, and it turns out they're not people, they're squirrels, and everyone outside is humans.

Yeah, something like that.

Oh my god, can you believe it?

I think even you reference it as an M-Night Shyamalan style twist.

And

that's definitely what it would be.

And the reality is, Alex is just simply not smart enough to do a twist like that.

His twists are mostly pun-based.

Yeah.

They're not,

yeah, his twists aren't seeking personal introspection and interiority.

Yeah.

I would like to see M-Night take on some more pun-based twists in the future.

I would love to see M-Knight on a season of Taskmaster.

Every task a twist.

Yeah.

He would have to direct it, though.

If he wants to be in something, he has to direct it, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

He's got to have his cameo, too.

Of course, yeah.

Yeah.

But look, all of the drawings were pretty good, apart from Rosie's.

Fatty is no head, obviously.

Stevie, I don't want Stevie's had 150 hours of driving lessons.

She didn't know where the horn was, didn't know where the hazard lights were, and drives the wrong way around roundabouts.

Yeah, incredibly funny.

That was what a great reveal.

Yeah,

let's not have her driving.

What was not included is at the end of the task, I did start the car and try and drive away.

And everybody was like, no, no, no, no, no.

We tried to drive onto the roof.

Oh, I wish.

Had you heard before you arrived at the house that getting on the roof, did they tell you the only thing you can't do is get on the roof?

They told me when I got there.

I think, I don't remember if they told me when I got there just to tell me rules or if they told me because I, I think I started by asking if I could get on the roof.

Right.

And then they told me you can't.

I think, oh,

what's the first task that I try and get on the roof?

Is it the sports commentary one?

Yeah, no, I think you mention it beforehand because you do mention trying to get on the roof before

because when you do then go try and get up onto the roof, we're like, Okay, there you go.

Okay, okay, okay.

Sorry, sorry.

I'm just trying.

Sometimes I can't place the timeline.

Exactly.

But yeah, no, I can't remember if they told me or they told me very quickly because I said something, I think.

So yeah, it was very clear to me.

But again, similar to what I was talking about before, the minute you tell me I can't do something, my mind is just like, can't we figure it out?

Can't we?

Come on.

There is a there's a task later in the season that I won't reveal that that I that had a we that was one of those you can you have a bit of time to plan and we made a whole plan and then they came to me and said health and safety said you can't do that.

And so

So I had to redo the whole thing and it was that was an another like man health and safety were really on me I assume it was because I'm American and it's like, you know, a bit of like xenophobia on their part.

But,

but, uh, yeah, no, they really were on me.

They were after me.

I think it's because we know that if anything happens to Americans,

there will be a lawsuit involved pretty quickly.

Oh, yeah.

For sure.

Yeah.

And I love that you're saying health and safety wouldn't let us do that.

As far as I'm aware, for no one else in the history of the show has there been a health and safety person on site.

Oh,

they were very present

in

my time at the Taskmaster house.

There was a lot of back and forth with health and safety.

I will say,

here's the deal.

Hey,

let them earn their money.

What do I want them to not be engaged in this?

If health and safety isn't involved in this season, it's a bad season of TV.

Yeah.

Whereas some of us learned the health and safety rules before they arrived at the house.

Oh, boy.

And again, just for the listener, Ed is stroking his trophy.

Yeah, boy.

It was one point for Rosie, two points for Stevie, three points for Fatia, four points for Matthew Bainton, and five points for you, Jason.

Rosie, you didn't see the monster on the driving license.

I have woke up in cold sweats over this task.

Oh, wow.

We were the monsters, weren't we?

Were we meant to just draw ourselves?

Wow.

That would have been waking up in

Yes, you were the only person who saw the picture of the thing you so you could have just painted you had

a spanked you think I'm at but on a deeper level yes

this is the task that you filmed first in the house oh yeah part one shorten these pencils and place your shortened pencils in the pencil case you have five minutes your time started when you mentioned the hats, which is a mushroom hat, of course.

Alex is cooking mushrooms.

Part two, write down every word you said in this room before you open the task.

Also, you must write the same number of words in each colour, otherwise your title will be halved.

Most accurate legible word wins.

Words wins.

You may not leave the lab.

Your time started when you started reading this task.

Infuriating, I would have found this personally, Jason.

Yes.

Very, and especially as first task up.

You know, first task up to be a multi-stage task

and to have like

components that are the shortening of the pencil, so easy.

Yeah.

Unless you're Stevie.

Yeah.

Something,

again, I go back to like that, what I was saying before.

There's something that is so wonderful about watching the show from stage, you know?

And so when, because when you're discovering, because we didn't talk about anything, you know, we didn't talk about any of the tasks, we didn't talk about whatever.

So the discovery that Stevie immediately thinks, well, the answer clearly in the face of all of these pencil sharpeners is to is to just chomp down on these, is to just like, like a beaver, start gnawing on these pencils.

I was like, this is next level insanity.

I love it.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's because it's the first task, maybe she'd gone in there.

with an idea that she was going to be the person who found all of the workarounds,

all of the fun little hacks she was going to do.

She was like, all these pencil sharpeners are a distraction.

I've got to shorten this pencil as much as possible.

She was wrong about that.

No one else is going to try this.

I'm going to bite the ends off the pencils.

Well,

it's one of my favorite things that I'm trying to think when I did it.

Not necessarily, but it's Stevie in this instance, and it's Matthew in the wetsuit one, which is a mistaken understanding on the task.

Matthew thinks he's supposed to keep his finger on his lips in the shush gesture the whole time.

And he's wrong.

And Stevie thinks the goal is to make the pencil as small as possible, you know, and that's just not the task.

So, those misunderstandings.

And why would it be, by the way, why would it be short, shorten a pencil as much as possible?

She must have come into that and been like, go, this is gonna be a bad series.

This is task one, and we're shortening a pencil as much as possible.

This is really run out of steam,

but then, then, but then it's that thing too, where

because you walk into the lab and there is paper on the wall.

You take it in, so you know there's something to come.

That's got to be there for a reason.

So to not think it all the way through, to be like, eventually I'm going to write on that, but you don't, because you're just like focus on the task at hand.

It's very like, this is what's right in front of my face.

And you forget about the rest.

And I mean, I thought you were doing a really good job.

I loved the idea of writing down the task that you'd read out until you got to the end of writing that down and you realized your time started when you were reading this task.

Yeah,

that what I was writing.

Boy, did I think I was so smart.

And then I was

so mad that I just destroyed it with sandpaper.

But

did you write down the first task that you read out?

Or did you come up with the idea, write down the second task, get to it saying to the other side?

I think the second task, because I think i knew that the first task was non

was not

part of

that doesn't make sense i must yeah no i know what you mean yes maybe i did write it down because i did get 34 words yeah

which surprised me that's a lot of words you know even though i was i was halved because i didn't do the alternating colors correctly i did get 34 words which seems like quite a lot compared to everybody else so maybe i must have wrote that first task or part of that first task i don't remember Yeah, I thought that was a really that was a really smart technique.

I mean, you came in all guns blazing.

The first thing you did when you saw Alex is finish a bottle of water, very American, hydrating, so LA,

and then just

threw it at him.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just gotta like, I needed to like establish dominance in the moment.

The first task in, I needed him to understand, I'm here, I'm here to compete.

I need, I'm, I'm, I'm, I want you to feel like under threat.

I wanted Alex to feel like there is genuine danger now, you know?

And frequently I would try and harm him.

I would try and cause him to be in a position where maybe he would be hurt.

Hopefully he would be hurt.

Yeah.

It must have been such a shock for him, you turning from someone you'd asked to come on the show from America, flown over, taken a lot of time to do it, been in seen in the house taking selfies with everything,

so excited.

And then you walk into a task and you're like, fuck, fuck you mate oh there were a couple of times in the first few days where we would be shooting something and it would escalate and i would get furious with alex really just furious and then we would end and i would go back to the you know the little room where i was sitting and like alex or andy would come back and be like hey is is everything okay i just want to check in and make sure and i was like wait what

they were like you seem to get pretty upset and i was like guys i'm having the time of my life.

Like,

this is how I'm playing the game.

So it took them a minute, I feel like, to get that I wasn't actually pissed,

which I loved, which was, for me, a blast.

I'm not being serious about anything apart from the egg thing, and I can't stress that enough.

You're absolutely right.

That was the one thing I was like, this is deadly serious.

Everything else, we're just having fun here.

Yeah.

Oh, Jason, you and your jokes.

No, seriously, the eggs need to stop but seriously please read the ingredients on this what was the thing that i had to eat the the not a bullion cube something pellet a gravy pellet yeah something there was something that i was eating

in the fake out in the task

you had to fake something yeah

um

disgusting you did very well you got the 34 words but unfortunately halved uh stevie got 19 halved i mean the way she does it with work she drops both her little pencil nibs and as if she's proud of this, as if she's found a new hack, scratches her nails down to use the nail varnish, like some sort of saw trap.

This is like from Saw 12 or something.

Yeah, it was so hard to watch her dig her actual fingers

onto the paper, trying to get the, yeah, her nail polish to be the only thing that she could use to write now.

It felt, yes, you're right, it felt like a horror movie element, yeah.

Like she's writing

her last living words

for people to find.

Fatia immediately remembers that she called Alex a prick.

It's a fair bet.

But 22 correct words and gets the colors right.

Poor showing from Matthew.

Only confidently remembered saying mushrooms.

Which you've got to bet you mention, right, when you walk in there.

Oh, yeah.

I'm almost positive I did, yeah.

I'm almost positive it was supposed to be eggs until 10 minutes before

you filmed your team.

I bet you're right, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Desperately throwing away the egg hat and trying to find a mushroom.

That's to me the thing where I feel like Alex was walking through his store, saw the mushroom hat, and was and reverse engineered the whole thing based on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Rosie, I mean, Rosie has,

it seems like she's having a nightmare.

She's got a real knack of seeming like everything's gone wrong and then doing quite well.

Yeah.

And this is one of those moments.

She gets 29 correct words, even though she spends a long time debating over whether haha is a word or a saying.

I loved that so much.

And I can't remember what it was, but the little thing she comes in, the joke she makes about mushrooms, and then you watch her like implode because she's so upset that she said the like the mom joke mushroom thing.

Yeah,

you won't have mushroom for anything else.

That's right.

That's what it was.

And then clearly nervous because it's the first task.

She's not sure how actively funny she should be in each task.

So she thought she'll make it like a corny joke and then you watch her die inside.

Yeah, yeah, it's such a good moment.

I'm so glad.

There's so many reactions that I wish they would keep in, and I'm so glad this is one of them that they let us just sit and watch her just be like, why did I do that?

She makes a noise.

She goes,

well, it's one point for Matthew, two points for Stevie, three points for you, Jason, four points for Fatia, and the big five for Rosie.

Mushroom.

I said butter.

Come on.

Pencil cake.

How long have I got?

30 seconds.

Okay, I'm running out of nail varnish.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

No.

Fifteen seconds.

I said,

spoon.

That's a long spoon, isn't it?

Fuck!

It looks like spoggen.

Oh!

Quite a lot.

Got it.

Let's talk about the live task.

Pop a balloon when you hear its colour.

Last one to pop is eliminated.

If you pop early, you're eliminated.

Last player standing wins.

It's one of my favorite flavors of Taskmaster live tasks.

Tasks that take quite a lot of setup and explanation, and then they're over within 10 seconds yeah oh yeah and the chaos has like an audio component

it's got wordplay it has all of the most like uh the most like crazy performative taskmaster elements you know so perfect for a live task because it's fast it's crazy and there's like the the chaos of the popping balloons was perfect Yeah, I mean, chaos, everyone does something different and normally wrong.

So you pop a balloon straight away.

By accident.

By accident.

Fatia has a real knack of in the live tasks, knowing exactly what to do to make it look even weirder.

So

in that first week, everyone else is flopping around.

It looks like some crazy painting.

Everyone's doing something different.

And Fatia just stands stock still and blows on the raisins.

I want to be very clear.

You're saying everybody else is flopping around.

And I'm pretty sure you're just talking about Stevie.

Yeah, she's doing the majority of the flopping.

In terms of flopping, I mean,

everybody is struggling.

That's very clear.

But in terms of flopping around, I believe it was just Stevie who went hard to the ground.

Yeah, with no, not moving her hands to protect her fall.

No, very dangerous.

It's a skill.

I do think everybody got hurt at some point during the show, which I think is a sign of a good season.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can't have everyone coming out of it able-bodied.

No, not at all.

So, in this instance, Fatia is clearly scared of balloon pops.

So, she wears ear defenders, ear defenders, so she doesn't hear the balloons pop, but that also means she can't really hear the story that Greg's telling.

This was so funny.

This was adding this element made me laugh so hard.

I loved it.

Yes, and just the visual, just the visual of her wearing the big, the big headphones was making me laugh so hard.

And then, when I'm watching it, even better on stage, hilarious, but I'm also like focused on my thing to watch it.

I was was like, This is incredible.

Because you pop two, uh, you pop the wrong one, yeah, by accident, and then pop the right one.

Fatia, then we turn to Fatia, who takes the ear defenders off and says, Did he even say green?

So, just total chaos.

Everyone's doing their own thing immediately, yeah.

And then Rosie's out, and Rosie says she gets horny when all her balloons are popped, so she's dancing around like an absolute mad person.

Um, and then Stevie's so gutted, and at the end of her tether, that Matthew Bainton just kills his balloons so that she can win.

He sacrifices himself for Stevie, which, boy, was that wonderful.

And I really appreciated it because it cleared the way for me to win.

Yeah.

You know,

I think without that sacrifice, Matthew probably would have won again.

Quite.

No, I think you still would have.

No, I don't think so.

I don't think so.

Yeah.

Narratively, yeah, sure.

We can say that.

Yeah, I think you might have still won because you were joint with Rosie, 17 points each.

And then it comes to the tie break.

This is where the curse to painting really kicked in.

Obviously.

So, yeah, make as many holes on a sheet of paper as possible.

I mean,

if it's down to a task where you need to put holes in something and aggressively slam a hole punch, you're always going to win, aren't you?

Oh, I'll smash that all day.

Those quick ones, those tiebreakers or those tasks that are like super brief and just have one layer, I always enjoy because you could really just throw yourself straight through it yeah you know that's a blast yeah there's no there's no possible trick you just have to do the thing and do it quickly yes uh and it worked out for you 44 holes over rosie's 34 holes huge huge you win an episode jason you take the painting home felt great except for that part it felt great

even though you're not competitive and you weren't doing it to win necessarily or got get points you're just trying your hardest was winning an episode something that was on your list of things to do?

Oh, absolutely.

Just to be, just for it to feel like well-rounded, I guess.

You know, like I absolutely wanted to win, and you see it.

Like, I am excited.

I'm excited.

I'm trying to get the audience to chant USA, USA.

They do not.

Weird, they didn't join in.

I couldn't believe it.

If you watch, I am trying to get them to chant USA, USA.

So fun.

And then running up and destroying everything, a blast.

You know, like, of course, I want to win an episode i i don't care about the the larger game of it but like experientially i want to have every experience of the show you know so um absolutely well you had a new experience on the show because i think you're the first person ever to win an episode of taskmaster and be booed

oh yeah

as the credits roll thank oh and i loved it i loved every minute of it um yeah no because that really helped there was and they've cut a lot of that stuff out but I spent a lot of time in the studio antagonizing the audience specifically.

Yeah.

So that it would engender just that kind of a reaction.

So the idea that I win, I'm screaming USA, USA, and they're booing me.

Come on.

That is, that is a true victory.

That's worth more points than anything else.

Well, even though you won the episode, you are still on the bottom of the table, 67 points.

Fatia, only just ahead on 68 points.

Stevie on 70 points.

Rosie on 75 points.

Matthew out ahead still on 84 points.

Jason, thank you so much for coming on the Taskmaster podcast.

Ed, what a delight.

Thank you so much.

It's been a joy to have you on.

We always ask our guests to rate their experience on the podcast between one and five points.

Feel free.

Now, this is your chance to give out points to something.

Be honest with us.

Oh, five points.

Absolutely.

What a blast.

What a blast.

I mean,

I think, think, you know,

I only, I want to do a joke.

You know, like, there's a part of me that like wants to undercut it.

But sincerely, I love that.

I love the podcast.

Listening or watching, I guess, but I listen to it.

It has been a blast.

So to be on, it has been a delight.

And to like, to be in the position.

to have to justify how I behave on this absolutely moronic show is a, is, is a trick unto itself.

So thank you for putting me through this.

yes you're most welcome i wasn't ready for you to be sincere about that uh thank you very much for coming on the show uh we'll just end by me being like go fuck yourself yes thank you thank you very much jason manzoukis

Thank you so much to Jason for coming on the pod and giving up so much of his time.

He's brilliant.

He's amazing on the series.

Keep watching.

Channel 4, 9 p.m.

Thursdays.

Straight back here for the podcast next week, where we will be in in the caravan again and we will be in the caravan with a former Taskmaster contestant, Emma Siddy.

Yes, Emma is coming back on the podcast.

She's coming to the caravan.

So make the effort, download the pod, and we will see you next week.

Bye-bye.