Funny / Taskmaster S16-S20

Taskmaster Funny Index
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Series 16

General

• Julian's dry, sarcastic attitude towards Alex. Greg points out several times that whether he means it or not, almost everything Julian says to Alex sounds like an insult.

The Natural Friends

• Julian's response to simply being asked how he's doing: "I'm holding up alright under the strain."
• The prize task is to bring in the most wonderful wooden item that you've had for a while.
  • Julian's entry is a table he had commissioned, where the support is in the shape of several bums.
  • Lucy claims that her prize, a painting of a boxer dog, is possessed, as she would always feel a small boxer dog climb into bed with her at night, and then found the painting in the garage when cleaning it out.
  • Sue later takes a jab at Lucy's story with her painting that was painted by a chimp, joking that she often feels a chimp climb into bed with her.
  • When presenting her entry - a wind chime - Susan immediately clarifies that it isn't haunted. She then tells a story of how she first got it from a woman after being awestruck by the beauty of a volcano in Costa Rica, only to immediately see the exact same wind chimes for sale in the gift shop.
  • Sam's prize, a 'Pinocchio' where everything is long except the nose.
    Sam: He's never lied. It's when other people lie to him.
• The can stacking task. The contestants must make a stack of cans in the lab while blindfolded, but aren't told the cans are already stacked in the lab.
  • The blindfold for the task is in a can. Lucy asks where you can buy blindfolds in cans from, and openly wonders why shops put labels on cans when plain cans are so much prettier.
  • Alex giggling during Julian's attempt.
  • Greg asks Sam why he sat down on the ground after completing his stack.
    Sam: I thought if I got really low, the tower would be even higher.
  • Lucy's absolute disaster of an effort; she took a full minute to find the door of the living room in order to leave it, then repeatedly knocked over her tower of cans, and ended up embarrassedly crawling away in silence. Guaranteed one point, right?...
  • Lucy's subsequent attempt at defending herself in-studio, which sputters out before it even starts:
    Greg: Lucy. How'd you feel watching that?
    Lucy: ...I don't know what you give points for, you might—
    Greg: Oh, in this case it's just for how high the stack of cans is.
    Lucy: How high.
    Greg: Yeah.
    Lucy: (Deflated, almost to herself) Yeah, and you measure it. Yeah. Yeah.
  • Amazingly, Sue does even worse. After dramatically sneaking through the corridor ninja-style as if she were a superspy infiltrating a top-secret supervillain lair, she ends up completely collapsing the tower of cans immediately after making contact with it.
  • After doing this, she calls Alex an 'absolute shower of shit'. Alex claims in the studio that Sue was quoting the Book of Revelations.
  • Her subsequent attempts to ground herself just end up knocking over the remaining standing cans, and she resorts to just heaping the cans up against her in a pile.
• At the start of the team task, we get possibly the most hilariously awkward meeting of a team in Taskmaster, with Julian and Sam greeting each other awkwardly, and Sam simply responding with a flat "Oh great" upon finding out that they're a team, which he says again when they find out that Lucy is their third teammate.
  • Greg highlights this quote from Lucy's arrival:
    Lucy: I've not seen you before.
    Julian: I know.
  • This is then contrasted with the meeting of the team of Sues, who have more natural chemistry, although Susan initially completely fails to notice that Sue has arrived at all and begins opening the task without her. Greg refers to them as "classic village idiots".
• The team task requires the contestants to connect their body parts together with a variety of clamps and ropes.
  • While connecting themselves, Sue and Susan accidentally cut one of their ropes in half.
  • Sam, meanwhile, has the idea to cut off bits of their hair and put them in the same clamp. Lucy is enthusiastic about the idea, as she has a Fruitella in her hair that she can't get out. Julian, on the other hand, is rather worried that it will mess up his haircut.
  • There's then a secret second part of the task where they have to cross a finish line together while still connected. While Sam's hair plan means the team of three find it quite simple, Sue and Susan struggling to cross the finish line while tangled up in one another is a sight to behold.
  • Compounding matters, the Sues somehow managed to tangle some rope around the box holding the equipment. Rather than take a moment to untangle it, they opt instead to drag it along behind them as they attempt to make it to the finish line, with Susan even calling it Boxy as if it's a contestant in its own right.
  • Sam's long bit where he cites the divers from the 2018 Thai cave rescue in relation to his team's attempt, which causes Greg to break.
• Everything about Lucy's intro in the duck task, which cements her Cloud Cuckoolander status this series.
  • Firstly, her chat with Alex about hook-a-duck.
    Lucy: It's the only sport I'm good at, hook-a-duck.
    Alex: A sport?
    Lucy: Well, you know, it's the only thing I was good at as a kid.
    Alex: How good were you at it?
    Lucy: Oh, I used to be able to... hook the ducks.
    Alex: Oh well that is good.
    Lucy: Yeah.
  • Then, her claim to have another pair of arms instead of legs. Greg is so baffled by this it almost brings the show to a complete standstill.
    Lucy: I think my legs are arms without fingers... they furl up easily, I can cross my legs really well.
    Greg: You think you've got four sets of arms.
    (Alex visibly notices the mistake in Greg's response, but decides not to correct him)
    Lucy: I've not had it proven, but...
    Greg: What do you mean, you can really fold them?
    Lucy: Mine fold like arms. With feet. I've got feet! So I'm not complaining!
    Alex: We have to carry on with the show, Greg.
  • And then, after having seen her attempt in the task, and more importantly Sue's attempt, in which she moves all the obstacles for the duck beforehand to give it a cleaner line to the lake:
    Lucy: (with genuine concern) I haven't changed the rules in any of these!
  • Lucy objects to Sue's attempt on the grounds that you can't just change the boundaries whenever you feel like violating the rules, and tries to use the fact that a 70mph sign doesn't say that you can't drive 90mph in that area. Unfortunately for her, it is immediately pointed out that, unlike the wording of the task, this is exactly what the 70mph sign is saying.
  • In a beautiful piece of editing, Sam and Lucy's attempts to roll the duck down the track, complete with a buzzer and on-screen graphic whenever they gain a penalty, is contrasted with Sue serenely walking down the track, dragging the duck along behind her with a length of rope.
• During the live task where the contestants have to guess whether an item will be heavier or lighter than the item before it, Sam asks if he can ask questions. Greg says he can ask him a question.
  Sam: Are you a child of divorce?
  (everyone cracks up)
  • For Sue's guess, she confidently says that a bag of flour will weigh more than a wellington boot. After being immediately proven wrong, she's given the boot to hold, and it's heavy enough that she almost drops it and happens to glance down. She immediately reaches into the boot and withdraws a length of chain that had been placed inside to make it heavier.
    Sue: You utter shit...
  • For his second and final guess, Sam is asked to decide if a leafblower is heavier or lighter than a teddy bear. Messing around, he says he thinks they are of equal weight, but is eventually forced to choose one or the other. Alex releases the scales... and they stay balanced! Cue Sam angrily insisting that he was made to change his answer. (At least, until it turns out the scales were actually just on a slight delay, and the leafblower was in fact heavier.)
• After winning the episode, Sam goes up to the stage, but instead of mucking about with the prizes like most episode winners, he just awkwardly stands there and waves before walking offscreen.

Hell Is Here

• The prize task is best sign.
  • Sam brings in a sign from the British Library that says 'Please take care, piazza slippery'. He jokes that Piazza Slippery sounds like a European spy name.
    Sam: Be careful, Piazza Slippery! This is a very slippery mission!
  • Julian introduces his by saying it's a sign from the green room at the Hull Literary Festival. When we see it, it's two post-it-notes stuck to a wall above a craft services table saying 'Food for the Artists :)'
    Julian: It's an unpretentious event...
    Greg: Did you actually steal it?
    Julian: No, I couldn't, or the artists wouldn't have known where to eat.
• The episode opens with a puzzle task involving pulling a sword from the stone. 'The champion is the one who releases the sword' - in this case, saying the name of Series 1 champion Josh Widdicombe, and there are several clues hidden around the area to Josh Widdicombe's name.
  • One of the clues mentions the Women's Institude (coding the letters WI). Lucy decides to call them, but gets put on hold.
  • According to Alex, it was fifteen minutes before Lucy said 'I think these are all clues!'.
  • At the end of Lucy's attempt, after she's pulled the sword from the stone:
    Lucy: In the legend, what did [Arthur] do once he had the sword?
    Alex: He ended up throwing it into a lake.
    (Lucy runs off and tosses the sword in the bathtub)
  • Sue's attempt is a similar mess. She spends some time trying to guess a geographic outline, including suggesting it might be Australia or the UK^note it's the county of Devon, which admittedly is not the easiest outline to recognise, but it is also clearly neither Australia nor the UK; she then finds the letters hidden around the area to anagram them, but her initial guess to the solution is 'Bedwewimbe'.
  • Her reaction when she offhandedly suggests Widdicombe and then slowly realises it's the correct answer. It seems to take about a minute for it to fully process through her mind, during which she keeps looking up and down between the letter and the camera with a slightly stunned look on her face.
  • When Alex recaps the task after the ad-break, he points out that Sue had worked with Josh on all four series of Insert Name Here.
  • Julian manages to find a clue with a picture of Josh Widdicombe early on, but is then hampered because, since he doesn't really watch modern comedy, he can't remember what Josh's name is. What makes it especially funny is his desperate insistence that he likes Josh's work while making it abundantly clear that he knows very little about him.
    Julian: He's sort of small and nasally... I've always liked him.
  • He also finds the pictures of the previous champions, during which he refers to Rob Beckett as 'the one with the teeth'.
  • In the studio, Alex notes that Julian's vocal and recorded failure to recognise any modern comedian was beginning to get increasingly awkward.
• Sam, messing about in the intro to the next task:
  Sam: (opening the task, gasping) It doesn't say anything...
  • The task does actually say something, telling the contestants to make a cheeky picture using nails and wire on a chalkboard. Both Lucy and Sue go directly to 'cock and balls' as their cheeky thing, though Lucy eventually feels bad about this and decides to give hers wings. Susan, meanwhile:
    Susan: We've got the sexy dog, because we're subverting stereotypes.
  • When pressed on this in the studio, Susan says she defines 'cheeky' as 'when you have your boobs out while feeding your dog'. Sue Perkins's horrified reaction to this is brilliant.
  • Julian's snarky comments throughout the task.
    Julian: Would you describe yourself as a charismatic man?
    Julian: What sort of people watch this programme, is it mostly students?
    Julian: My art teacher would not be impressed with this. Fortunately he's dead.
  • After the break, Greg wants to see the cheeky pictures.
    Alex: Of course you do Greg, it's your sort of thing you randy sod.
  • All of the cheeky pictures:
    • Julian's square sperm.
    • Lucy, despite claiming to have added wings to her cock and balls, turns out to have just done a mostly shapeless blob.
    • Sue immediately points out the irony of her picture of a penis being the most anatomically accurate.^note Just on the off-chance that someone doesn't know, Sue is a lesbian.
    • Susan's picture of a woman feeding her dog with her boobs out, which also includes a depiction of hell for some reason.
    • Sam's cheeky picture, the only one to have no lewdness: a person with beautiful blonde hair who cheekily covers up their hair with a large hat so nobody can see it.
• In the task to 'Make mischief':
  • Lucy does a fake seance where she talks to a spirit named Simon, before standing up with a look-a-like taking her place and proceeds to pickpocket the two guys she's doing the seance for.
  • Greg notes that, to the detriment of Lucy's attempt, the actors looked completely disinterested.
  • Sue initially says, to Greg's confusion, that the first thing that comes to her mind when thinking of mischief is a portcullis.
  • Her actual attempt reverses the task back onto Alex by giving him his own task envelope that makes him follow a trail of lollipops while unwrapping and putting all of them in his mouth, before locking him in the caravan with... a portcullis.
  • Greg is particularly tickled by Sue yelling 'portcullis!' like a five-year-old after she traps Alex.
  • Susan takes it a step further and sets a secret task for another contestant to do, which turns out to be Sam. The task is to stand up and shout "mice" whenever he sees a mouse and sit down and shout "fish" whenever he sees a fish, all while being restricted to the Taskmaster House's small toilet room.
  • Due to Alex's full cooperation and participation, Sam only finds out about the origins of the task at the show recording several weeks later. His sheer disbelief and indignation is hilarious.
    Sam: This lady's a nut job. That was amazing, but also, just lock her up!
  • As a bonus, it's then revealed mice and fish were used as they are an anagram of Mischief.
    Sam: How deep does this go, Wokoma?!
  • Sam borrows Alex's phone to make a prank call, but then pretends to drop it in a bowl of water and smash it with a hammer. According to Alex, he never once during Sam's whole pretense thought that his phone was really being damaged.
  • Julian writes a fan letter each to Stephen Mulhern and Jacob Rees-Mogg asking them for a signed photo. Rees-Mogg actually replied to him, with Mulhern's getting sent back due to it not being posted properly.
• The first part of the live task is for each contestant to write down a thing they like and a thing they don't like on a whiteboard. By the end of the time, Sue has realised what the second part will be, but tries to will it not to be anyway.
  Sue: Please don't say draw them... (opens task, reads) 'Draw...'
  • In a callback to the Mischief Task, Julian picked Stephen Mulhern and Jacob Rees-Mogg. While this is funny on its own, Sue amazingly had the exact same idea.
  • Sam's drawing is complete chaos. His picks were 'world cinema' and 'negative gearing', and his attempt to visualise them is unrecognisable.

Languidly

• The prize task is the present that raises the most questions.
  • Sam brings in a thesaurus, in which he has drawn a question mark after every single word. He claims it took him about three days to do them all.
  • Lucy brings in a quiche Lorraine, because of her belief that the quiche Lorraine was so named because somebody once asked Lorraine if she wanted some quiche ('quiche, Lorraine?') and somebody else misunderstood. She then suggests Steak Diane and rogan josh came from a similar process.
  • Julian bringing a large sparkly phallus that he hangs on his spare room door, which everyone is surprised to learn is four feet long.
  • Susan brings a Snickers bar.
    (Greg sidles over to Alex and points at his card)
    Alex: Well, you haven't heard the last one yet, it might not be...
    (Susan bursts out laughing)
• The contestants have to get a ball in a hole without touching it, and they have a range of equipment available.
  • Julian finds a barbecue fan, giving him the opportunity to mock Alex:
    Julian: I bet you've got a barbecue, have you?
    Alex: Yes... I built it with my friend Ben.
    Julian: Oh, you've got a friend!
  • Sam asks if he can use the horn to 'summon creatures of the forest' to help him.
  • The contestants reacting to discovering Alex was hiding the real hole behind his legs. Sue continues her tradition of sweary insults by calling him an 'absolute anus', while Julian just gives a pointed glance and turns disdainfully away, causing Alex to break.
  • According to Alex, Julian later told him he had the charisma of Matt Hancock.
  • Sue playing the panpipes in the middle of her attempt.
  • Just the image of Lucy tramping about with the leafblower welly. Greg says he could watch it all day. Lucy later says she enjoyed the task because she likes hoovering up and playing crazy golf, and this task allowed her to combine both of those things.
• Julian's sarcasm when he discovers the task under the table.
  Julian: Oh, what a laugh.
  • This is contrasted with Sam's enthusiasm, that 'hopefully' he will have to get under the table.
  • Tasked with getting underneath the most unique things, Julian stays true to form by starting by going through all of the crew and getting them to go on top of him.
  • He then makes his way through the rest of the task in a very relaxed manner, with no sense of urgency at all, and eventually ends up in his dressing room.
    Alex: (as Julian leaves the room) Are you going to take your tea?
    Julian: (languidly, while slowly opening the door) No, well, time is of the essence.
  • Sue also gets on Alex to go on top of her, except it's right as her time ends, so Alex ends up blowing his whistle in her ear.
  • Another golden day for the Taskmaster editors in Lucy and Susan's attempt. If the contestants get under any items someone else gets under, they lose points. Lucy repeatedly says she's only using things within the living room because she thinks it's too obvious, and everyone will choose to leave. Cut to Susan using the exact same strategy, and we get several parallels of them both going under exactly the same things.
  • Sam rushing about excitedly grabbing random things from around the house, and ultimately tiring himself out. He ended up getting under 74 different items. Greg describes him as having 'the energy of a sugar-pumped toddler'.
    Sam: Lint!
  • In the studio, Sam and Greg have a bizarre yet oddly affectionate discussion where Greg says he wants to carry Sam around his waist like a papoose, and Sam responds by saying he wants to cover Greg in oil, then hoover up the house and dump it over his oily body.
• Lucy, noticing the knitted versions of the S7 contestants in a birdcage in the intro to the nickname task:
  Lucy: Are they your children?
  Alex: No, these are little knitted characters.
  Lucy: Do they want to come out? They look like they want to come out.
  Alex: (looking concerned) They don't want to come out.
  (Lucy appears genuinely somewhat distressed)
  • The contestants are asked to come up with new nicknames for themselves. Julian immediately offers 'fuckpig'.
    Julian: Your legal team won't thank me for going into details.
  • Sam has another idea while exploring the parameters of the task:
    Sam: I'm allowed to touch stuff? Maybe that could be the nickname. Touchy!
    Alex: I don't think that's a good nickname.
• Almost everyone comes up with a funny nickname in this task:
  • Sue dresses up as a cowboy and does a number of Western-related activities, including shooting cans off the hedge and lassoing a cow. It then turns out her chosen nickname is 'Lassue Perkins'. Greg praises her for committing so much to a single pun.
  • Lucy dresses up in a rocker outfit and goes nuts in the caravan, popping out the sunroof to bite some pine needles. Her nickname is 'Lucyfer the Rock God'. That leads to this discussion in the studio:
    Greg: Lucy, what's the most rebellious thing you've ever done?
    Lucy: I threw a poo out of the window.
    Greg: Why?
    Lucy: Cause I couldn't flush it and I didn't want people to pick on me.
  • In contrast to the cinematography of Lucy and Sue, Julian just sits there and pounds the table once with his fists (and accidentally breaks the table in the process). His chosen nickname? 'Butch'.
    Greg: I think your nickname should have been 'Minimal Effort'.
  • Susan blindfolds Alex in a chair, then sinisterly reveals her nickname is 'Chain Bastard' and starts chaining him up. However, in the event, it turns out Chain Bastard's main method of torture is done through feathers. Greg notes how even with a nickname like Chain Bastard, Susan still found a way to appear very friendly and fun.
  • Sam goes outside the Taskmaster house and asks members of the public to come up with his nickname. After each one refuses, he loudly yells 'Dammit!'
  • Eventually Sam finds a compliant cyclist, though instead of allowing him to come up with a nickname, he just whispers a name into the cyclist's ear for him to say. The name? 'Doctor Cigarettes'.
  • Cut back to the caravan where Alex addresses Doctor Cigarettes and Sam turns around wearing sunglasses and speaking in a gravelly voice.
  • Sam defending his name in the studio:
    Sam: Greg, what can I tell you? Smoking kills... weaklings!
    Sam: A pack a day keeps the doctor away!
• In the live team task, one member of each team has to lie down across a grid of squares, and the other team has to throw a cushion to hit their squares. Alex points out there's a 'game that's quite similar', and Greg asks if it rhymes with 'cattle tips'. Then, once the game has started:
  Lucy: (just now realising) Oh, this is like Battleships!
  • It then gets even weirder as it turns out Lucy was actually thinking of Guess Who! all along.
  • This, after Susan hits Julian on the border between two squares:
    Alex: I'm going to have to ask VAR where that hit.
    Julian: I can tell you.

Dynamite Chicks

• The prize task category is the best thing for a grown-up that is meant for a child.
  • Lucy struggling to say her prize, a 'bibpack'.
  • Julian brings a prize he says 'amuses him as a renowned homosexual' - it's a book called 'Biggles Takes It Rough'.
  • Sam brings in his birth certificate, which Greg takes issue with as not being meant for a child. He challenges Sam to name a time when he used his birth certificate as a child; Sam claims he used it to 'papercut a bully'.
• Lucy knocking over the chair as she leaves the room for the first task.
  • This task is the sausage task from NZ, where the contestants have to order ingredients for a sausage that begin with the letters of the word 'sausage'. As before, many contestants try to carefully get around the rules; Sam orders 'ugly raisins', Sue orders 'unalive fish' and 'all the herbs', and perhaps best of all is Lucy ordering 'some carrot' and then 'some more carrot'.
  • Meanwhile, Julian orders (edible) underwear, and Susan orders normal underwear.
  • This version of the task is harder than the NZ one because the contestants are not provided with a sausage machine, meaning they have to wrap the sausages themselves - a pitfall that befalls many of them, from Sam effectively rolling all his ingredients up in some meat as a sort of crepe, to Lucy just serving her sausage as a lump of sludge.
    Alex: I've never had a sausage before with such prominent ends.
    Sam: Oh yes, the ends are very prominent this time of year.
  • Susan feeding Alex and calling him a 'good boy'. She later makes him lick the undies.
  • Throughout her preparation time, Sue says that her sausage 'reeks' and that it is 'vile', to Alex's visible concern. (Though it ends up being saved by Sue's being the only one he actually likes.)
• In the team task, the contestants have to do several mini tasks that are attached to their bodies.
  • There are a number of stipulations for the task, one of which is that one team member must be shouting at all times. Lucy mutters quietly 'I'm good at shouting'.
    Sam: Do you like shouting?
    Lucy: Yeah.
    Sam: OK, great, great.
    Lucy: I'm gonna pretend that the fox shat in my garden again. Is that all right? It's method.
  • Though Lucy initially thinks she's just meant to be shouting randomly, rather than simply shouting everything she says, and begins yelling at the fox to get out of her garden.
    Lucy: Get out my garden, you bloody fox!
  • One task is to 'sniff the front door'.
    Alex: Did you sniff the front door? What did it smell like?
    Lucy: IT SMELT LIKE WOOD!
    Julian: Better try sniffing the back door.
    Lucy: YOU'RE A MUCKY BUGGER!
  • Sam shaking his head and smiling while eating cereal.
  • One of the tasks is to reveal their biggest regrets, to which Sam says was 'what happened in Croatia'. In the studio Greg asks Sam why that was his biggest regret.
    Sam: I just felt like I didn't make the most of my time there.
    (everyone bursts out laughing)
  • Julian's regret is cunnilingus. Lucy, meanwhile, regrets having a big poo and throwing it off a balcony.
  • For the team of two, Sue is the one who takes on the role of shouter, and immediately becomes a barking military-style figure. Greg compares their team to "a jolly, compliant primary school teacher and then a 50s sergeant-major... and yet you seem to get on so well."
• From the art task:
  • Julian stands up to Alex's rules so he will get him some coloured pens.
    Alex: You haven't said your time starts now yet.
    Julian: I haven't, no.
    Alex: Do you want me to get these pens before the time starts?
    Julian: Yes.
  • Julian and Alex make rather an oddly nice partnership in this task, as Julian recruits Alex to colour dots for him, and they chat about going to see some barn owls.
  • Lucy confusing Monet for Van Gogh in the studio. Greg points out that one had an eye problem and the other had an ear problem, and he has a mnemonic system to remember that: 'Mon-eye' and 'Van Cut-it-gogh'.
  • Everything about Lucy's effort in this task. she decides to do Van Gogh's Sunflowers, but doesn't start with any sort of plan, instead just trying to do it in her head. If that wasn't enough of a mess, she then realises halfway through that she's actually been drawing poppies instead of sunflowers, as she confused Van Gogh with Gok Wan. When we finally see her fully-completed picture, it's just a jumbled mess of random lines.
• In the final task, the contestants have to write the name of an animal on a dice, and roll it, with the one which least fits a given category being eliminated. Sam's dice includes a mammoth, which Alex repeatedly confirms.
  Alex: We know there's a mammoth.
  • Amusingly, taking a look at Sue's dice reveals she also had a mammoth, it just never came up.
  • Sam's extravagant dice rolls, including rolling one towards Greg and then another between Alex's legs.
  • The winner of the final round is whoever rolls the animal most like Greg.
    Alex: Well, we know there's a mammoth.
  • For this round, Sam then rolls 'human', effectively instantly winning him the round.

Skateboard Division

• For the prize task, Sam brings in a "Plucka Duck" toy (carrying an Australian $5 note) from Australian TV show Hey Hey It's Saturday. Greg thinks he's making all of it up, to which Sam points out Julian was on that show.
  Julian: I do remember going on that show, yes. Not a career highlight.
  • We then move on to Susan's prize, which includes a ten pound note. Greg points out ten pounds is more than five dollars.
    Sam: You have to keep in mind the rate of exchange.
    Alex: Five Australian dollars is roughly two pound sixty-five.
  • Lucy brings in a 'Yorkshire melon', which is a melon with five Yorkshire puddings stuck to it. She then claims she likes to use the puddings as a bowl and putting Greek yoghurt in them.
    Greg: It's like she doesn't want to win.
  • After Greg puts Sam in last:
    Sam: You're gonna get a lot of letters. And I hope you like anthrax!
• The task to burst the balloon from as far away as possible:
  • Lucy attempting to manoeuvre a pole between her legs, while only a very short distance from the balloon. The visual of her attempt is hilarious, even more so when she fails to burst it and just pushes it over.
  • Lucy and Susan's attempts are shown together. According to Alex, Susan's distance was 71 aspirins, while Lucy's was 15. Lucy reacts with disbelief in the studio, seemingly unable to fathom how somebody might be able to burst a balloon without being right next to it, despite having just seen Susan's attempt in which she did just that:
    Lucy: Who could have possibly done better?
    [Sue, and then Greg, both point at Susan]
    Greg: And Susan was rubbish!
  • Julian preparing himself to throw the balloon a great distance, and then lets go of it too soon and barely throws it at all.
  • This quote from Sue while preparing her effort:
    Sue: It's a win-win. Either it works, or...
    Alex: ...or you lose.
• The googly-eye gang task:
  • Sam claiming he was in the 'skateboard division' of the Hell's Angels.
  • Sue's terrible attempt, just sticking one large eye on a number of random objects, including one low down on a beaver soft toy as its 'eye bollock'. Greg asks Alex to describe Sue's in one word, and after almost saying a swear word, he then calls it 'poor', much to Sue's indignation. As an added bonus, Sue's 'beaver' is the same as the vole Mike undermined back in Series 11.
  • Julian gangs together several jugs and teapots, according to him to give his gang some homosexual flair.
    Julian: They're cool because they're an oppressed minority who found their voice and their strength.
  • Discussing his gang, Julian says the word 'pour', and Alex asks if that was a deliberate pun on his earlier criticism of Sue's effort. This allows Julian to continue his streak of deceptively mild but withering comments to Alex:
    Julian: Yes, I put that in for you. Whoever you are.
  • Lucy puts a cloak covered in eyes over her head and dances around wildly holding a skateboard and a saxophone. Greg points out she's only one person.
    Greg: Do you know what a gang is?
    Lucy: Yeah well I was in the gang, but they couldn't come out to play that day.
  • Susan's wacky attempt, which begins with a gnome appearing and saying 'Hello, pleased to meet you! I'm Satan!'. We then meet Satan's gang members: a mop called Alison, a broom called Tim, a suave multi-eyed helmet called Helmet, and a leafblower called Iain, who sprays googly-eyes over a chained-up duck.
  • Sam's gang of three-eyed heads who live in shoes, who mock Alex for having only two eyes. Alex tries to contact a police officer, only to learn the three-eyed gang has infiltrated the police as well.
    Greg: Talk me through the genesis of the gang, Sam.
    Sam: Well basically we had so many eyes, I thought, let's definitely incorporate them.
• Everything about Lucy's attempt in the third task. She lights the candle despite not knowing what it's for, then tries to blow out the match, only to blow out the candle at the same time. Then, upon discovering the plate of water is stuck to the table, inexplicably decides to try tipping over the table to pour the water into the vase, which ends up spilling most of it and disqualifying her. Alex does point out her attempt was quite quick, though:
  Alex: It is fastest wins, so-
  Lucy: (full of excited hope) Did I do it?
  Alex and Greg: (in unison) No!
  • Sam setting the task on fire by mistake.
  • Sue discovers the secret diagram of the solution to the task, but initially has it upside down and as such tries to fill the vase from the plate by putting it underneath the table.
  • Everyone ends up spilling some of the water whether they found the trick or not, so everyone is disqualified.
    Sam: If in the Olympics there was a sport and they're like 'yep, no one can do it', don't have it in the Olympics!
• In the live task, Lucy storming offstage after Alex points out her fingers were just slightly over the line.
  • While also Heartwarming, it is hilarious how Alex desperately tries to remind the contestants that only a contestant who had already been disqualified could help Julian without being penalised - only to be too late, and Sue (who hadn't been disqualified) to have already done it.
  • Also Julian's take:
    Julian: That's the LGBT community for you.

Brother Alex

• The prize task (best thing that makes a noise when you shake it) being incredibly competitive... because all five entries are completely crap.
  Greg: It's the worst round in sixteen seasons.
  • Sue brings in her 'Great Aunt Margaret's glass swan collection', which had supposedly been saved from the Titanic... with the joke being that once the box of glass swans was shaken, it shattered them all.
  • Sam continues his tradition of exceptionally weird prizes with a bucket lined with sandpaper and filled with matches and fire alarms.
    Sam: Listen, my Grandad gave me this, and he was on the Hindenburg.
• The task to avoid the rubbish robots:
  • Sam's complete disdain for this task.
    Sam: Yeah, I've loved some of the other tasks, but this one I thought was a dud.
    Sam: (after completing the task) It's nice that you let your nephew come up with this one.
  • When pressed on it in the studio, he sarcastically states that there should be a spin-off and merchandise of just this one task.
  • Julian getting on his hands and knees:
    Alex: Is that your starting position?
    Julian: It is. The number of times I've been asked that...
  • Julian, however, loses almost immediately after he kneels down directly in front of the robots' path.
    Julian: Sam was quite right, it's not one of your best.
  • Susan's technique for avoiding the robots: just deny it once one of them has hit you.
  • There's also this quote from Susan's task:
    Susan: Who's controlling the rubbish robot?
    Alex: God.
  • Lucy asking about the rubbish robots 'Do they know I'm here?'.
• From the team task:
  • The repeated cuts back to the garage where the walkie-talkie contestants are wearing different outfits, including a large flamingo costume.
  • Lucy's ineptness and complete befuddlement in this task, in particular her failing to hold the walkie-talkie button down while giving a long explanation to her teammates, but holding it down while she has a long coughing fit.
    Sam: (listening to Lucy coughing) Are you all right? Is there gas?
  • Lucy also repeatedly uses words like 'left', 'right', 'front', and 'back', which the task explicitly forbids. She further cements her Cloud Cuckoolander status by attempting to argue that she only used the forbidden words in giving instructions to her teammates.
    Lucy: But left and right were instructions...
    Alex: Yes, exactly!
  • Not that her teammates were much more helpful - at one point Lucy says 'the thing that they have in churches that's evil', meaning a gargoyle, but somehow Julian initially interprets this as 'crucifix'.
  • In the studio Greg is completely baffled that Sam's immediate response to the prompt "two of those bright things at the zoo" is flamingos. Even weirder was that this was absolutely correct.
  • Both teams have a funny interaction when their time is almost done:
  • Alex tells Lucy that she has ten seconds left, and she relays this down to Sam and Julian as having ten minutes.
  • The team of two:
    Susan: How long have we got? (Alex blows his whistle) TITS!
• In the 'Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes' task, Alex repeating 'knees and toes' any time one of the contestants says 'knees and toes', to the point where some of them assume they misspoke.
  • Preparing her attempt, Lucy assembles a lot of heads from around the house.
    Lucy: Now I just need a knee... and a shoulder... and some toes.
  • In Sam's interpretation, 'The Case of the Insane Murder', he is a distressed man reporting the brutal dismemberment of his parents to a police officer, who keeps repeating 'knees and toes'. It then gets sidetracked when Alex's character eats a banana and Sam points out how strange it is to eat a banana in the middle of the night. In the studio, he points out that normally, if you saw someone eating a banana at midnight, you'd report it to the police, but in this case Alex was the police.
  • Julian's picture:
    Julian: No one wants yellow in a piece of artwork.
    (the camera focuses on the primarily yellow Greg portrait behind him)
  • Also, this chat between Julian and Alex while he's working:
    Julian: So do you do comedy?
    Alex: I've tried. ...I sometimes sing in a band, Julian.
    Julian: Do you? What sort of music?
    Alex: Sometimes it's jazz.
    Julian: Oh, jazz brings me out in hives.
    Alex: Me too.
  • And then, as Julian leaves:
    Julian: Good luck with your career. Such as it is.
  • Susan's weird cultic ritual rendition of the song, in which a violent mutilation is apparently performed on a duck, cutting off its head, shoulders, knees, and toes... except of course, the (rubber) duck doesn't have knees, so Alex just swings his axe in that general direction. Susan says it's a comment on the death penalty.
    Greg: And what is the comment on the death penalty?
    Susan: That it's... bad.
  • Sue's 1950s-style safety advert, warning people to be careful when singing nursery rhymes. It stems from a story she told earlier in the episode about schoolchildren she was teaching in Vietnam repeatedly injuring themselves while she was teaching them about the song.
  • Lucy playing a creepy nun cheekily touching the different parts of 'Brother Alex' as he sleeps. The real Lucy gets distracted, though, when she notices Alex has a lizard tattoo on his arm.
  • Lucy also struggles to explain the narrative of her attempt:
    Greg: If you were to sum up the whole story from start to finish as succinctly as you can, what was the story you just presented to us?
    Lucy: Uh... Harry Potter.
    Greg: (after the laughter has subsided) And the duck represented...!
    Lucy: ...the RSPB.
• Greg's eye mask on a stick in the live task.
  • The live task, to 'Pass the Pineapple', starts going off the rails in the second round, as the contestants realise they don't actually have to hold one pineapple each, so Julian ends up hiding two pineapples. They go even further off the rails in the third round, as the contestants realise they don't have to hold on to the pineapples at all, so Sue and Susan hide two pineapples off stage, while Sam hides behind Greg with a pineapple.
  Greg: If this Australian is holding three pineapples, I'm gonna lose my mind.
  • Even better - Julian is the one who initially thinks of the idea of holding multiple pineapples, which he tries to whisper quietly to Lucy, only for her to loudly whisper it to the other three so Greg ends up overhearing.
  • Susan invokes her training at RADA^note Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, while trying to fool Greg, so Greg starts calling her 'RADA' and becomes particularly determined to suss her out. Susan fools him every time.
    Susan: Thirty grand baby!
• Lucy covering herself in cream after she wins the episode.

I'm Off To Find A Robin

• Greg's running gag throughout the episode about Alex having had Botox and cosmetic surgery done.
• The prize task is the thing that would most make someone groan.
  • Lucy's prize is 'a serious lesson in the importance of cartilage'.
    Greg: And how do we look after our cartilage?
    Lucy: Ooh, I don't know.
  • Susan pulling a VCM and noting that Greg has groaned at all her previous shit prizes, so she's got them all back from the winners who didn't want them and is offering them up collectively as her entry.
  • Lucy and Sam's incredibly awkward high-five.
• From the switch task:
  • 'Your time starts when Alex is confident you understand the task.'
    Julian: 'Confident' and 'Alex' are two words one doesn't associate.
  • While deliberating about the switches, Lucy starts just listing off the things she doesn't like, which include going upside-down, spiders, hotdogs (the ones in tins), pulling cotton wool apart, folk music, and ice cubes.
  • Sam offering up completely random facts about samurai in the studio.
  • The switch task itself - after being asked to flip switches to affect the conditions of the next task, the contestants have to stack golf tees on a shelf, while hampered by the conditions they set up - which can include leaves dropping from the ceiling, the platform beneath them vibrating, and a speaker repeating their name to them over and over again.
  • Susan's angry vibrating.
  • This from Sue, affected by multiple conditions at once:
    Sue: Don't make me fart into the darkness listening to my own name.
  • Sam attempts to break the task by placing a bowl of tees on the shelf, which Greg initially appears to allow. When Greg tries to disqualify Sue for sticking her tees into the shelf, Sue questions why he is allowing the bowl, which reveals there's been a mix-up and Greg actually meant to disallow Sam's effort. Alex points out that if Sue hadn't stuck her tees into the shelf, Sam might've got away with it.
    Sam: Yeah, you're pretty good at sticking things into other places... knives into backs!
• All the contestants' joy upon seeing 'Wayne', the inflatable waving man.
  • Apart from Julian's, that is - his total lack of enthusiasm about Wayne leads Greg in the studio to wonder if Julian has somehow lost his "childlike enthusiasm." But Julian denies it, saying he was the same when he was young and never had enthusiasm.
  • If the contestants fail to pie Wayne, they have to imitate his dance moves. Susan gets a little too into it and appears to spend most of her time dancing, while Julian is completely unenthusiastic and just casually sways about.
  • Sue using a 'naughty flamingo' to turn off Wayne's power and pie him.
  • Julian tries to bring Wayne down with a swingball stick, and ends up knocking him off his perch completely.
  • Lucy breaks the rule saying she's not allowed to touch Wayne quite a lot, but tries to justify it by claiming 'he touched me!'
  • As has happened many times before, we get a zoom to reveal that some contestants marginally stepped on the red green and therefore are disqualified.
    Sam: Why are you zooming in on people's feet, you sicko?
  • After Alex gives Lucy 0 points:
    Lucy: Oh fuck you.
    Greg: You know what, Alex is smiling, but he's hurting. The reason you can't see he's hurting... (gestures to his face to once again imply Alex's cosmetic surgery)
• All of the contestants reacting to the cutout of themselves in the third task, in particular Lucy, who seems almost frightened of it. She turns it away from her, only for it to slightly move after she places it, freaking her out.
  • This task requires the contestants to 'act weirdly throughout', which Greg notes won't be a problem for Lucy and Sam, who 'have come across as absolutely deranged so far'.
  • In response, Lucy and Sam attempt to high-five again and this time succeed.
  • The 'acting weird':
  • Lucy spends the whole time yodelling.
  • Julian pretends to be Alex, which he does by scrunching up his face.
    Julian: That was what he looked like before the surgery.
  • As some commenters have pointed out, Sam being told to act weird actually makes him less weird.
  • The main part of the task is to place your cutout somewhere in the room as far away from the others as possible. Julian says he's going to put his up by the boundary line, which nobody else will think of; cut to Susan doing the exact same thing.
  • Alex asks Lucy where she thinks the others have put their cutouts. She suggests that Julian might have put his cutout in a place very close to where she's put her cutout.
    Alex: Why have you put yours so close to Julian Clary?
    Lucy: Oh, well, I didn't know at the time.
  • Sam tearing off his cutout's head and throwing it up into the antlers of a deer, and hiding the rest of himself under the carpet.
  • Sue deliberates between placing hers next to the boundary line, or mounting it on the wall deer as Sam has done. She flips a coin to decide, and we initially don't see the result for some time... but in the end it turns out she's not only put it right up to the boundary line, she's only put it about 8cm away from Julian's cutout.
• Sue accidentally spilling her balls out of her hat in the live task, while already being the only one who hasn't completed the task yet.

Never Packed a Boot

• The prize task is introduced with a drum roll, and then Alex saying in Motor Mouth fashion 'The best single word or object they own and love that gets the best reaction after a drum roll.' Then this happens:
  Alex: Whoever wins the episode will win all five... (drum roll) prizes.
  • Lucy's first 'single word' is (drum roll) 'alien device'.
  • The alien device is a truly baffling one. Lucy claims it had been in her mother's ear canal for 'two years and 36 months', which as Greg points out is just five years. Then she claims that 'the cat licked it, and the cat disappeared'.
  • Julian's (drum roll) jacket with the words FUCK YOU sewn into to the inside, to flash at people you don't like.
  • Sue makes (drum roll) Greg(gs), a portrait of Greg made out of sausage rolls.
  • Susan's entry is (drum roll) a calendar - more specifically a calendar with pictures of cat balls (i.e. cats with enormous testicles).
  • And having been left for last, Sam's entry is (drum roll) cobalt.
  • Asked to justify his prize:
    Greg: Go on.
    Sam: So I used to live near Tempe in Australia. It was very close to the flight path so the locals hated it, and they commissioned an artwork which was all kids with their hands over their ears going AAAAAAH! And then they changed how high the planes were flying.
    Greg: (confused) Where did you get the cobalt?
    Sam: Online.
  • He then says he only said it cause everyone was telling a story and he wanted to join in.
• The secret task that Alex keeps mentioning throughout the series is finally resolved in the first 'team' task.
  • During Sue and Susan's attempt, Sue finds the task in the living room first, then tells Susan to look in there without explicitly telling her she's already found the task. This leads to some amusing dramatic irony as Susan acts as though she's managed to find it first.
  • Lucy finds a task telling her the task is behind a secret door.
    Lucy: (to Alex) Do you think it's a real door, or like a secret door?
  • While Julian and Sam are finding the task, we randomly cut to a shot of Lucy in the caravan playing the French horn.
  • Julian, at the end of the task, sinisterly tells Alex it was 'one of your better efforts'. Greg compares him to a Bond villain.
  • The secret task itself stipulates the contestants to choose another contestant, who will lose or gain points depending on when the task was found. Both Sue and Susan choose Sam Campbell, and Greg asks Sam how he feels about that:
    Sam: It's just exciting to know people are talking about me.
  • The task ends with a complete anticlimax, as Sam being picked so often means he both loses and gains the five points. In the end, the only result of the task is that Sam gains one point, and Sue loses one point and gains a large floppy sunhat.
• In the second task, Sam says he's never heard of a 'fortune trail', and Greg points out this is because Alex made it up.^note Though of course he actually didn't - this task was taken from the NZ version, so in fact Paul made it up.
  Sam: Oh. It's like, Brian Blessed. Is he real?
  Sue: Yeah. Super real.
  Sam: (nonchalantly) Oh wow.
  • This line from Sue when Alex points out she didn't open the umbrella in the shed, but opened one of the umbrellas from the fortune trail in the shed:
    Sue: Damn your syntactical vortex!
  • Sue's interpretation of 'toss five heads in a row', in which she gets down on the ground and effectively does a weird sort of push-up-cum-sun-salutation while rotating her head.
  • When Greg disallows this, Sue opens up her jacket to reveal she's taped the words 'FUCK' and 'OFF' into the inside, like with Julian's prize task. Apparently one of the crew members helped her do it in the break.
  • Lucy is the only contestant to find the double-headed coin, and yet she ends up taking longer than everyone else because she is completely unable to toss a coin. In the studio, she says that she usually gets a man to do it.
    Lucy: I've never packed a boot.
  • Julian openly threatens Alex for the first time at the end of this task, saying 'You got a problem?' When Greg points this out, Julian defends it as 'heterosexual male banter'.
• The task to convince a child you're asleep:
  • Greg notes that all the contestants planned to use their acting skills in this task, apart from Julian who looked like he was planning to just have a nap.
  • Everything about Lucy's attempt at sleepwalking, which can only be describing as the least convincing sleepwalk ever. The completely bemused reaction of Flossie (the eight-year-old child attempting to work out if she's asleep) only adds to the hilarity.
  • Sam doesn't even try to make it look like he's in the bed, replacing himself with a plastic flamingo. However, even so, Flossie claims that he's asleep. This naturally arouses suspicion in the studio, so Alex shows a further clip of Sam's attempt, where the plastic flamingo then opens its eyes, looks directly at Flossie, and promises her £100 if she says Sam was asleep - effectively, Sam was bribing an eight-year-old in order to win the five points. Even better is that it worked. Flossie gigglingly deliberating over whether or not Sam would actually give her £100 is hilarious.
    Flossie: (giggling) A hundred pounds...!
• In the live task, the contestants have to wave at each other throughout their mimes. Sam puts his hand up.
  Alex: Any questions? Sam?
  Sam: No, I'm just practising.
  • All of the noises Greg makes the contestants do in the live task, especially Sue's auctioneer voice, and Julian's Big Ben BONGs.
  • Sue attempting to mime 'Curiosity killed the cat' while trying to do her aforementioned auctioneer voice.

Fagin at the Disco

• Alex's intro, in which he reveals himself to be part of a WhatsApp group called 'the Little Ones' with other famous people with 'little' in their name. Greg reads the conversation:
  Lil Nas X: Hey guys you free Wednesday? Got some lil plans
  Alex: Na man not Wednesday, swimming lesson you know this
  Lil Nas X: Lil Wayne? You around next Wednesday? Like I say I got some lil plans
  Lil Wayne: Also not free Wednesday, I got my climbing lesson, thought you knew that Lil Nas!!!!!
  Richard Littlejohn: Hi guys love the banter as always. I'm mad free on Wednesday cause my javelin practice has been moved to Sunday mornings. 8am wtf
  Greg: I've messaged them back for you.
  Alex: What did you say? (looks at the phone) Ah... I don't think they've ever heard me use that word before.
• The prize task is the bit of old crap that Greg likes the best.
  Greg: Wow, you are getting lazy.
  • Julian brings in a little toy soldier. Greg asks Alex why soldiers wear feathers on their heads, and Alex claims to know but initially refuses to explain.
  • Then comes Lucy's entry, a mouse dropping:
    Lucy: Bascially, where my mum lived when she was growing up, she lived next to an old couple who couldn't have children. So the husband, he bought a monkey off a sailor, but then the monkey bit her nose off and so I was never allowed pets. But my mum did eventually get me a hamster and one night it ran across the settee and because it scared her she whacked it and killed it. But because of that my mum's now got mice in her pantry and she's keeping them like pets. And (quietly) that's the dropping.
    (Beat)
    Alex: So the feathers are a symbol of their collective identity.
  • Sam bringing in his National Insurance Number recorded on a cassette tape.
• The street-cleaner driving task:
  • Before the task Alex asks everyone if they have a drivers' licence. Most answer in the negative, and Sue says she does but it took her a while to get it. Julian, however:
    Julian: I not only have a licence, Alex, I am a member of the Advanced Motorists' Association. So stick that in your pipe.
  • Alex's flashing blue hat, and Greg's contempt for it.
  • Before they start, everyone gets a quick driving lesson. Lucy, however, starts going immediately and has to be stopped by Alex.
    Alex: The lesson hasn't quite finished... or started.
  • Sam's visible annoyance when he gets whistled for one infraction.
  • Julian reaches the final flag but gets the instruction wrong, and Alex tells him to come back. Without saying anything, Julian quietly considers and then decides to just ignore him and keep on driving through the finish line anyway. Greg describes it as a 'chillingly calm meltdown'.
  • Susan's terrible driving, which includes crashing into one of the flag-holders. As she tries to free herself (and just ends up repeatedly driving into it), the camera reveals that there is a production assistant who was hiding behind the board and changing the flags, and that Susan almost killed him!
• Most of the contestants in the 'make Greg a gift' task received their £50 in notes. Sam, however, is given his in the form of 50 pound coins, which he ends up spilling everywhere and spending most of the time picking up off the floor.
  Sam: Coin fever, eh?
  • Sam tells Alex to spend the leftover money from his prize on something nice. When Sam is making his gift, Alex is wearing an orange tie, which he later tells Greg is what he bought.
  • Julian makes Greg a tiny vest and a pair of tiny shorts, which Greg calls a 'gimp costume'.
  • Susan makes Greg a coat, which Greg points out is just bits of coloured paper stuck on a fur coat. Nonetheless, he wears it for most of the task.
  • Lucy makes Greg a tent, telling him 'you can hide in there waiting for your victims'.
  • Sam's 'gentleman's basket', which is a basket of Ferrero Rochers on top of snow, with a Statue of David next to it and his actual credit card stuck in the top. Greg questions why it's called a 'gentleman's basket':
    Sam: I thought it was cause you were so stylish, I didn't think (gesturing to Susan's coat) you were going to start dressing like Fagin at the disco!
  • Sue's gift is a painting of Alex, naked and wearing a long red wig which covers him up, while Sue blows the wig with a hairdryer. It gets the five points.
• The cards task:
  • Lucy's attempt is yet again complete madness, from her wearing two hats to her attempting to blow the cards into the clown's mouth with a leafblower. The crowning moment, however, is her irritation and disappointment when Alex says he can't put the cards into the clown's mouth for her.
  • Julian being Julian:
    Julian: Is this your stage persona, or is this what you're really like?
  • Sam manages to get all 52 cards in. Trying to describe the feeling in the studio, we get another one of his bizarre analogies where he compares it to a woman who came to his school to describe how she came back to life and saw God as a huge pink crystal.
  • Sue coolly describing her card stack as a 'classic 72'.
• The entire parade live task.
  • Particularly Lucy's baffling answers to the questions, which clearly demonstrate she was paying absolutely no attention to the parade whatsoever. Highlights include her thinking Greg claimed Alex was born in '2015 or the 1800s', and her answer that Greg was holding 'a penis (cock ring) and/or cheese triangle'.
  • Alex mentioning offhandedly that Sue and Susan, who both won the task with three correct answers, had 'suspiciously similar answers'.

Always Forks and Marbles

• Sam, who throughout the series has been wearing all-grey outfits in the studio, is this episode wearing a garish orange shirt and blue trousers, and wearing a platinum blonde wig. Asked about this by Greg, he says, "Oh, it was just all a bit grey."
  • To reflect Sam's makeover, his picture on the scoreboard was changed to a picture of him wearing the blonde wig.
• Alex claiming that this episode is being filmed live.
• The prize task is the most shocking thing when you turn it around.
  • Susan brings in vanilla ice cream, which Greg eats some of. When he turns it around, there is a list of ingredients on the back, among which is 'secretions from the urinary and anal glands of beavers'. (Which is sometimes, albeit rarely, true!)
  • Lucy brings in a lamp which is using an old braid of hers as a pull-switch. What's particularly funny though is when her explanation gets derailed when she uses the word 'untaffled', and refuses to believe it isn't a word. ^note It's extremely regional to Yorkshire, and is synonymous with "unravel" or "disentangle".
    Lucy: There'll be people screaming at the TV.
    Alex: Well, we can listen.^note Referring back to his claim that the episode is happening live.
• The first task is 'do something shocking but family friendly with this doughnut'.
  Lucy: Well obviously you'd want to put it on a penis, wouldn't you.
  • Despite the family-friendly stipulation, Susan can't get perverted stuff out her mind:
    Susan: That's filthy... that's filthy... (long pause) ...that's filthy...
  • Greg presses Susan on the studio on what one of her filthy ideas were, and Susan answers that she considered biting the doughnut apart and shoving the bits up her arse.
  • Sam makes a tiny paper bikini and turns his doughnut into a 'femme fatale', who stands atop the Taskmaster house and is then knocked off by a crow. When Greg tries to claim they can't count the crow part of his attempt since Sam didn't cause that to happen, Sam asks if that means David Attenborough shouldn't get the credit for his documentaries.
  • Sue's 'Donut of Doom' catapult, where she tries to launch a doughnut at Alex from a short distance... and fails repeatedly. Greg even reprimands the audience for clapping when she finally gets it.
  • Then we get onto the gross food ones. Julian chews up the doughnut and spits it into Alex's face.
    Julian: Good luck to you and your family.
  • Susan eating tons and tons of food. Every time you think she's finally going to go for the doughnut at last, she pours another thing into her mouth, and it gets all rather Squick-y. She does claim in the studio that the crew's shocked faces were the highlight of her time on Taskmaster though.
  • Nothing compares to Lucy's attempt though, in which she dresses up as a bird, picks up the doughnut in her mouth, eats it, and then regurgitates it into Alex's mouth.
  • Greg points out that Alex will eat anything.
    Alex: Well, I'm not the one who gobbled a beaver's anal gland.
  • Lucy tries to defend her attempt by also citing David Attenborough, except she accidentally calls him Richard Attenborough.^note David's brother, a well-known actor.
  • When Greg is deciding who to give to the one point, Sue says 'Give it to me, Uncle Greg!' Then he deliberates giving the two points to Sam, who replies 'Come on, Gruncle!'
• The exercise task:
  • All of Lucy's exercises must end with a 'whoops!'.
    Lucy: I think most things I do do that.
  • Sue almost immediately starts wrapping herself in gaffer tape, commenting that she's "going to gaffer herself real good". Greg later uses this quote to cut to an ad break.
  • Lucy's 'head butt ball', bobbing up and down and hitting her head into the yoga ball.
    Greg: You remind me of one of those birds from the 70s.
    Lucy: Like the ones that went on Top of the Pops?
  • Sam interpreting 'exercise' as 'exorcism' and beating the demons out of Alex while repeatedly saying 'Let the power of Christ be with you.'
  • Sue somehow misses the stipulation that all the exercises must be different, and just does the same exercise four times, a form of 'hot yoga' which involves wrapping herself in gaffer tape and repeatedly smacking Alex with the yoga ball.
  • While trying to explain the science behind it, she mispronounces 'kidneys' as 'kiddeneys'. She then leans into it and starts discussing her "livere".
  • Julian's exercises, particularly the names. One was called the Flying Homosexual. But the highlight is an exercise where he punches Alex repeatedly with boxing gloves on his feet, which was called 'Punch the Cunt'.
• Everything about the hotel task, which may be one of the funniest tasks in Taskmaster history.
  • In this team task, the contestants have to give the best room service to Qrs Tuvwxyz, a demanding and irritable hotel guest played by Alex, who is here with his suitcase full of forks and marbles to attend a 'forks and marbles' conference, and has a number of strange demands including a hot cucumber sandwich and a bedtime story.
  • In the studio segments, Alex has to keep saying Qrs Tuvwxyz's surname for rest of the cast as nobody is able to remember how to pronounce it.
  • Greg offers a completely deadpan prediction of both hotels:
    Greg: The team of two are going to have the time of their lives playing hotels together. And the team of three? Uncle Julian trying to wrangle two lunatics.
  • From Sue and Susan's hotel:
    • Sue has a quick flick through the guest book, and she is amused that one of the guests is called Brian O'Yoghurt. When Alex checks in, she asks him is if he is Brian O'Yoghurt.
    • They struggle to find Qrs' name in the guest book, due to it being pronounced "Chris", but inexplicably spelled as "Qrs".
    • Susan goes into Qrs' room to find his suitcase full of forks and marbles, which reduces her to a helpless, almost catatonic state of laughter as she struggles to process it. When Greg mentions this to her, she dissolves into even harder laughter in the studio.
      Susan: (while in tears of laughter) I've never seen forks and marbles together in my life!!!
    • When they get a moment's rest, Susan offers Sue a couple of cucumber slices to eat, except Sue then immediately puts them on her eyes. Even better, Qrs interrupts at exactly that moment.
    • At one point, Sue is soothingly sitting on Qrs' bed telling him a story, while Susan frantically runs across the garden in the background.
    • Unable to wash Qrs' dirty trousers in time, Susan ends up giving him her dungarees to wear.
  • Sue and Susan, however, are able to run a pretty efficient hotel. You'd think with one extra person the team of three would do better, right? Nope! None of the hilarity of the Team Of Sues' attempt even comes close to matching the absolute hilarious chaos that is Julian, Lucy, and Sam trying to run a hotel. The absolute nonsense provided by the 'two lunatics' Lucy and Sam, with Julian himself not being too much of a stabilising force, leads to perhaps one of the greatest task attempts ever.
    • The chaos begins immediately when Sam offers Qrs a 'complimentary feather' on entry.
    • Qrs asks which room he’s booked into, so Lucy asks him 'what's your favourite number?'
    • After getting Qrs to his room, Lucy offers him a free service, that she will sit beside his window and sing. The three of them all then stand outside Qrs' window looking in at him while Lucy sings, only to suddenly realise that Qrs is calling reception.
    • Sam answering the reception phone with 'What's up?'
    • He then arrives to move Qrs into a different room by yelling ‘Sir!’ through the window.
    • Sam struggling to open the caravan door, and having to get Qrs to open his own room for him. He then gives Qrs all the keys to all the other rooms, should he need them.
    • The Running Gag of Lucy complimenting Qrs' legs. Even funnier when Sam compliments him on his legs too.
      Lucy: Lovely legs, sir!
    • For the second time during a team task, Lucy is playing the French horn.
      Qrs: Why's your colleague playing the French horn?
      Julian: She's French.
    • Qrs gets back to his room to discover the word ‘HI’ spelt out on his bed in forks. He comments that it’s lovely, only for Sam to suddenly say 'Hi!' and reveal he's in the room, genuinely startling him.
    • Julian is rather nonchalant about discovering the fire:
      Julian: Is there a fire? How awful.
    • Sam hears the fire alarm and interprets it as a police siren, asking Qrs if he is a white-collar criminal.
    • Julian taking Qrs to the wrong fire assembly point.
    • Qrs asks to be read a bedtime story. All three of them come round to his room, and then, to his disdain, Lucy starts getting into bed with him to tell him a story about a man named Qrs who had very nice legs.
      Lucy: Are you sure you don't want a song?
      Qrs: Please get out of my bed.
    • As Qrs leaves:
      Sam: (handing Qrs the bedding) Here's your bedding, sir.
      Qrs: No, that's your bedding.
    • Qrs leaves the hotel wearing just a jacket and his underwear. When Lucy tells him several times that he needs to wear trousers for his meeting, growing more and more alarmed each time, he keeps on walking away. Even better, he looks back before leaving, only for Julian to gesture for him to leave.
    • According to Alex, Julian charged him £305 and pocketed the tip for himself.
      Julian: That’s 20… 205…
      Qrs: You’ve charged me-
      Julian: Not now sir, I’m adding up.
• The anticlimax of the live task, where most of the contestants fail to keep the ball in the bath. Made especially funny by Alex's clear regret about the task's difficulty.
  • Sam does manage to keep his ball in:
    Alex: Well, it's possible, which is a relief.
  • Before Julian's attempt at the beginning, Lucy suggests that the four other contestants cuddle up.

Series 17

General

• Nick debuts perhaps the most bizarre and impractical outfit in Taskmaster history, attempting pre-recorded tasks in a Dracula costume. Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that, like any true vampire, he casts no reflection throughout the season.
• Greg messing with the highly competitive John, particularly through exploiting his constant dread that he's about to be disqualified from a task he's otherwise smashed.

Grappling With My Life

• Alex's opening banter bit, in which he claims to be living dangerously and then opens up a literal can of worms, is once again disparaged by Greg for not having a punchline...
  Greg: Everyone was in a great mood and really looking forward to it, and now look at this. I mean...
  Alex: Well that's what happens when you open a...
  (laughter and applause for Alex's joke)
  Greg: (begrudgingly) You've got a round of applause in quite a manipulative way there.
• The prize task is the most glorious thing that sounds like 'Greg Davies' when you mumble it:
  • Entries range from sounding quite close (John's entry of 'Grieg's diaries') to nowhere near whatsoever (Nick's entry of eggs Benedict).
  • Before presenting her prize, Sophie claims to have met Greg's aunt and uncle, Pam and Willy, with Pam having been Miss Wem 1962. Greg then says he doesn't have an aunt and uncle called Pam and Willy, revealing Sophie was just randomly bullshitting.
• The task to do the most risky thing with an egg without cracking its shell.
  • John initially wonders if he could swallow the egg whole and have it come out the other side without cracking. Joanne then makes a comment about putting the egg inside her that Greg interprets as a similar idea, only for Joanne to clarify:
    Joanne: I wasn't gonna defecate, I was gonna add it to the rest of my eggs for safety.
    John: ...I was gonna defecate it out.
  • Nick decides to hard-boil his egg beforehand to make its shell stronger; a reasonable idea, until it turns out his plan is to throw bricks close to his egg, which (as Greg points out) boiling the egg is hardly going to help defend against whatsoever. (As proven when Nick does break his egg.)
  • After Nick's attempt, a bird steals part of his broken eggshell, which he notes is unsettlingly cannibalistic.
  • Joanne's utterly pathetic attempt, involving lightly tossing the egg wrapped in bubblewrap between her and Alex.
  • John's story about an egg-wife taking him out for a drive in the car, swerving to avoid hitting her egg-husband riding a cow, and crashing into a brick wall.
  • Steve's attempt, set in the mining town of 'Yolkstone', in which he drags a Victorian carriage carrying an egg through several hazards, clearly having a lot of fun. After completing the course he then inadvertently knocks the carriage and breaks the egg, but tries unsuccessfully to cover it up by claiming the egg is just 'very sweaty'. When Greg sees through this and points out that the egg did, in fact, break, Steve's (ultimately unsuccessful) defense is:
    Steve: Oh, you mean after the task was completed?
  • Sophie trying and failing to balance the egg on her head. Greg, mimicking her thick Bolton accent, says a lot of the actual risk in the attempt came from Sophie just saying 'riskeh'.
• In the painting team task, the contestants can only say two words at a time. The team of two's first words to each other after starting are just 'Hi Nick!' 'Hi Steve!'
  • The two words thing leads to some other amusing exchanges, in particular Joanne McNally discussing her Wikipedia article length:
    Joanne: Mine's longer. Wrote myself.
  • Nick and Steve deciding oddly swiftly to draw a giraffe, lying down, giving birth. Unfortunately it turns out that Nick drew portrait pictures and Steve drew landscape pictures so their sequence of drawings is completely jumbled.
  • Sophie's complete failure to understand any part of this task, while her two teammates press on. Her utter bewilderment is hilarious.
    Sophie: What the fuck?
  • Despite their team having decided to paint a dog driving a car, and Joanne and John desperately trying to get her to paint the front part of the car, Sophie just ends up ignoring them and drawing pictures of dancing animals instead.
• The image of Gary the Gorilla lurking among the rushes in the third task.
  • It's made quite clear before her attempt is shown that Sophie has made an utter mess of this task.
    Alex: We're now going to see Joanne, John, and Steve. Not you Sophie, you know what you've done.
  • Her first attempt to hoop-la Gary sees the hoop fly wildly off course and end up somehow hooking the branch of a nearby tree.
  • Her other attempts all fail as well, and eventually Sophie decides to just get in the river and hoop Gary up close. Now, this task has a time penalty for whenever one of your limbs get wet, so she tries initially to just get one limb wet, somehow believing she could hop on one leg across the whole river. This fails.
  • While pursuing Gary down the river, Sophie then manages to get stuck in a patch of quicksand and ends up flailing for her life (and getting both her arms wet as well) as she gets dragged into the water, which is both hilarious and genuinely quite scary. What adds to it, as Sophie points out in the studio, is that Alex made no effort to help Sophie whatsoever as she was struggling, which Greg takes as more evidence of Alex secretly being much crueller than he lets on.
• This line from Alex going into the final part of the show:
  Alex: Hello to you all, including anyone watching from prison.
• The live task, which involves drawing on a picture of a sausage:
  • Nick, going with the vampiric theme, adds Dracula fangs to his sausage. Unfortunately the first task was to make the sausage look human, meaning he is the first eliminated.
  • John, having drawn lipstick around his sausage to make it look human and then reinterpreted it as blood to make it look scary, struggles with the third requirement to make it look sporty, and ends up telling a baffling story about a Team GB cyclist cycling so fast he's got gum disease.
  • Steve draws a sausage girl going to a music festival "hoping to hear some bangers."
• Steve completing the tiebreaker (to find the chess piece missing from a chest of peas) in thirteen seconds by out-thinking the game and finding the missing chess piece on the mantelpiece behind him. Even better is Joanne predicting Steve would ace this one in her attempt.

Jumungo

• Greg tells Alex to introduce the prize task and Alex says 'You got it, poppet'. Greg voices his strong displeasure for being called 'poppet', then goes to Steve for the first entry:
  Greg: How are you Steve?
  Steve: I'm very well, thank you, poppet!
  • Even better, Sophie then also refers to him as poppet while presenting her prize.
• The prize task is the most fun thing to turn upside down.
  • The moment Steve mentions 'calculator', Greg knows immediately it'll be the traditional lewd Calculator Spelling.
    Greg: And I approve this message.
  • Steve goes above and beyond, however, by composing a full haiku in upside-down calculator digits:
    Big boss gobbles eggs
    His hole oozes shizzle, gosh
    Beige blobs soil his shoes
  • Sophie explaining her prize, a steak pudding, in more depth than she needs to.
    Greg: Can you ask Sophie if she thinks I don't know what a pie is?
  • John's entry, pointing out that if you turn the Chicago Bulls logo upside down it looks like a robot fucking a crab. Steve suggests that the robot might've caught "a nasty case of humans."
  • Joanne's entry of bats, who turned right-side-up when sleeping looks like 'a goth disco'. Alex shows a clip and she is absolutely right.
• Patatas the cat returns in the first task and must be rescued:
  • Joanne's attempt. She begins by fashioning a rope to pull Patatas out with, but chooses to describe it as a noose for his neck; she then sits atop a stepladder, but falls through the side without the rungs, causing Alex to ask if she's ever used a ladder before. After failing to throw Patatas through the hole in the roof of the dome, she ends up grabbing a leafblower to somehow try and blow Patatas out of the dome.
  • Alex reveals Joanne's time was 22 minutes 20 seconds, and the audience claps... only for Alex to tell them to save their applause, as that was actually a terrible time and Steve (shown alongside Joanne) did it in 2mins 19.
  • This line from Nick's attempt will appeal to fans of No More Jockeys:
    Nick: Now if I was taller...
    Alex: Big if.
  • Nick saving Patatas, but then flinging him onto the house roof with very little regard for him.
  • Alex talking about Sophie's attempt, which has gone rather badly:
    Alex: Sophie took ten minutes...
    Sophie: (surprised) Ah!
    Alex: ...to spot Patatas.
  • John smashes the task by discovering the trick, realising the boxing glove on the stick they've been given is actually concealing a grabber hand. When it goes back to the studio, John reveals he's been sitting there about to have a heart attack throughout, as he is absolutely terrified he might have accidentally lifted Patatas through the wrong hole. He hasn't, but Greg says they will have to disqualify him anyway, sending John into shock and despair... only for Greg to reveal he's only messing with John.
    • And yet it still turns out not perfect for John, as Alex points out he actually wasted a lot of time before working out the grabber trick and ended up taking longer than Steve, scoring just four points.
• Alex's green-screen floating head trick in the team task, especially considering all the contestants act like they are genuinely seeing a floating head.
  • Steve and Nick's green-screen video, in which Steve sits alone in the room and repeatedly murmurs 'Pancakes' while a pancake makes itself in the kitchen. It's initially a little underwhelming, but quickly becomes hilarious when Steve asks the invisible pancake-maker if he wants any, and Nick's mouth suddenly appears out of thin air like a creepy wormhole.
  • The team of three's attempt, on the other hand, is ridiculous. It begins with Sophie sitting alone saying 'It's very dull being a Tudor queen', only for a lizard to land on her shoulder and say 'Lick me, I'm magic!'
    • Random objects then start floating past Sophie, and eventually she decides to start flying. Unfortunately, said flying involves her jumping onto John's back, which - as we see in behind-the-scenes flashes - is not a particularly smooth process.
    • Greg points out the incongruity of Sophie's 'Tudor queen' saying 'Bloody Nora, I'm flyin'!'
    • John objecting to Greg's charge that the objects that flew past Sophie were completely irrelevant and random:
      John: We've got two different peppers, the red and the yellow pepper, to represent heat and... the Sun. And the armless mannequin, which represents...
      Joanne: Toxic masculinity.
• The adhesive task, to stick the heaviest thing to a whiteboard:
  • Steve, choosing his object, holds two objects in his hand, and mutters 'I don't know which is heavier'. Alex then points out there has been an electric scales on the table in front of him this whole time.
  • Nick tries to stick a water bottle to the whiteboard by putting his sock on it and Velcro-ing it, but it doesn't work. He then just gives up on the bottle and goes for just his sock instead, covering it in sticky adhesives and ruining it, and even that doesn't work. Greg calls it another example of a contestant having a full breakdown during a task.
  • Sophie cleverly grabs a decorative star from the hallway, reasoning that she can use its hanger to keep it tethered to the board... only to accidentally rip said hanger off as she talks about this. (Fortunately she does eventually manage to reattach it and win the task.)
  • John, after failing to blu-tack a chopping board to the whiteboard, tries to add a second adhesive, a mixture of flour and honey. What's particularly entertaining here is his complete confidence in the flour-honey mixture as he's making it, even remarking that there'll be engineers watching who'll think he's completely smashed this... until he actually applies the flour-honey mixture to the board and realises it's total crap.
• Everyone's disembodied heads in the live task.
  • Some of Joanne's guesses are amusing - notably 'Batman Bigman'^note Batman Begins and the titular 'Jumungo'^note Jumanji.

Some Impropriety?

• The prize task is the best thing for a person meant for an animal.
  • John introduces his prize as a chair made for an elephant's back. It takes Greg some time to realise that he means a chair for sitting on top of an elephant, not a chair for an elephant with a bad back to sit on.
  • Joanne brings in a trough, which she thinks will be the next big thing to come back.
    Joanne: You know these lads! They love making their own ham... they're all going back to the land with their moustaches and eating off the ham hock and all, I think this is next.
    (Greg corpses)
  • Greg has been singularly unimpressed with most of the entries so far:
    Sophie: I've gone in a different direction.
    Greg: Thank God.
  • It turns out that Sophie's prize task, however, is a cat feeder, to give Greg 'structure' in his diet, which Greg immediately takes as a jab at him being fat. Sophie admits she was worried it was fat-shaming, but the production crew told her 'no, it's fine, he needs to hear it'.
• The task to work out who is following you. Particularly the fact that what is following the contestants is an inflatable Mr Blobby toy mounted on a motorised golf cart.
  • The contestants get names of animals as the answers to their questions - mammals as 'agree', birds as 'disagree', and amphibians as 'don't know'. This completely foxes Joanne, who admits she has no idea what an amphibian is. It's especially hilarious when Joanne correctly gets Mr Blobby, and is given the answer of 'donkey', but this fails to register (indeed, she initially suggests out loud that a donkey is an amphibian), and she doesn't even realise she's completed the task for a while.
  • One of Joanne's questions is 'can I get inside you?' - which since Mr Blobby is a costume, of course gets an affirmative answer.
  • Nick trying to work out Mr Blobby's identity from the time he appears on the TV schedules.
  • Sophie assumes that the production team will have sourced someone she knows personally to follow her, and asks questions accordingly - such as whether she and the person following her have been drunk together. In the studio, she explains that she thought the person behind her might have been her friend Amy.
• The contestants are asked to look after a baby - really a canister of water. Whoever spills the least baby while completing a number of chores gets the five points.
  • Most of the contestants end up using the 'baby' to wipe down Greg's shoes.
  • Joanne almost immediately spills some water out of her 'baby' at the beginning of the task, with the justification that she knows she's going to spill some eventually so she might as well get it over with.
  • A great quote from Joanne's attempt, when she notices Alex just hanging around outside the caravan while she does the dishes inside:
    Joanne: Daddy Horne hanging round outside doing fuck all.
  • Needing to hang up laundry, Steve constructs a washing line using Alex as one of the poles. What sells it is Alex's contemptuous facial expression when he realises he's stuck there.
  • Once again, John absolutely smashes the task (finding a wording loophole that means he isn't required to carry the baby around with him), and once again, he is clearly dreading getting somehow disqualified. He notes with terror a palpable silence after Alex says his time, anticipating a 'but'; a feeling that only gets worse when Alex asks Greg 'How long do you want to let him enjoy it?' and Greg lets John sit there in excruciating trepidation for ten seconds... before once again revealing that all is fine and John hasn't broken any rules, they were just messing with him again.
• The contestants enter the living room, where Alex is standing ominously next the table and refuses to speak to them. Hilariously, every single one of them has a different response to the situation:
  • Joanne just has a lengthy awkward silence as they stare at each other.
  • Nick vocally dreads what's about to happen.
  • Sophie worries that she's somehow wandered into the wrong room.
  • Steve starts treating Alex in an almost childlike way, asking softly 'Have you seen something bad? Have you had an accident?'
  • John just gives Alex a big hug.
• The actual task is to 'create tension', and again everyone does something funny:
  • Sophie decides that, since tension is the anticipation of something bad about to happen, she's going to balance on a chair on one leg with a cup on her head. She then inexplicably starts hissing like a snake. Greg calls it utterly pathetic.
    • Even better is when Sophie thinks Greg doesn't find it tense simply because he's tall, so she gives a live demonstration where Greg is sitting down beneath her chair. Greg still has the same response.
  • John creating literal tension by tying himself and Alex together. This leads to a maddening conversation where Greg asks how much tension John applied and Alex describes it as the same as 'a small monkey swinging on a tree'.
    John: (angrily) HOW HEAVY IS THE MONKEY?
  • Nick balances four eggs on rolls of paper above glasses, and tries to knock all four rolls out the way so each egg lands in a glass. He misses all four eggs, and then to top it off tries to whip away the tablecloth underneath them all and completely bungles that as well.
  • Steve and Alex's incredibly tense hangman duel.
  • The five points deservingly go to Joanne, though, who immediately takes the 'sexual tension' route, sitting on Alex's lap and caressing his face.
    • While she's doing this, she makes this hilariously disconcerting remark:
      Joanne: Ohhh... it's like my father's alive again. It's his anniversary today, been dead 21 years. ...You smell like him.
    • The moment Alex blows his whistle, Joanne gets off Alex and beelines the door, saying 'Never look at me again.'
• The live task, to land pop-up monster toys in containers on your body:
  • Sophie knocking over the pedestal in front of her on her first attempt at launching a toy.
  • Alex has Greg adjudicate some contentious points after the task has complete. In particular he mentions one where he sounds uncertain as to whether Steve's final monster was before or after the whistle. We then see the VT... and Steve's monster was incredibly obviously after the whistle (Greg calls it 'about three years').

Apropos of Apoppo

• The prize task is best thing for a granny.
  • Nick brings a good luck potion.
    Nick: Cause it feels like, when you're on the cusp, you'll need all the luck you can get.
    Alex: Hello to all the grannies watching!
  • Greg's frustration that Joanne and Sophie's prizes, a grille and a form-fitting onesie respectively, both do not fit his idea of a kind, sweet granny, and instead envision her as what he calls 'a blinged-up sex maniac'.
  • Sophie suggests her granny might do a slut drop in her onesie. It turns out Alex doesn't know what a slut drop is, so Sophie demonstrates in the studio, at some length.
  • Steve brings in what Greg thinks is the sweetest prize, a birthday card he made for his granny when he was eight, with a poem inside... and then he reveals he's also brought another card he made when he was thirteen, which has a risqué image on the front and contains the message 'Beware, Alice is an erotic sex object (ask Arthur)' in newspaper cuttings.
• The gloves task:
  • The task stipulates you can only interact with the gloves by shaking their hands, but Joanne immediately begins intensely fondling and sniffing them, explaining it away as 'an Irish greeting'.
  • This line from Joanne, when feeling the glove that has an actual human hand in it:
    Joanne: Eurgh, if that was a human hand I'd assume it was contagious. ...Herpes.
    • Even better, her guess of 'herpes' still allows her to solve the acrostic part of the task as it begins with the same letter H as 'hand'.
  • While Joanne is doing the acrostic part of the task, it turns out she doesn't actually know Alex's surname.
    Joanne: Is this you trying to teach me your surname?
    Alex: What's my surname, Joanne?
    Joanne: ...Taskmaster.
  • Steve coming up with themed names for all of his guesses, such as 'Tom A'Tosoup'.
  • Nick finds the glove containing rum, which starts leaking, and he says 'I think the glove's doing a wee on me'. He then almost immediately attempts to drink it.
  • When John, who is teetotal, discovers that the 'R' glove stood for 'Rum':
    John: I'm slightly concerned that my R stood for 'Relapse'.^note Don't worry, Alex confirmed the glove was filled with non-alcoholic rum.
• Steve imitating an angry farmer in the intro to this episode's location task:
  Steve: GET OFF MY LAND!
  • The task is to create a dot-to-dot picture. Being the two older men on the panel, Greg and Steve start reminiscing about dot-to-dot puzzles. Steve pictures the scene: 'sitting next to granny, doing the dot to dots... drinking the potion...'.
    • This is funny enough on its own, but what makes it particularly amusing is Greg seemingly not noticing Steve's Call-Back and just moving straight on with the show... while Alex very clearly has noticed, and makes a truly remarkable WTF face.
  • There is much discussion of the wild horses that were roaming the area while the contestants were completing this task. The crowning moment comes when Alex claims the horses - which were there for all five contestants - were not meant to be part of it:
    Alex: We were very worried, we didn't know they were going to be there.
    John: Considering the number of health and safety discussions I've had over the course of this series... not one mention of the fact I was doing an enormous dot-to-dot around wild horses.
    Alex: Mmm. And there were land mines.
  • Steve stepping in a horse poo as he leaves the task.
  • In one particularly amusing shot during the montage, the camera flies over the field to reveal that all Nick has done is a very very long line.
  • Sure enough, when Nick's drawing gets shown in the studio, he has basically just done a very long line. Guesses for what Nick might have been trying to depict range from 'a balloon' to 'an oboe', with Greg pointing out the scope of guesses clearly doesn't bode well for whatever it turns out to be.
    Nick: When I tell you, you'll be kicking yourself.
    Greg: Go on.
    Nick: It's a very happy snake.
  • Joanne's reaction to seeing her dot-to-dot for the first time is 'it's not that bad!'. Unfortunately for her, it turns out her drawing is that bad, as Greg thinks it is either an anchor or the Fallopian tubes, when it is actually 'one of those moustaches, like the lads on the penny-farthings have'.
    • Joanne does little to dispel Greg's Fallopian guess when she describes the skin under the moustache as 'the labial folds'. She's absolutely right, but it doesn't stop her drawing from being interpreted as a 'vaginal moustache'.
  • As he finishes his dot-to-dot, Steve tells Alex that he hopes there'll be a red dot in the bottom corner of it by the time it's shown in the studio. His picture is revealed to be a copy of the Mona Lisa, signed and in a frame, with a sticker in the bottom corner... which the production team have coloured in ''yellow', which, Alex explains, means that the picture hasn't been sold but an offer has been made.
• Steve and Nick in the puzzle task initially think they've solved it when they fix the clock in the lounge to a particular time.
  Steve: Stop the clock?
  Alex: Well, you have stopped the clock.
• The sheer chaos of the toilet paper live task. Particularly when John puts his hands up to serve his ten-second penalty for breaking his loo roll, and Alex initially mistakes it for John celebrating victory in the task.

Snooker Cue Umbrella Chin

• The prize task is most extraordinary picture.
  • Nick's entry, a sign outside a church whose relative text sizes make it appear to be shouting random words - as Nick demonstrates:
    Nick: St Anne's Church home made cream TEAS 3pm TILL 5pm SUNDAY!
  • Joanne's absurd entry.
    • Before she shows it, she claims her picture is an experience:
      Greg: OK, I'm gonna turn away, and then I'm gonna experience it.
      Joanne: No you have to look at it to experience it.
    • It turns out to be a picture of Che Guevara on a balloon.
      Joanne: I thought it was important to raise awareness of Che on a balloon.
    • She then promises that if she wins the task, she will donate her fee to the Cuban revolution.
    • Greg asks Joanne what the message she's trying to send with her picture is. While Joanne fumbles for an answer, an audience member yells out 'Inflation!'
• The first task of the episode begins 'when Alex interrupts you'. For most of the contestants, this works fine, but Alex accidentally misses his chance to interrupt John, who, with a hilariously devilish silent smile, then refuses to say anything else so he can't be interrupted. Alex thus decides he must 'interrupt John physically', and chases him across the house garden.
  • Steve's sense of childlike wonder in this task when he discovers the caravan has a secret room.
  • Tasked to bear the most impressive load, Steve finds a stuffed white tiger which he puts around his neck, and then adds to the image by stacking several (fake) people on top of one another as if they were all riding the tiger. Unfortunately it's a very windy day, so one of the rider's heads falls off, and the picture of him bearing the load has all the people toppling over to the side.
  • John also has a great visual image - in his case the 'Gutter of Gregs', a long pipe across his shoulders filled with Greg portraits, with a Greg cardboard cutout astride his neck.
• For the second time in the episode Alex makes a mistake in his clever task setup. In this one the task is suspended from thin string above a hairdryer to make it look like the hairdryer is keeping the task in mid-air; when the contestants turn the hairdryer off, Alex makes the task drop. Unfortunately, he does it too early while Steve is doing it, ruining the illusion.
  • The task is to do the best thing in mid-air. In the studio, the contestants all see how high they can jump, with Nick clearly being the best jumper. Makes it all the more ironic when we see Nick's actual attempt, in which he isn't in mid-air at all, instead having inexplicably jammed himself in a stack of tyres and got Alex to roll him towards some cans. Alex comments that it's almost like Nick was doing a completely different task.
  • The other entries are all pretty good too:
    • Joanne is a bride who's been stabbed in the head on her wedding day. When Greg notices the bride has an eyepatch, Joanne explains it away as the bride having had laser-eye surgery on her way to the wedding.
    • Steve playing a skydiver with a failed parachute, including putting rubber bands on his face to simulate G forces.
    • John constructing an elaborate scene involving fire in a bucket to make it look like he's being shot out of a cannon.
      Sophie: You really want this, don't you.
    • Sophie, however, takes the five points for her genuinely insane photo, taken of her bouncing up and down on a trampoline in a tutu while pouring milk from a teapot onto Alex wearing a pigeon mask.
• From the task to use ties to tie yourself to a bed:
  • Joanne describing the task's energy as like 'a low-end brothel'.
  • Also, Joanne leaving the task by walking out the door still tied to the bed.
  • This from Sophie:
    Sophie: I'm just gonna strategise here first.
    Alex: How long are you gonna strategise for?
    Sophie: Just a second.
    (she lies completely motionless for several moments)
    Sophie: Done.
  • Sophie worming her way out of the lab to ensure she remains horizontal at all times.
  • Steve jams the mechanical tie rack so the ties keep falling onto him.
    Steve: I can't keep up with the number of ties the tie gods are giving me! It's a whole tie-rade.
  • Nick's amazing disaster attempt. He initially seems to be doing fairly well, but then inexplicably flips himself over while still tied to the bed, and ends up trying to crawl out of the lab while underneath the bed. He can only be described as looking like a sort of large struggling insect. What tops it off is this quote from Nick, while stuck under the bed in the doorway
    Nick: (sounding genuinely broken and distressed) I don't think I've done this one right.
    • In the studio, Nick is at a total loss to explain why he flipped at all.
• The little versions of the contestants used for the parking live task. Even better when Alex reveals that when they are eliminated the little contestants have to be taken away to sit on the elimination bench, and Sophie refuses to give hers up.
  Alex: I must take Small Sophie away from you.
  Sophie: No you can't!
  • In the third round, John chooses a horse and manages to park it very carefully. Steve also chose the horse:
    Steve: John, any advice on the horse?
    John: Just whack it right off the end.