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I was genuinely bamboozled by one of the shots in the Taskmaster C of C trailer. It was me in the Taskmaster lab, seemingly carrying out a science experiment whilst wearing a cowboy hat. I wracked my brain but could not remember anything like this happening. Not in Champion of Champions, nor in any of the other Taskmaster appearances (I suppose it might be possible that they used a bit of old footage, but it would be a weird decision). It’s such a rollercoaster of a show and so it’s easy to forget a task, but you’d usually have your memory jogged by a photo. I wore a cowboy hat in the karaoke challenge in the series, but I didn’t go in the lab in it. And I could remember the lab tasks from this episode (there are a couple of tasks that didn’t make it into the show) but none of them involved measuring a tiny amount of white powder into a test tube. And in none of them was I wearing a fucking hat.
Had Alex hypnotised of drugged me and made me make meth for him? And if he could do that then what else might he have done?
It was genuinely quite perturbing. I am getting to the age where I forget quite a lot of stuff, but to have forgotten a whole task… it felt like I’d had my memory actually wiped. Or had I done something so terrible that I’d blanked it out. I’d watched the episode when we filmed the studio back in September - surely I should remember this.
In the end I worked it out, but it was quite the journey into mental oblivion. See if you can spot it when the show is on a week on Thursday.
I watched episode 9 of the current series today and it was a very emotional journey. I really thought Bridget was going to win this series (and she still might) as she started very strong. But along with moments of utter genius, she has moments of rather surprising scatter-brainedness (says the bloke who couldn’t even remember a task he’d done) and I think the latter might just have outweighed the former. Judy is my hero from this series though. I love her relationship with Greg and her journey on this episode was genuinely heart-breaking. It’s such a tremendous show. Even I can’t mess it up entirely.
I had a lot of fun this morning interviewing Michael Fenton-Stevens for his 200th episode of Time Capsule. I was one of the early guests on this show - Michael came to my house just before lockdown - so it was an honour to be chosen to interview him for the 200th one. It’s a great format and he’s a very good host, but he turned out to be a terrific guest too. This show gets all the stories without having to resort to stupid hypothetical questions like some podcasts.
It will be out soon.
