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So finally the day has come. The final episode of Taskmaster and after a year of keeping all the secrets and four months since the studio records I can finally talk about it all.
There will be spoilers. Oh that photo doesn't help.
It had been another day of prepping for and then doing Twitch of Fun. I tried to take it back to its roots a bit more and keep it as fluid and improvised as possible and risked a gottle of geer to help me along. It will be interesting to see where I am with this show in a year's time. I want to up the sketch content, but not lose the central relationship between Ally and me. I think I got the balance together quite well tonight, though a few characters didn't make the cut. But the ones who appeared got a bit more time to breath and took the conversation in some directions I wasn't expecting. Who knew that Ally knew most of the words to Robbie Williams rap?
I got another beer and a big whisky to watch Taskmaster along with a few dedicated nits on Twitch. It was tense for me watching the ep again, as it seemed certain that I'd blown it with my rubbish prize task attempt (though it might have worked had everyone else not upped their game for this episode, as it was deliberately bad). It seemed to be slipping away as Daisy beat me in the spider task too and I was not three points adrift with three rounds to go. And oh no, the first of those was a team task where it was unlikely that Daisy and me would score differently.
It was nice this task came last though, as it showed the two of us working together beautifully and repaired some of the damage caused by Hippogate. Even though that actually happened afterwards. I do think the two of us should play husband and wife in a sitcom and maybe one day we will. Or maybe I should just be pleased to have escaped with my life.
Thankfully the penultimate task went well for me and less well for Daisy so we went into the final task with me trailing my one point. But I'd sort of already accepted that I was not going to win - remember the Tarot lady had said I wouldn't win, but I would be happy with the result. And I did feel happy. I had had such fun on this show and I said to Daisy as we got up on stage that I was going to try and win but I would still be happy if she beat me. She said, "Well I won't." She did really want this. And that's what made the contest such fun. I really love her though and would have been pleased for her and probably only crushed last thing at night when I thought how close I had come and would wish I'd worked harder on the prize tasks.
I could not fail in this very tricky last task of making a spaghetti bridge between two coconuts that could hold some ring biscuits or polos. I was the only one who plumped for polos. I thought two bits of spaghetti should be strong enough, but also not as difficult to thread as any more. Greg told me afterwards that he thought I'd fucked it with that decision.
It was very tense indeed and I needed a safecracker's steady hands (the mittens did not help) to get the polos on. In all likelihood a mistake would be made and my challenge would be over.
But it turned out that the spaghetti was strong enough and I finished first. Daisy coming second would still be enough to tie the final scores....
I can't really remember what happened then. Sorry.
Amazingly I'd done enough. I was still anticipating Alex gleefully telling me I'd fucked something up and we had to go through the anti-climax of an episode tie breaker which I won (I won five of the eps and lost another on a tiebreak) and then I was crowned. As I said on the Taskmaster podcast (which we recorded on Monday) Daisy has her burgeoning amazing career to comfort her, whilst this is the apex of my entire life.
It makes up for the narrow defeat in Mastermind and I wouldn't even care if this was the last thing I ever did on telly now. It's really unbeatable. But next year we're doing a champion of champions, so I get to do it again (I think it's only two episodes, but that's less stressful and I can work harder on my prizes next time).
What a wonderful ride it has been. It definitely was a shaft of light through the dark shit that has engulfed this year, but so much of that is down not just to the genius of Alex and the charming offensiveness of Greg, but the fantastic team behind the scenes who were both tight-knit and welcoming. Absolutely delighted just to be a part of it, so being able to take a trophy home was insane.
This and Tipping Point? Am I losing the one defining piece of character that I have as a comedian?
I went to bed a bit drunk and read through all the tweets (which were mainly positive) before my wife came home.
I asked her if she'd like to make love with the Greg head watching us. She didn't seem keen. On either bit.
So as a compromise I had a wank in a bush. Greg loved it.
