#1: Taskmaster New Year Treat 2023

Jan 2

I'm kicking off the new year with a new podcast starting with Taskmaster New Year Treat 2023!

See this episode’s stats and more at Taskmaster.info!

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Transcript

Welcome back to TIW Podcast!

I'm Erik and it has been a while and I decided to bring back the podcast with a little bit of a change.

The TIW no longer stands for "today I watched." No, instead it is Taskmaster is Wonderful! I absolutely love Taskmaster and all of the different versions of it around the world and so this podcast I'm going to be talking about all of that.

I've been on a huge Taskmaster Marathon over several weeks I've been really watching and listening to the official podcast and I thought that you know what? It's a it's a new year and we also got a new year treat with the first episode of 2023: the Taskmaster New Year Treat! Thought I'd start things off with that, what a great way start off the new year.

Our contestants were Amelia Demoldenberg, I believe she's a YouTuber. Carol Vorderman who is best known for Countdown. Greg James, a radio host, does a bunch of other stuff I'm sure. Mo Farah, Sir Mo Farah, Olympian. And Self-Esteem AKA Rebecca Lucy Taylor who is a musician.

And oh man I loved this episode. I didn't know any of these people going into it. I would have liked one of the tasks to be a little bit more straightforward. All three of them were kind of tricky, but that's okay.

Prize Task

We opened with the prize task which was the thing which Greg would be most surprised that you own.

Of course sir Moe's hair dryer, since he's completely bald, shaved bald, that absolutely deserved the five points.

Second place was Carol's camper van and that actually got me back to watching this one show on Discovery. I can't even remember, I think it's called Van Gogh and this guy his company built out that the interiors of a vans for camping and for tiny living and all that. It's a pretty interesting show. But yeah I'd say that's pretty surprising just for my first impressions of Carol.

And then a third place and three points went to Amelia. Her item was a coffin for a fly. They didn't explore this but I was wondering is the fly in the coffin? Has it been emptied? In which case it didn't get really used for its purpose to its very end.

Fourth place and two points went to Rebecca who modelled an ashtray of herself in a very low-filled bath.

And in last place was Greg James who brought in, I'd say it's a surprising image, but it's not surprising that he owns it because it was given to him as a gift when he joined the BBC. It is an image of Jonathan Ross and another host, I forget his name, depicted as Mary and Jesus. BABY Jesus. It's kind of a frightening image and very funny. But as for his ownership of it, and the story behind it, I'd say not very surprising so that makes a lot of sense.

Mo is off to an incredibly good start and I'd say this really keeps him at the top of the ranks the entire episode.

Comparison to Previous New Year Treats

We have three taped tasks, and like I said I would have preferred for one of these to be a little bit less tricky than it was. I just recently watched the other two New Year Treats and the put the egg in the egg cup in the most daring way I thought was a nice straightforward and open-ended thing that it let everybody be creative if they wanted to, or athletic if they wanted to, that kind of thing.

And then very first New Year Treat, the get the biggest thing through the donut without breaking the donut I thought had a lot of different possibilities and had some room for taking different approaches.

And then also the sculpt the scene on the other side of this wall, that was maybe more purely a creative thing.

I guess this is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum because you also had build the lightest tower, so there wasn't really a sort of physical feat sort of thing in the first New Year Treat.

I feel like the second New Year Treat had the best kind of balance of different types of tasks, whereas this year's, the 2023 Edition, was very much just tricky, lots of rules, lots of things to keep track of and that that sort of thing.

The carp pellets is a lot more straightforward than the other two but we'll get to that in a second.

Filmed Task #1

We had count all the dots on this card. You may not touch or mark the card. You must answer the door and obey the instructions every time the doorbell rings.

So Greg James did the best that it at this because he's the only one who answered the phone, and the phone was ringing while very loud music was playing right after one of the instructions they received was to only yell until the next time the doorbell rings. This one was a whole lot of stuff going on to distract from the primary goal of counting all the dots on this card.

Carol got very, very close with a more conventional approach. She did not take advantage of answering that phone. She got second place. Greg James, because he answered the phone, even though he mixed up the, luckily was the last two digits, so he wasn't off by that much. He's off by like 18. So he still got the 5 points luckily. It's always a shame when somebody finds the trick and then really messes it up and doesn't win the task, but luckily he only messed it up that little bit.

It was just a lot that you had had to leave the room to go answer the door every time the doorbell rung. They had to put on weird goggles, and then the mat got flipped over, the card thing was flipped over so there were dots on both sides.

This one was pretty fun and I'm glad that one person did find that shortcut. Otherwise I think it maybe wouldn't have been as exciting, because there isn't isn't really a lot of wiggle room for variation other than stuff like just getting distracted too much by the things. This one kept everybody on a very similar path the entire time.

Filmed Task #2

The next one, okay this one did have that room for creativity, but it had so many other limitations. I think the only trick to this would have been to notice things around the room before getting into position, because you're not allowed to remove your face from in the massage chair... okay let's read the exact instructions.

Recreate the picture that Alex is holding. Your face must not move from this position. Alex will show you the picture for 5 seconds when you finish reading the task and then for a further three seconds every time you land a ball in the bucket.

I thought everybody did as well as they could, but nothing really turned out very well. Greg James did the best at throwing the balls into the bucket. I think Mo would have done better if he didn't get so distracted by the massage aspect of it, especially the head massager thing.

All of the the the pictures were pretty bad. This one was kind of similar to sculpting the what was on the other side of the wall. Really it's more of a memory thing and then a physical limitation, which most of them got around that part of it pretty quickly. Using the mirror was kind of a misdirection once everybody is able to actually get a hold of the canvas to just hold it beneath their faces so that they could see it and paint directly. I'm not sure if I would have realized that. I would have been all in on using the mirror.

As it was unfolding I was thinking about okay, if I use the mirror to look at it like this way it would actually be easier than like doing it from the side or that kind of thing because it's if you look at a mirror that's held like below you at something in front of you it gets flipped upside down. Left-to-right is still the same but top-to-bottom is flipped, so that might be easier to paint something than the other way but the actual hack is I'll just grab the canvas and look at it directly.

That was pretty fun. The results were appalling. None of it looked any good.

Carol's was... at least the others were recognizable as a house. Maybe none of the actual items around the house were recognizable in any of them, but at least you could tell that basic aspect of the image. Carol's was just a mess of paint. It was very funny

Filmed Task #3

So moving on, the third and final taped task. Put the most carp pallets in the fishbowl. You must not bend at the waist or knees at any point. I think this one was also 10 minutes. It was interesting, that they were all very time-limited. I guess that's a good approach to it so that you know you can get all of it done in a day of filming. That part of it very smart to be able to get through knowing that you'll get through all of the tasks in one day and that the day won't be end up being super, super long.

But yeah, the carpet pellets, oh my gosh. This is so, so fun! I think I would probably have a really hard time with keeping my legs straight and not bending down. Like as soon as I spilled anything my instinctive reaction would probably be to just break all of the rules to try to catch pellets.

They had some pallets in the lab and the lounge in the in the dome and in the Caravan. Only one person, Rebecca, found on the Taskmaster statue at the back of the garden, he was holding a broom and a dustpan which is the perfect way to clean up and pick up the pellets that get spilled in all the different rooms. She only used it in the caravan. She went for... I forget what everybody else did. So the bottom three pretty much triggered all the traps. I think Amelia got pretty lucky, the one in the lounge, the trip wire didn't work, but she still got last place by quite quite a bit.

Mo was very good at getting a rounds many of the traps and he didn't lose a lot of the pellets. And then Rebecca, oh man I was so filled with joy watching her take on this task because she nailed it with the one in the dome, but she went the other, completely different direction with it, put the fish bowl on top of it and then flipped the whole thing down into it and I don't even... there is no indication that she had figured out that there was no bottom on that can. That was just the way she went at it!

From the overhead shot I don't see any pellets. It looks like it's filled to the brim and I don't see any pallets on the ground around it, so I think she must have just had an instinct. Actually, she went to the caravan first and the entire, it's just the whole mess in there. She's like okay well I'll go over to this thing and and try that now. I think she probably figured it was a trick because of that caravan booby trap. But after she nails the dome she goes and finds the the broom and dustpan. She gets a little bit of the caravan pellets back, but it's not quite enough to put her ahead of Mo. Then when she goes into the house she goes in the lab first and she... it looks so much, I forget the exact name of this emote in Fortnite, but there's a recent new emote where you just flop onto the ground and she does basically that. She does bend one of her legs when she gets down onto the floor but we hear Alex say, oh I didn't see that. So he does excuse that rule break. I think there wasn't a lot of mention of people not keeping their legs and hips straight, because I think everybody kind of bent that rule the same amount from what we saw. I think it's better to be lenient with that otherwise everybody would just been disqualified if you were going to be strict about it. So that was a good call about it.

She decides after trying to get up, get back up, she decides okay it's going to be easier if I just stay on the floor. And then she crawls to the lounge which lets her crawl underneath that trip wire and then she uses the tripwire with the best aim I think I've seen the entire show other than Joe Wilkinson's potato throw, she pulls that can off of the pedestal and it goes right into the fishbowl. It's amazing. A little bit spills out just from the impact so she spent the rest of her time picking up the rest. Oh man, that was such an amazing moment. That's my favorite moment of the episode.

There is also another moment, Rebecca did have a bit of luck that the lab pedestal fell so perfectly that the can landed upright so there's only a little bit that spilled so her trouble getting down to the ground was just so that she could grab the can.

Looking back, just going through all the footage just now, I think that the only reason Amelia didn't do better in this task, she got last place, is that she didn't go into the lab at all. That was a huge, huge amount of the carp pellets. Because otherwise she did awesome. I bet she could have have gotten at least like third, maybe second place, if she didn't miss that entire entire cache of carp pellets.

There was this time a couple years ago that a friend posted about having a pellet stove and I was so confused. I didn't know... I thought it was like a "Pelay" stove or something like that. I'm not familiar with wood stoves of any kind and it took me a little bit of research to understand what they were even talking about. Pellet is such a weird word and in a context that you haven't seen it before it gets even more confusing. So yeah I think that I would have had the same confusion at first that a lot of them did, and I definitely would have just triggered all of the booby traps.

I think I would have had the most fun on this task being one of the people setting up all the booby traps. I've never set up a pulley system type of booby trap, but I can just imagine the satisfaction of getting that last bit of the string in place as you're carefully closing the door and knowing, okay if I did this right then it's just going to make an absolute mess when they open this door. That anticipation of it I would have had so much fun.

Live Task

That that brings us to the live task. Obey Greg's instructions. You must only obey the instructions which start with "Greg says."

So this is like a hypercharged version of Simon Says. It was a very specific list of instructions because there's a very specific place where each item had to go. They had like privacy walls between them so they couldn't see what each other were doing, and then they had all these coats with specific Pockets marked on them, and then they had a table filled with all kinds of stuff like a little rocket, a sock, a pendant, few other things.

The pace of the instructions was so rapid I don't even think it was cut down for time at all. I think that was the actual pace that Greg was reading out these instructions. Because at the start of it I was thinking this isn't too bad, I think I could hang with them and do pretty well this. But very quickly it picked up, and up, and up. And I think the tricky thing is there were some instructions that he said "and" between and it wasn't necessarily clear if those were a continuation of the previous instruction which had a "Greg says" in front of it, or if it was a new instruction which would then not have a "Greg says" in front of it. It went by so fast, but I think that was unclear enough that it messed up everybody at some point because nobody did perfectly.

Amelia did the most perfect. Amelia and Sir Mo, they each got four items correct I think? Four or five items correct. And there's a tie for third place between Carol and Rebecca, and then Greg got like one or two items correct to get last place with just one point.

This was incredible the final scores, Alex did his usual thing, "Oh there isn't somebody in last place," and I got to thinking oh but that means there are multiple people in last place. Then he said there's also nobody in fourth place or third place! Four people were tied for second place with 14 points! But Sir Mo Farah got the win. 20 points, way out ahead, as a decisive victory.

Congratulations to Sir Mo Farah, really awesome... that "hello, woo!" when he got the instructions to yell was pretty great. He had a couple other moments of yelling hello and such. It look like he was having such a blast the whole time, especially with the head massager.

Final Thoughts

But yeah I love this episode despite it being really, really complicated. Every task was very complicated, but not necessarily in a bad way. The the carp pellets I think it was very, very effective for it to be that complicated with the booby traps. Although with a couple of them failing I wonder if Amelia was the first one to do it and so they had to kind of tweak to make sure that those booby traps worked better for everybody else. I don't know, I don't know!

But yeah it was so much fun. I am really looking forward to series 15 but until then there are still so many seasons of international series that I haven't seen yet. Bast i Test I think will maybe be the one I start with, or maybe Kongen Befaler. I think both of those, at least the first one or two seasons of them, are on the official Taskmaster YouTube. Once I do got all the way caught up through everything that's on the YouTube, I'm going to dive back into the Supermax subscription so I can see the Danish version. Stormester is the Danish version, and Suurmestari is the Finnish. And then of course the the New Zealand edition and upcoming is the Australian Edition.

That does it for the relaunch of TIW Podcast because Taskmaster is Wonderful. Go to TIWPodcast.com for all the ways you can subscribe and stay tuned for more. Be safe out there, and always check under the table! Bye!

Erik J Skinner