A Hampshire village, a misused bottle and a combination of books and cats feature in the second instalment of the challenge series.
This time playing for five pairs of items, such as a song from Dick and Dom and a picture of two pandas shagging, the opening task involved players Iain Stirling, Joe Thomas, Lou Sanders, Paul Sinha and Sian Gibson having to make something that looks like a moustache far away, but on closer inspection is something completely different, with host Greg Davies first guessing what the fake facial hair is made up first before Little Alex Horne revealed the truth. Davies was annoyed by Stirling using a map featuring the village of Liphook on his lip, but more impressed by Sinha’s use of caviar.
Next was a more complicated task: moving some rice from the lab into a bottle in the living room, without taking the bottle from the living room and only touching the rice using a selection of inappropriate items, such as a jar of honey and some mangos. Here, Sinha slipped up with a rule violation, while Sanders and Stirling had different ways of dispensing honey, and Gibson tried to siphon the rice with a straw. After that was the first team task of series eight, with the comedians Sinha, Stirling and Sanders taking on the actors Gibson and Thomas. The task involved trying to describe what was in a chest to their team mates with various restrictions, first using only facial expressions, then noises, then speaking adjectives and finally verbs. Interestingly, both describers (Sinha and Gibson) both making seemingly the same noises.
Following this the participants had to travel as far as possible while making a constant noise with your mouth. Here Stirling made a mistake of beat-boxing, as his technique was to say the phrase “Books and cats”, which has spaces between the words. The final live task involved eats grapes and naming a different species of bird every five seconds.
Only two episodes in and we are already seeing some early riders and trailers. Surprisingly, it is Sinha who appears to be floundering, with his general knowledge not getting him far in these lateral tasks – although his knowledge does help in out in the bird task – while Sanders is coming out strongly. She already tied with Stirling in the first episode, only losing out by two seconds in a tie-break. However, things can easily change in the weeks to come.
Taskmaster is on Dave at 21.00 on Wednesdays.
