Emma becomes increasingly frustrated with Alex

Emma is the only contestant who chooses to run to the centre of the barrels from the starting line, when Alex blows his whistle.

When Alex asks her how far she thinks she just walked, she estimates 50 yards. When he asks her how she is, she simply responds “Well”. When Alex asks her how she’d slept the previous night, she responds “I wore socks. Middle of the night, I had to take them off, so that disrupted it a tiny bit”. When Alex asks her if she’d had any peculiar dreams, she responds that she’d dreamt about “some admin stuff”.

After she’s read the task brief, Emma realises that she’s made life hard for herself by going so quickly, and Alex informs her that she has just 2 minutes and 30 seconds to complete the task.

In the studio, when Greg asks Emma about her taking her socks off in the middle of the night, she shares with him that “Women are much likelier to orgasm if their feet are kept warm”. Alex responds by stating “This is new territory”, while Greg takes his glasses off and says “I don’t know what the hell’s going on”. Alex then observes that Emma had chosen to take her socks off during the night.

Aware of how little time she has to complete the task, Emma panics and tries to rush through the task, getting increasingly frustrated at how slowly she perceives Alex to be reacting. Alex does appear to be intentionally leaning into this, though, as he even takes the time to inform her of the correct answers to his ‘true’ or ‘false’ questions, when she gets them wrong (which he isn’t shown doing with anyone else).

She begins by throwing a 1 with the die before having even read the instructions, and moves onto barrel 2. She incorrectly answers Alex’s question about whether humans have the same number of neck bones as giraffes with “False” and, assuming that she’s correct, tries to move on to barrel 3, before Alex corrects her. She then rushes back to barrel 1, having forgotten that she has two chances to succeed at each mini-task, and Alex has to remind her that he can ask her a second question. Returning to barrel 2, she then incorrectly answers Alex’s question about whether all the electricity powering the internet weighs the same as a school bus by saying “True”, and so she does, this time, having to return to barrel 1.

Emma throws a 3 with the die, and moves on to barrel 2 again. This time, she correctly answers Alex’s question about whether one in 15 people has a third nipple by saying “False”, and moves on to barrel 3. She then draws the top card from the deck of playing cards and it turns out to be red, so she immediately moves on to barrel 4.

She has read the instructions for barrel 4 and made her guess before Alex even has a chance to grab his whistle, but correctly guesses that it’s in his right hand, so moves on to barrel 5. Instead of turning the handle on the bingo machine, she struggles to extract a ball manually, and manages to get ball number 18 to drop out of the bottom, so moves on to barrel 6.

Emma manages to eat a chocolate-covered coffee bean on her second attempt, so moves on to barrel 7. However, she then fails to toss a head with the coin twice, so has to return all the way back to barrel 1.

Emma rolls a 3 with the die, and moves on to barrel 2, where she rushes Alex to ask her a question. When he informs her that she has 45 seconds remaining, she annoyedly tells him “I don’t care!”. She then incorrectly answers Alex’s question about whether Wayne Rooney’s middle name is ‘Paul’ by saying “True”, and almost returns to barrel 1 again before realising she has another chance, and hurriedly prompting Alex to ask her another. She then incorrectly answers “False” to Alex’s question about whether the high-five was invented in 1977, and has to return once more to barrel 1, while complaining that the answer cannot be true.

Emma rolls a 3 with the die again, and moves on to barrel 2 once more, where she correctly answers “True” to Alex’s question about whether the letter ‘J’ was the last one added to the alphabet. Moving swiftly on to barrel 3, she pulls the top two cards from the deck of playing cards, and the second is red, so she moves on immediately to barrel 4. Again, Alex is unprepared with his whistle, as Emma yells her guess at him that it’s in his right hand, but he turns out to be holding it in his left hand. Emma moves as if to return to barrel 1 again, before Alex reminds her that she has another chance to guess. Again, she guesses that the whistle is in his right hand, and again she proves to be wrong, so she has to return to barrel 1 once more.

With just 10 seconds remaining, Emma throws a 1 with the die, and moves on to barrel 2. She then incorrectly answers “True” to Alex’s question about whether lobsters are biologically immortal, before correctly answering “True” to his question about whether Australia is wider than the moon. She just manages to move to barrel 3 as Alex blows his whistle.

In the studio, Greg states that it was “Fascinating that Emma was patently shit at that task, but had the demeanour of someone who was excellent throughout”, and was speaking to Alex “as if you were getting in the way of her genius”. When Emma attempts to argue that she was “in a playful mood”, Greg questions “Was that playful?”, before stating “I would have sworn the socks were off up there”.

Alex confirms that Emma comes last in the task, having ended up in barrel 3, so she earns just 1 point.

(Written by Karl Craven and proofread by M3 / Andres Sanchez)

(Illustrations collected and adjusted by: David Fuller)