Mathew’s really tricky back-up plan

When Alex asks Mathew what tricky things he can do, Mathew initially says that he’s thinking about escapology, but then admits that he can’t actually do that.

Mathew realises that there’s nothing preventing him from recording two commentaries for himself, so that he has a back-up, if he can’t achieve the task he describes in the first one.

For his first attempt, he attempts to achieve a run of 19 keepie-uppies with a tennis ball, on the lawn. In the commentary, he sequentially predicts that he will have hit the thresholds of 10, 20, and 30 keepie-uppies when, in reality, he is struggling to achieve more than a few in a row (apparently peaking at nine).

After Alex announces to Mathew that he is about to make his 50th attempt, Mathew states that he knows that people will say “Don’t pick something you can’t do”, but argues that the achievement actually has to be really tricky, and that he has definitely proven that. He then asks Alex “Where are the grapes?”, signalling that it’s time to revert to his back-up plan.

For his second attempt at a really tricky thing, Mathew emerges from the house with a bowl full of grapes, and then tries to throw individual grapes up into the air as high as he can, before catching them in his mouth. Although the first grape hits him on the lower lip and falls to the ground, he successfully catches the second one after throwing it as high as the house.

Mathew’s commentary becomes very enthusiastic as he succeeds in catching the grape, insisting that “That’s a really tricky thing!”, before exclaiming that it was “Iconic!”.

In the studio, when Greg questions the wisdom of Mathew setting himself a goal of 19 keepie-uppies, knowing his skill level, Mathew argues that he’d intentionally made it harder for himself by using a smaller ball, and had set himself a more challenging target (“overestimated my ability”), to make it more impressive.

Greg is genuinely impressed by Mathew’s grape-catching skills, noting how high he’d thrown it, and ultimately awards him 5 points.

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

(Illustrations collected and adjusted by: David Fuller)