Deborah has “V word” issues

Deborah’s strategy is to cram as much poppadom into her mouth at a time as she can, so that she can eat more of them without having to eliminate too many letters.

She manages to cram at least one whole poppadom into her mouth, assuring Alex that she has not yet swallowed any, before nominating her first letter for disposal.

She disposes of the least commonly used letters first, starting with ‘Z’, before stating that Greg is a “lovely man”.

She then starts cramming most of another entire poppadom into her mouth, before disposing of the letter ‘V’ and stating that Alex is meaner than she’d thought.

She then attempts to crumble up the large piece of poppadom she is holding, to make it easier to stuff into her mouth. While chewing her handful of poppadom, she describes it as “lovely”, and thus incurs her first penalty for using a ‘V’. When Alex points this out to her, she accidentally repeats the word again, and so incurs a second penalty.

She subsequently eliminates the letter ‘Q’ before asking Alex if the poppadoms are “vegan”, and so incurs another penalty for using the letter ‘V’.

After she has disposed of the letter ‘X’, and Alex has complemented her performance using the word “lovely”, she makes the mistake of pointing out “You said the ‘V’ word”, thus using a ‘V’ herself, and earning herself another penalty.

In the last couple of minutes of the task, she eliminates the letter ‘J’ before making the mistake of asking Alex “Is it over yet?”, thus using another ‘V’ and earning another penalty.

Before the task ends, she also eliminates the letter ‘M’.

After blowing the whistle, Alex points out to her that she has ended up with a piece of poppadom lodged in her left eyebrow.

In the studio, Alex reveals that Deborah incurred 24 penalties in total, during her attempt, effectively producing an additional 15 poppadoms’ worth of weight, but still earning first place.

(Written by Karl Craven)

(Illustrations collected and adjusted by: David Fuller)