Steve focuses on insulting Alex

Steve’s strategy is just to eliminate the least commonly used letters first.

He bites a mouthful of poppadom off, and then disposes of the letter ‘Z’ first, before telling Alex that he does not like his shoes.

He then takes another mouthful and disposes of the letter ‘Q’, before telling Greg that he’s his favourite comedian of all time.

He eliminates the letter ‘X’ next, before saying “Alex, that shirt needs a tie”, apparently forgetting that Alex’s name contains an ‘X’, and thus incurring his first penalty.

Steve then disposes of the letter ‘Y’, before saying “Greg, you are my perfect man”, and incurring another penalty for the ‘Y’ in ‘my’.

He next eliminates the letters ‘V’, ‘J’, and ‘K’, before saying “Alex, I never liked The Horne Section”, and incurring two extra penalties for the ‘X’ and the ‘K’.

When responding to Alex’s observation that the insults appear to be coming naturally to him, Steve then says “I didn’t have to work at that one”, and thus incurs an additional two penalties for the ‘V’ and ‘K’ he’d used.

He subsequently eliminates the letters ‘W’ and ‘P’ before asking for a “glass of water”, and incurring a penalty for his use of a ‘W’.

He then says “Alex, you will always be a sidekick”, which earns him seven penalties for using one ‘X’, two ‘Y’s, two ‘W’s, and two ‘K’s.

Steve then eliminates the letter ‘U’ before simply calling Alex a “moron”.

By the end of the task, Steve has also eliminated the letters ‘U’, ‘L’, ‘R’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘F’, ‘B’, and ‘C’. Struggling to come up with a qualifying insult for Alex, he arrives at “moobs”, which earns him a penalty for using the letter ‘B’.

After the whistle has been blown, Steve still has a mouth crammed full of chewed-up poppadom, which he is clearly sick of eating.

In the studio, Alex reveals that Steve had eaten five and a half poppadoms, but had also incurred 38 penalties for using forbidden letters, effectively producing an additional 24 poppadoms’ worth of weight during his attempt, and earning second place.

(Written by Karl Craven)

(Illustrations collected and adjusted by: David Fuller)