Joanne shakes hands in the traditional Irish manner
As Joanne spots all of the hands poking through the fence, she describes the scene as “well creepy”. Having completed her reading of the task brief, she asks “How am I going to know who they are? Do I know them?”.
Joanne chooses a novel form of hand-shaking, rubbing the first hand with both of her own hands in a circular motion. When Alex questions her on this, she claims “It’s an Irish thing. You don’t understand.”
She continues with her ‘hand-shaking’ technique with the second hand, adding a sniff at the hands for good measure, and claiming “It’s an Irish greeting”.
She opts to use the scissors to cut the tip of the thumb off of the first glove, correctly identifying its contents as “Acorns”.
Groping at the fifth hand, she initially states that she has no idea what it is, before stating that it “feels like a human hand”, and then noting that she hopes it’s not, because she believes she has “completely fractured it”. She then goes on to say “If that was an actual hand, I’d assume it was contagious. It feels lumpy.”, before instructing Alex to “Write down ‘herpes’.”
Grasping and prodding the ninth hand, she incorrectly suggests that it contains “some sort of crustacean”, before noting “I’m not happy to meet this hand at all”. However, as she continues to grope at the hand, the glove tears open, revealing it’s true contents. This causes her to exclaim “Oh for fuck’s sake. It just exploded.”, before correctly identifying it as containing “Egg”, and then apparently retching at the spilled egg on the ground.
She uses the scissors to remove a fingertip from the eighth hand, and correctly identifies its contents as “Nails”. As she heads towards the chalkboard to record this, she asks Alex what to do with the handful of fake nails she is now carrying, and he suggests “Oh, eat them. I dunno. Whatever you want.” She decides to store them in the pocket of her overalls instead.
Although not included in the edit, she correctly identifies the contents of the second hand as “Lipsticks”, and the contents of the fourth hand as “Xylophone”.
Having correctly identified the contents of the first, second and fourth gloves as being words beginning with ‘A’, ‘L’, and ‘X’, Joanne correctly identifies that the first letter of each of the words written down on the chalkboard will spell out Alex’s full name. After asking Alex “Is this you trying to teach me your surname?”, he responds by asking her what his surname is, and she guesses “Taskmaster”. At this point, she had incorrectly recorded on the board that the third glove contained a “Stress ball”, and that the seventh glove contained “Water”.
She asks Alex if he’s trying to make a point, and then asks if his name is “Alex Horns”.
At the end of her attempt, she has correctly identified Alex’s last name, and has changed “Stress ball” to “Eggs”, and “Water” to “Ribena”, to make them fit, and has also incorrectly guessed “Humous/Herpes” for the fifth hand, and “Olives” for the sixth hand.
In the studio, Greg tells Joanne that he’d been to Ireland, and no-one had ever “double-handshaked me while sniffing my fingers”. Joanne responds by asking how recently he’d visited the country, suggesting that “Things have moved on.”
When Greg also asks her about “herpes of the hand”, she questions whether there was even a real hand in the fifth glove, prompting Alex to confirm that she definitely did, and it was attached to someone called Clarenz (a member of the production team). She then admits that she’d “really bent that”, and Alex confirms that she really had.
Alex states that Joanne had only correctly identified the contents of five of the gloves (though she appears to have actually identified six), but had correctly identified him as the person she was shaking hands with, so Greg agrees that she should be placed above John (who also identified six, but did not correctly identify Alex). She therefore earns 4 points.
(Written by Karl Craven)
(Illustrations collected by Jenny R and adjusted by David Fuller)
