John politely greets all the hands

While shaking the very first hand, John says “Hello to you, sir”. As he rhythmically massages the hand to feel its contents, Alex observes “Forgot that’s how you shake hands”.

Continuing with his practice of verbally greeting each of the hands, he says “It’s a pleasure to see you, mate” to one, “Hello to you” to another, and “hello to you as well, of course” to a third.

He steps back at one point and admits that the problem he is facing is that many of the hands as “just sort of smooth and hot”. He then suggests that perhaps he could use his “more vigorous handshake”, and proceeds to start yanking one of the hands in a rhythmic motion, as if milking a cow’s udders.

He then takes the scissors and cuts off the fingertip of the first hand, correctly identifying its contestants as “Acorns”.

After firmly tugging on the second hand, he asks Alex to note “Question mark – lipsticks”, correctly identifying the contents of that glove.

After cutting the a fingertip off of the fourth glove, he correctly identifies its contents as “a toy glockenspiel or xylophone”.

After shaking hands with the fifth glove, which contains a real live human’s hand, he screams in response, and exclaims “Fuck me, man! What’s in that one? It’s got something in it, mate.”, leading Alex to dryly respond that all of the gloves have something in them. John then clarifies that “there’s something moving in that one”, before correctly identifying that it contains a real person’s hand.

Still slightly traumatised by his experience with the fifth hand, he admits that he is “quite scared” to shake the seventh one, and tentatively grasps it before yelling out loud and rapidly retracting his hand when he feels how soft it is. He initially guesses that the glove might contain water (later, in the studio, it is revealed that he had tasted some of the rum inside, and was therefore concerned, as a recovering alcoholic, that the ‘R’ in his case actually stood for ‘relapse’; Alex clarifies in response that the rum in this glove had been alcohol-free).

Cutting a fingertip off of the eighth glove, he correctly identifies its contents as fake nails, noting “Yeah, that’s gross.”

While shaking hands with the sixth glove, Alex begins to remind him he has no more cuts remaining (suggesting that this was one of the last hands he investigated, but was shown out of order), but John then immediately and correctly identifies the contents as (pickled) onions.

John cuts off a fingertip of the ninth glove and correctly identifies the contents as eggs.

Having completed his attempt to identify the contents of all of the gloves, and presumably prompted by Alex to identify ‘who’ he had shaken hands with, John struggles to come up with a logical answer, and simply guesses “The king?”.

As his time runs out, he observes that he can tell from Alex’s expression that he has somehow not successfully completed the task.

In the studio, as Alex admits that the aim of the task was somewhat ambiguous, as the aim could have been to identify just one or nine different people, John admits that it “drove me insane”.

Alex observes that John had very quickly identified the pickled onions simply by feeling them, prompting John to admit that he eats a lot of them.

Alex confirms that John had correctly identified the contents of six of the gloves, but had not identified Alex as the person he’d shaken hands with, so he earns 3 points.

(Written by Karl Craven)

(Illustrations collected by Jenny R and adjusted by David Fuller)