Communicate the time to the Taskmaster

Tom Cashman on the Taskmaster studio stage. He is standing next to a very large beige analogue clock with red hands and numbers. Below the clock is a small spinner with ‘AM’ on one side and ‘PM’ on the other.

Task types:

Team

Live

Mental

Physical

Social

Objective

Single brief

Original

Locations:

NEP Studios

Task brief

The brief for the task is as follows:

Perform a 30-second scene that communicates to the Taskmaster what time the clock says.

You may only say one word per team member, and that word cannot be ‘morning’, ‘day’, ‘afternoon’, ‘night’, ‘sunrise’, ‘sunset’, ‘dawn’, ‘dusk’, ‘breakfast’, ‘brunch’, ‘lunch’, ‘dinner’, ‘quarter’, ‘half’, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, ‘four’, ‘five’, ‘six’, ‘seven’, ‘eight’, ‘nine’, ‘ten’, ‘eleven’, or ‘twelve’.

Each team will get three randomly selected times and three scenes.

Closest times guessed by the Taskmaster to the actual times wins.

The two contestant teams on the Taskmaster studio stage. The team of two on the left and the team of three on the right. Center stage there is a very large beige analogue clock with red hands and numbers. Below the clock is a small spinner with ‘AM’ on one side and ‘PM’ on the other. Tom Cashman is standing to the left of the clock.

Task notes

The contestants are sat on benches on either side of the stage, in their usual teams.
In the middle of the stage, there is a large analogue clock, with a small wheel of fortune beneath it which is split into just two segments, allowing a random choice between ‘am’ and ‘pm’.
Tom Gleeson averts his eyes as a time is randomly selected at the start of each team’s turn in each round. Although Tom Cashman mimes rotating the clock with his hand, this process appears to be controlled from elsewhere.
A curtain rail is set up around the clock so that the chosen time for each team to communicate may be hidden from the Taskmaster during their turn.
For the team of three, each team member only gets to say one word per round. For the team of two, one of the team members gets to say two words in each round, while the other may only say one.
It’s interesting that the task brief did not just include a blanket statement prohibiting any numbers from being said by the contestants, since the list of forbidden words did not include numbers which could be used to communicate some times in the 24 hour clock format, or any minute component of the time which do not include the words (e.g. 13 through 20, 30, 40, 50, and zero; or at least 13, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, and zero, if forbidden words contained within words such as ‘fourteen’ are prohibited).
The task is judged by adding up the total number of minutes difference between the times assigned to each team, and the Taskmaster’s guesses, over the three rounds.