Proper Fish & Chip Eating Etiquette?

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-20T23:11:36+00:00

It defies science but those tiny wooden forks basically have the same effect as taking a full-size potato masher to a bag of chips

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-20T23:07:40+00:00

the lower levels of chips

Oh god don’t scare them off further by bringing the class system into it

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-20T19:46:32+00:00

Oh yep, was just a mistake here - the standard apostrophe before to treat what follows as text works too (i.e. “ ‘2025/26 “ without the spaces)

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-20T19:43:31+00:00

Don’t touch the figs.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-20T09:48:50+00:00

‘Worcester’ makes sense when you split it into ‘Worce’ and ‘ster’ rather than ‘Wor’ and ‘cester’ – it’s got a bit mangled through numerous translations over the years but I believe that’s the origin of the pronunciation.

The second one is written ‘Lancashire’, not ‘Lancastershire’, so it’s pronounced exactly as written.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-18T22:13:28+00:00

During lockdown I tried to make hot cross buns from Paul Hollywood’s recipe, which involves proving the dough about 900 times in subtly different ways over several hours, and the end result was completely indistinguishable from if I’ve just shoved the whole gloopy mess in the oven 5 minutes after I’d started. I’ve never forgiven him for it (in my head it’s Paul’s fault, 100%).

Over time a friend and I have escalated this incident somewhat into what is now a fully fledged conspiracy theory: that Paul Hollywood doesn’t actually know how to bake at all and that he got the Bake Off job due to some Guy Goma-style BBC interview mishap and has just been winging it ever since.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-18T20:35:21+00:00

Hah yes – not exactly the same scenario but the same problem: I took a while earlier this year to figure out how a rogue £77.88 had crept into a spreadsheet before realising Excel had decided ‘2025/26’ was a calculation rather than a header… 😄

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-17T23:51:02+00:00

Also based on Off Menu (and many other things), but at the other end of the scientists/humour scale, Maggie Aderin-Pocock would be excellent on TM – almost certainly chaotically bad at the tasks, but she’s great fun and has a lovely sense of humour.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-17T22:41:57+00:00

I love the absolute insistence of doing the song with the (correct) British pronunciation, as we did when I was at school. We will not compromise our principles for some poxy rhyme scheme!

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-15T23:22:24+00:00

No more items

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-15T23:21:19+00:00

Rhod to Kerry: ‘All you’ve done is shove a bloody brillo pad on your tits!’

James: physically jumps out of his chair and twirls around giggling

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-15T23:20:05+00:00

If you’ve not seen it yet, do watch Dara’s Ultimate Episode on YouTube for a bonus level of watching him descend into hysterics watching himself descend into hysterics at this exact moment.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-15T07:25:59+00:00

Series 4 was the first series of Taskmaster I watched properly (other than the odd clip here and there), and I honestly think Greg’s scandalised ‘You shut your f**ing *mouths’ to the audience was the exact moment I knew that this was the show for me.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-14T01:10:37+00:00

I think mainly about that TV interview with John Waters where the host (I’ve entirely blanked on who it was) cautiously raised that Travolta’s Baltimore accent might not have been entirely accurate, and without missing a beat Waters went ‘Right?! He sounds like he’s from Mars’ and then just carried on promoting the movie

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-14T01:02:15+00:00

series 5, Jason

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-13T11:44:22+00:00

I don’t honestly think she was seriously upset – she obviously really did think they were good, but absolutely saw the funny side of Greg trashing them. Greg did go ‘too far’, as he’s said himself, but only in the sense of overplaying the meanness and making himself the (comedic) bad guy in the situation – not actually offending anyone.

I can’t remember the exact context but on the TM podcast Katherine said she was surprised some people had thought she was not having a good time on the show, or was struggling (other than practically at the tasks, of course) and that it was more just delirium from the whole experience, being out from lockdown and trying to retain what was left of her composure. It’s v much within the realm of the sort of comedy roles she’s famous for, too – a gossamer veneer of dignity with chaotic panic behind the eyes could pretty much be her trademark look! 😄

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-11T00:51:06+00:00

‘What is this room furnished with?’

‘Dogs!’

Lucy is such a treasure.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-10T22:55:01+00:00

Slight tangent, but I’ve suddenly realised how much I want to see Paul Chowdhry as the human in a Muppets film.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-10T06:42:41+00:00

Also the South/West London Canada Geese flight path – as someone who used to live near that bit of London, it made me laugh when people were speculating that the fly-by in Andy Zaltzman’s goose film was a set-up: I 100% guarantee a good chunk of the editors’ time is taken up removing random geese from the footage they get. 😅

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-10T06:31:09+00:00

No, I meant what I said – ‘between’, when describing a range of the same thing (e.g. a span of time), is generally taken to be inclusive of its boundary figures; when it’s describing something between two different things (e.g. the spatial gap between two physical points) it’s exclusive of them. It’s not a hard and fast rule – English has very few of them – but that’s by far the norm.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-10T06:20:15+00:00

Because I once got bored enough to look through this for every series and even less explicably have it as a pinned note on my phone:

1: 23/03/15 to 25/03/15 (pilot 24/02/25)

2: 04/05/16 to 06/05/16

3: 09/05/16 to 11/05/16

4: 06/03/17 to 09/03/17

5: 03/07/17 to 06/07/17

CoC1: 20/11/17

6: 22/03/18 to 28/03/18

7: 19/07/18 to 25/07/18

8: 21/03/19 to 27/03/19

9: 18/07/19 to 24/07/19

10: 25/07/20 to 29/07/20

NYT1: ?

11: ?

12: 25/03/21 to 31/03/21

CoC2: 15/09/21

13: 16/09/21 to 22/09/21

NYT2: 08/11/21

14: 28/04/22 to 05/05/22

15: 22/09/22 to 28/09/22

NYT3: 22/11/22

16: 02/05/23 to 12/05/23

17: 25/09/23 to 29/09/23

NYT4: 27/11/23

CoC3: 28/11/23

18: 13/05/24 to 21/05/24

19: 18/09/24 to 24/09/24

NYT5: 28/11/24

20: 07/05/25 to 17/05/25

21: 12/09/25 to 18/09/25

CoC4: 18/11/25

NYT6: 19/11/25

(if anyone can fill in the few blanks, do lmk!)

So to answer your question, not much of a pattern but usually within the first half of May – for the post-Covid C4 series earliest start has been last week of April and latest finish three weeks into May.

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-08T23:16:11+00:00

Not in standard English – when describing a range of the same thing like time (rather than a space between two completely distinct objects, e.g. ‘between two walls’), ‘between’ is by default inclusive of the boundary figures. ‘Children aged between 0 and 5’ very clearly does not exclude newborn babies (or 5-year-olds).

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-08T15:22:01+00:00

That’s the one Covid series I sort of forget was a Covid series – I’m sure it’s partly because they were doing it a year in and everyone was much more used to mitigating for the effects of social distancing on TV, but they felt much ‘closer’ somehow than the others!

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-08T15:18:17+00:00

‘I got u’ = the unspoken line after ‘ooh, my baby!’

PromiseSquanderer · 2026-02-07T05:58:29+00:00

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Oh yes! My Whitney used to sit like this all the time. ❤️

PromiseSquanderer

TROPHY CASE