Never Meet Your Heroes (Or Should You?)

It’s a relatively common saying, if you think about it. All of us have been told to “never meet your heroes” at one point or another in our life. I’ve definitely been told that, and I’m not here to say that isn’t true. Take one of the actors from Supernatural, for instance. When you’re at a convention for a tv show, you’d expect the actors (who are getting paid to be there) to hold themselves to at least some kind of standard. That doesn’t always happen. In this particular example, this actor mentioned so many shows and actors; which during the writer’s strike was not okay. To add to that, he made some comments about disabled people that were an immediate red flag.

I hadn’t planned on going to that session originally- I was there to kill some time before it was time to drive home. But having someone who at least some people look up to acting in this manner? It’s disheartening, to say the least.

That being said, I am not here to agree that you shouldn’t meet your heroes. Of course, there are multiple reasons to not do that. People get to be celebrities in the same way other things start evolving- but by the time that they are someone that people look up to, they are ‘protected’ from the public. That is quite literally the reason that an agent is a job.

At this point, if you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering what it is that I AM trying to say. Honestly, that’s a good question, but I promise I have a point that I’m getting to.

There’s this theory of ‘degrees of separation’ that has been floating around on the internet for some time. If you have somehow missed it, I will sum it up quickly. Basically, each person “between” you and the end goal is a degree of separation- for example, I would be one degree away from my dad’s boss. I have never met the woman myself, but my dad has, and I have met my dad. This can be extended to frankly unreasonable degrees.

Have I met Richard Speight Jr? Yes. Do I remember it? Also yes. Does he? Probably not.

If the degree theory is to be believed, I am a mere four degrees of separation from Sir Ian McKellan. He doesn’t know I exist, of course. But if you follow the pathway and this theory, I am but a mere four people from knowing this extremely famous actor. Of course, that’s a load of crap. Even though I have met Richard Speight Jr, the person who serves as the gateway to Sir Ian, he probably doesn’t remember that I exist, and I don’t expect him to. I was at a convention that he attended, and it was in Aug 2023. He has so many more important things to do than remembering one college student.

I’m not offended by that in the slightest, even if it now means that I have no chance of meeting a knight. Realistically, I never did in the first place.

I started off with an example that showed how crazy this whole theory is, but now I’m about to flip it around.

Ed Gamble has absolutely no idea what he got me into.

I can say quite confidently that Jack Bernhardt knows who I am. Do I know his opinion of me? No. But the fact that he responds to my dms indicates that he at least has some grasp on the fact that I exist. The same can be said of Tom Cashman. Now, using the separation theory, I am only three people away from Cate Blanchett knowing that I exist. Of course she doesn’t. But Tom Cashman does, and that’s enough for me. It’s the same with Jack.

Tom Cashman is a well connected Australian comedian. He’s the mind behind a show that I love, and he seems like a genuinely nice person. But he’s a celebrity, in at least some sense of the word. I could have quite potentially gone the rest of my life knowing that I shouldn’t meet or talk to people that I look up to, and Tom probably would have appreciated the lack of an American occasionally contacting him in his dms. But I didn’t, and that’s the premise of the rest of this.

I am not fool enough to think that Tom Cashman is being fully himself on the internet, and especially in dms with an American fan. If I was in his position, I wouldn’t want to show someone like that the essence of who I am, either. But Tom has helped me with the Australian Taskmaster stats (more to come on the stats later). He’s enabled me to do something that brings me joy. (Yes, a spreadsheet brings me joy. But if you know me in life at all, that really wouldn’t be that surprising.)

Now, it’s probably time to turn to the reason that I am writing this at all. Of course it’s Taskmaster related, because what in my life right now isn’t?

Discord servers are great, and you can find one for anything- including Taskmaster.

Ed Gamble is a British comedian. If you aren’t into Taskmaster, that name probably means next to nothing to you, but Taskmaster fans will recall some of Ed’s greatest hits, such as “just checking, have I been put on a team with David Baddiel?” or “I had to bury the duck so it wouldn’t haunt me forever” (you didn’t erase it from existence Ed- it’s under the Taskmaster Garden, and is very much still haunting you).

The diabetic comedian (who hates being referred to as that- which I learnt in a clip of a show *which he made an entire bit about his diabetes*) also hosts a podcast, since he is shamelessly as much of a Taskmaster fan as the rest of us plebs. It was on that podcast that I first heard the name Jack Bernhardt.

I will admit that I originally thought that Jack was American, and I knew he wasn’t a contestant. Those two things were enough to make me decide not to listen to his episodes, and it wasn’t until Ed released the episode analysing the first episode of Taskmaster New Zealand that I actually realised why the hell Jack Bernhardt was so important.

I highly doubt you’ll be still reading and have no idea who Jack is, unless you’re a very close friend of mine that has somehow escaped the constant stories relating to what I’m about to say. But in case that describes you, Jack Bernhardt is a British comedy writer who also does extremely detailed statistics for everything surrounding Taskmaster. If you’ve ever wondered if Rhod Gilbert is vegan (he is) or what percent of points available went to Josh Widdicombe (19.89%), Jack’s your man. But he’s also something else.

Jack’s on Reddit. He crossposts his detailed episode-by-episode stats on there, and I realised this during the airing of Series 18. These stats were really interesting to me, and I wanted to do something with them. Jack had already done all of them for the UK, which was fine by me. The adaptation that I really wanted to analyse was Taskmaster Australia, the adaptation that helped me through a tough time in my junior year of college.

In a spur of the moment decision (thanks, ADHD), I found Reddit messaging and promptly messaged Jack through there. I didn’t expect him to respond- or that I would be able to find the messaging place again- but he did, and I was.

He sent me a link to his spreadsheet for Taskmaster Australia and Taskmaster New Zealand, and I was euphoric. I’m still working on filling those out- but Jack also introduced me to BlueSky.

I never had Twitter. Jack used to be pretty active there, so he moved to BlueSky. Because of that, I also downloaded the app…and promptly started following a bunch of Taskmaster people, including Mark Watson, Richard Herring, and Dara O'Brien. If I had learnt ANYTHING from Instagram, I knew that they probably wouldn’t know that I existed, and I was fine with that. A link to the world of Taskmaster did (thanks Jack), and that was enough for me. But boy, was I proven wrong.

When the fandom is about pedantry, a discussion about An Absolute Casserole — Alex Horne and Jack Bernhardt, available now, can get heated quickly.

All in all, my ADHD hasn’t always led me to the best of places. I have it to blame for some of my social troubles and low test scores, and I’ve learnt to live with the hyperactive squirrel that is my brain. But the impulsiveness has also led me to a great deal of happiness lately, and I can’t forget that. What I’ve been trying to say this whole time is that sometimes you should reach out to someone who you think would never respond. Sometimes when you take that leap, it will pay off, and you’ll be happier for it.

Thanks to Tom Cashman, Mark Watson, Richard Herring, Jack Bernhardt, and Sam Smith for giving me the experiences that I wrote about, and thanks again Jack for the idea to write this at all (I read an article of his on Medium and got this idea).