Taskmaster

Revision as of 16:15, 10 December 2024

Synopsis

Comedians are given very strange things to do.

Alex Horne's mind is a strange place. All of the usual elements are there, but they're all mixed up. He makes hot toothpaste pies. He plays golf with hen's eggs. He draws horses while riding horses.

But a problem shared is a problem halved, so Horne has invited some comedy friends to perform these surreal dreams. Greg Davies hosts the programme, ranks the performances, and the best player over the programme (and over the series) is the winner.

The players from Series 1: Ranganathan, Skinner, Conaty, Widdicombe, Key. Seated: Davies and Horne.

Taskmaster is theatre of the absurd, sensible people doing insensible things. The atmosphere was heightened by the filming location - almost all the tasks took place in a hired cottage, decorated as a shrine to the Taskmaster. There was no narration over the films, just the natural sound of the players talking.

Fans of bizarre television flocked to this show, and it gained audience as the first series went on, and as each subsequent series aired. Taskmaster turned into a massive hit for Dave, their first since Argumental about five years earlier. After five years, during which the format was honed to perfection, UKTV's contract expired and the show went up for new bids. Channel 4 bought the rights; ignoring adjustments for COVID-19, about all they changed was the credit sequence.

Pre-watershed editions were made of each episode, which wasn't too much trouble for the most part. When aired on E4, these editions were aired as Taskmaster Bleeped. These evidently went down well, so much so that Channel 4 announced a Junior version, with Rose Matafeo and Mike Wozniak doing Davies' and Horne's jobs.

Champions

Champion of Champions

New Year Treat

Participants

2015

• Frank Skinner
• Josh Widdicombe
• Roisin Conaty
• Romesh Ranganathan
• Tim Key

2016 (Summer series)

• Doc Brown
• Joe Wilkinson
• Jon Richardson
• Katherine Ryan
• Richard Osman

2016 (Autumn series)

• Al Murray
• Dave Gorman
• Paul Chowdhry
• Rob Beckett
• Sara Pascoe

2017 (Spring series)

• Hugh Dennis
• Joe Lycett
• Lolly Adefope
• Mel Giedroyc
• Noel Fielding

2017 (Autumn series)

• Aisling Bea
• Bob Mortimer
• Mark Watson
• Nish Kumar
• Sally Phillips

Champion of Champions

• Josh Widdicombe
• Katherine Ryan
• Rob Beckett
• Noel Fielding
• Bob Mortimer

2018 (Spring series)

• Alice Levine
• Asim Chaudhry
• Liza Tarbuck
• Russell Howard
• Tim Vine

2018 (Autumn series)

• James Acaster
• Jessica Knappett
• Kerry Godliman
• Phil Wang
• Rhod Gilbert

2019 (Spring series)

• Iain Stirling
• Joe Thomas
• Lou Sanders
• Paul Sinha
• Sian Gibson

2019 (Autumn series)

• David Baddiel
• Ed Gamble
• Jo Brand
• Katy Wix (but see Trivia)
• Rose Matafeo

2020

• Daisy May Cooper
• Johnny Vegas
• Katherine Parkinson
• Mawaan Rizwan
• Richard Herring

2021 (New Year Treat)

• John Hannah
• Krishnan Guru-Murthy
• Nicola Coughlan
• Rylan Clark-Neal
• Shirley Ballas

2021 (Spring series)

• Charlotte Ritchie
• Jamali Maddix
• Lee Mack
• Mike Wozniak
• Sarah Kendall

2021 (Autumn series)

• Alan Davies
• Desiree Burch
• Guz Khan
• Morgana Robinson
• Victoria Coren Mitchell

2022 (New Year Treat)

• Adrian Chiles
• Claudia Winkleman
• Jonnie Peacock/Alan Davies
• Lady Leshurr
• Sayeeda Warsi

2022 (Spring series)

• Ardal O'Hanlon
• Bridget Christie
• Chris Ramsey
• Judi Love
• Sophie Duker

Champion of Champions

• Ed Gamble
• Kerry Godliman
• Liza Tarbuck
• Lou Sanders
• Richard Herring

2022 (Autumn series)

• Dara O'Briain
• Fern Brady
• John Kearns
• Munya Chawawa
• Sarah Millican

2023 (New Year Treat)

• Amelia Dimoldenberg
• Carol Vorderman
• Greg James
• Mo Farah
• Rebecca Lucy Taylor

2023 (Spring series)

• Frankie Boyle
• Ivo Graham
• Jenny Eclair
• Kiell Smith-Bynoe
• Mae Martin

2023 (Autumn series)

• Julian Clary
• Lucy Beaumont
• Sam Campbell
• Sue Perkins
• Susan Wokoma

2024 (New Year Treat)

• Deborah Meaden
• Kojey Radical
• Lenny Rush
• Steve Backshall
• Zoe Ball

2024 (Champion of Champions)

• Dara Ó Briain
• Morgana Robinson
• Sarah Kendall
• Sophie Duker
• Kiell Smith-Bynoe (see #Trivia)

2024 (Spring series)

• Joanne McNally
• John Robins
• Nick Mohammed
• Sophie Willan
• Steve Pemberton

2024 (Autumn series)

• Andy Zaltzman
• Babatunde Aléshé
• Emma Sidi
• Jack Dee
• Rosie Jones

Key moments

Some of the most memorable solo tasks included Josh Widdicombe counting the numbers of beans, spaghetti hoops, and grains of rice in their respective containers during the ad breaks, Mel Giedroyc trying to hide a huge inflatable ball on a football pitch from Alex, and Mark Watson sending daily anonymous cheeky text messages every day for 150 days (but falling short by two). Tim Vine was given £150 to buy stuff from a stationary shop to make an outfit in 10 minutes; his opponents were then tasked with guessing what pun Tim had opted for. But the most memorable solo task of them all has to be the one that backfired on the Taskmasters themselves when Aisling Bea, tasked with taking pictures with a golden pineapple over six months, delegated the task to her mother.

At times during a task, an additional rule would be instated for one person for more fun punishment, such as Rob Beckett being tasked to spend a task trying to sweat in an eggcup while talking in an accent other than his own, Joe Lycett tasked to paint Greg on a canvas without touching the circular mat while also smiling throughout the task or Mark Watson taking a lit candle on a cupcake to the caravan with obstacles in the way while not saying any words that contain the letters from the word Taskmaster.

There were several occasions when contestants would be disqualified for a specific reason. They could either be an honest accident like Joe Wilkinson's potato-gate incident where he threw the potato in the pot in the fastest time with 14.3 seconds but was disqualified after the front end of his shoe slightly touched the mat and his opponents could not unanimously agree to grant him the points. Or they could dishonestly cheat like Dave Gorman, who not only attempted to stick a pea inside a tennis racquet so he could pretend to hit it but also poured his tea inside a bucket after being asked to fill it with water from another bucket. But the most memorable disqualification happened in the tenth series when the liquid has to be overflowing in an eggcup atop a wobbly pole in the middle of the green where only liquids can land, where not just one celebrity got disqualified, nor did two of them, in fact... all five of them were disqualified.

The final task of the fifth series when both teams had to come up with a song for a stranger with Nish Kumar and Mark Watson's really catchy upbeat track and Bob Mortimer, Aisling Bea and Sally Phillips' less than affectionate tribute to an unwitting victim called Rosalind…

The entirety of the seventh series, with James Acaster's many breakdowns during his tenure on the show, Rhod Gilbert being, well, Rhod Gilbert, and Jessica Knappett falling off the stage during a live task. There are so many memorable moments in that series to list down, we could be here for months. You can find the whole series playlist here on YouTube.

During a live task on the ninth series, Ed Gamble lost his marbles on the "Draw the same drawing alongside the person behind you without communication" task when David Baddiel decided to carry on drawing as Ed left his drawing finger behind David's back. If that wasn't enough, the following year on the tenth series, there was a similar drawing task with Daisy May Cooper drawing three lines of an animal and Richard Herring trying to guess what it is and every time he was wrong, Daisy got increasingly frustrated as she was drawing three more lines after that and ultimately when they ran out of guesses, Daisy let it all out on Richard and everyone else just losing it laughing.

Catchphrases

"All the information's on the task."

Inventor

Alex Horne, who also wrote and produced the show.

Title music

The Horne Section.

Incidental music by Dru Masters.

Trivia

Based on a stage show at the Edinburgh Festival in 2010 and 2011.

In early series, judgement was pronounced at the Clapham Grand theatre. Later series used a proper studio set.

Series 1 participant Tim Key was retained for future series as a Task Consultant.

One of Alice Levine's task attempts had to be so badly censored that the censored version had to add a line to explain just how much had been taken out. Way to spoil the illusion.

Just as they had done with Penn & Teller: Fool Us, The CW bought the eighth series in 2020 with a view to producing a remake. It lasted one episode before being hauled off to CW Seed and replaced by Supernatural reruns.

Kerry Godliman, Katherine Ryan and Alan Davies covered for Katy Wix, Katy Wix and Jonnie Peacock in series nine, episode five, series nine, episode six and the 2022 New Year Treat respectively.

After Greg and Alex, the contestant with the most appearances is Kerry Godliman, with twelve appearances.

For the first series, the trophy was a bog-standard off-the-shelf trophy, while subsequent series winners took home a golden replica of Greg's head. Champion of Champions episodes forked over a replica of the rest of Greg's body. Josh Widdicombe won the first series and the first Champion of Champions series, meaning that - as of the 2022 episode - Richard Herring and Dara Ó Briain are actually the only owners of Greg's whole body. It could have been worse; Mae Martin was not available when the third Champion of Champions was filmed, and so their place was taken by that series' runner up Kiell Smith-Bynoe.

The first half of series twelve suffered from a number of broadcasting failures; the Bleeped version of its premiere was aired by accident on first broadcast, while episodes two to five aired without subtitles as a result of residual technical errors following an activation of the fire suppression systems at Red Bee Media's broadcast centre.

As of the first fifteen series and excluding New Year Treats, Romesh Ranganathan, Joe Wilkinson, Sara Pascoe, Aisling Bea, Nish Kumar, Phil Wang, Judi Love, Frankie Boyle are the only people to never win an episode. Wang's, Love's, and Boyle's failures were that bit more abject than the others as they lost ten episodes rather than six, five, five, eight and eight episodes respectively.

In 2023, a pilot was shot for a culinary version, with five celebrity contestants competing to please series nine winner Ed Gamble. They called it Foodmaster.

The seventeenth series was tailed by Taskmasterclass, a clip show narrated - not even presented! - by Greg and Alex.

Web links

U programme page

Channel 4 programme page

Wikipedia entry

British Comedy Guide entry

taskmaster.info, a database about Taskmaster around the world.

See also

We Need Answers

Weaver's Week review

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