BEN THOMAS looks back at Series Six of the otherwise mighty Taskmaster.

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My relationship with the UK version of Taskmaster is easily the least dysfunctional one I have with any TV show. With the programmes I truly adore, like Doctor Who, we frequently stagger into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? territory, especially after a few drinks. (I’m the Elizabeth Taylor in that scenario, in case you were wondering.) In the case of Taskmaster it’s much more like a warm, nourishing, but platonic, friendship. If I’m in a funk of some description I can count on Taskmaster to jolly me out of it. There’s very little else on television that can both charm me and make me roar with laughter.

It’s a simple premise on the face of it. Five comedians – usually comedians, but they’ve had the odd presenter, DJ and quite a few actors in the mix – being given silly/deceptively ingenious tasks to complete by a seemingly neurodivergent man with a beard. By which I mean actual facial whiskers, but I understand that Alex Horne and Greg Davies, the hosts of the show, are the subjects of a disproportionately large amount of slash fiction online. Each to their own, but for me, personally, that would be the Fermat’s Last Theorem of difficult wanks.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore the Taskmaster (Davies) and the Taskmaster’s Assistant (Horne). They’re the perfect double-act, with Alex pedantic and diffident while Greg menaces the contestants like a bipolar Sasquatch. I knew Greg Davies far better than Alex Horne before Taskmaster began. The former was the maniacal Head of Sixth Form, Mr Gilbert, from The Inbetweeners, but I’m also a big fan of his stand-up. He may look like a seven-foot golem made of reclaimed chicken, but on stage he’s mercurial, giggly and has an appetite for self-abasement that would make the Marquis de Sade blush.

Also my wife’s aunt Jill is very good friends with Greg’s mum Pauline from when she lived in Wem, and she says he’s ‘a very nice boy’.

I don’t have any in-laws who know Alex, but he seems like a very clever man. He comes up with the vast majority of the tasks for the UK version of the show and the format was his baby. It was something he created for the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and after that proved a hit he was encouraged to pitch it for TV. All the major broadcasters rejected it, and it ended up on the relative backwater of the UKTV channel Dave.

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Eleven years later, the show’s a BAFTA winner and a merchandising powerhouse. It’s spawned versions around the world (the New Zealand one is the best), and while a US version failed after one series, the UK original has since cracked America, thanks to YouTube. In 2019 Channel 4 announced it was poaching Taskmaster off Dave for a reported 20 million quid, having rejected it six years earlier.

Why does it work? Aside from the steamy sexual chemistry between the two hosts (similar to the sizzling dynamic between Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting), I think having the same line-up of competitors all series is key. You get to know their strengths, foibles and failings.

Sometimes a contestant will surprise you. Who could’ve guessed that effete Goth clown Noel Fielding would be a sporting polymath? Who would’ve known that Cambridge graduate David Baddiel would lack any basic spatial awareness or common sense? And over the course of the studio recordings a delightful camaraderie builds up between the participants. I feel a giddy affirmation of my life choices simply from watching it.

Of course, this being a Hate Watch article we’re heading for a ‘but’. I love nearly every one of the twenty-two seasons of Taskmaster UK, but there is one I love a little bit less. And it’s the one where I managed to attend one of the recordings. What are the odds?

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Series Six came off the back of the almost universally-loved Series Five, where Bob Mortimer began his elevation to National Treasure, Sally Phillips made love to a water cooler and Nish Kumar and Mark Watson wrote and performed a beautiful pop song about a woman called Rosalind that I still hum to myself at times.

We enjoyed Series Five so much, I felt I had to go into the ballot for Series Six tickets. It was still on Dave at this point, so the tickets were free, but even if you were successful you weren’t guaranteed to be in the audience. They deliberately overbooked the recordings to guarantee there weren’t any empty seats, so even though we got tickets we had to be there early or risk getting turned away at the door. But we did have tickets, at least, and they were for the series finale. We were going to see who won!

We left for Pinewood Studios hours before the recording. I wasn’t feeling well. I’d woken up to an upset stomach and to survive the journey without incident, I’d had to take enough Imodium to stymie the Ganges. We got there too early and were turned away as the previous episode was still recording, so we decamped to a nice pub, but I didn’t eat or drink for fear of upsetting my digestive apple-cart. Back at the studio we had to hang around and wait as they selected the audience. We were plied with free beer which I also had to turn down. There were no toilets near TV Studio One, and the recording was estimated to run for more than three hours. Three hours plus of sitting there, not daring to laugh too heartily for fear of peppering my undergarments.

So you could probably say I wasn’t in the correct headspace to enjoy the recording. Definitely not in the right arsespace. But Pinewood Potential Incontinence Incident aside, Series Six is the one I enjoy least on rewatch. There’s an odd energy to it. Alex and Greg don’t seem at their best. The recording schedule was tighter than previously, it was the first series to run to ten episodes, and they both admitted during breaks in recording that they were struggling with colds.

It demonstrably affected them, as they had to record nearly forty pick-ups (inserts to edit into the final show) after our episode had finished to cover the flubs and stumbles they’d made. The poor buggers were utterly frazzled by that point and we had to sit there for an additional forty-five minutes as they (Greg mainly, if I’m honest) kept mangling the patches.

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And then there were the five competitors. For me, this is the series where they didn’t really gel. Actor and comedian Asim Chaudhry was probably my favourite. He seemed genuinely happy to be there and (spoilers) the others seemed genuinely pleased when he finally won an episode in the final. He was definitely the ray of sunlight in the line-up.

Tim Vine seemed very pleasant as well, but I do struggle with him a bit. I find pun-based stand-up tiresome (unless they’re twisted and filthy like the ones from one-liner maestro Gary Delaney) and he was a regular cast member of the painfully unfunny and apparently unending BBC sitcom Not Going Out, which ought to have earned him some kind of custodial sentence. But it’s mostly unfair prejudice on my part. He’s not the worst member of the family.

I was surprised I didn’t take more of a liking to Liza Tarbuck when she was on Taskmaster. I was a big fan of her Radio 2 show (yes, I know, I’m old, deal with it). We’d occasionally listen to it while driving and her warm, chocolatey, chatty tones made me feel toasty inside. However, on Series Six she seemed impatient and snippy, not wanting to join in. That said, she won the series and did display a few flashes of joyful mischief. And her making Alex Horne sit bare-arsed on a cake will continue to haunt my nightmares until my dying day.

To quote Alex: ‘Because of the angle of the squatting, I was quite open.’ And: ‘It felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was so…in me’.

And then there was Russell Howard. If Liza Tarbuck looked occasionally disengaged, then he might as well have been checking his watch throughout. I think he was recording The Russell Howard Hour for Sky around the same time. Anyone remember that? No, me either. Around the same time he was appearing in a travel show with his mother, Ninette, called Russell Howard & Mum. Remember when comedians legally had to be filmed travelling abroad with a parent? I think it was like jury service. His sister, actor Kerry Howard, is the talented one of the family if you ask me, but he does do a lot of work for charity, so I shouldn’t be too hard on the Bristolian yokel.

I think the contestant who troubled me the most was DJ and podcaster Alice Levine. She didn’t thrive with the tasks in the Taskmaster house (although she scored well enough, winning two episodes) and seemed increasingly uncomfortable and cowed as the series progressed. She’s said she really enjoyed appearing on the series and felt welcomed, so maybe she consciously decided to take a back seat during the studio sessions and let the experienced comedians spar? If so, then fine, but that contributed to some of the lop-sided energy of Series Six.

Most strikingly, I think it’s a series short on memorable tasks and moments. Aside from Alex Horne getting sixteen fluid-ounces of confectioner’s custard up his anus, obviously. That is an all-timer; it belongs in one of the Saw movies. But if you name any other of the twenty-two series, I could probably name you six or seven standout moments of genius. After five strong series, the sixth one is an intake of breath. Not bad. Not even unwelcome. Just a lull. And perhaps that’s the most damning thing I can say about it: for once, Taskmaster merely entertained me. I’d still happily watch it. Even the worst UK Taskmaster could happily hang in the Tate Modern.

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