So we have taken to watching
Taskmaster, a weird game show we have over here (evidently with versions made in the US and New Zealand) where five contestants (famous people, broadly comedians but not always) compete in absurd tasks for the amusement of Greg Davies, an established comedian who is a retired teacher as well as being 6'8 and generally projecting an air of major authority.
The tasks are some kind of weird combination of
Whose Line is it Anyway?,
Jackass and
The Crystal Maze. The latter is a big influence on Alex Horne, the creator of the show and tasks and the other main recurring onscreen figure.
There are ten seasons of it to watch plus specials, and we just started watching the tenth season. The preceding nine have featured a fun combination of people the three of us had heard of and new faces. A couple of things struck us about this.
Firstly, for the first six or seven seasons, there appeared to be a depressingly stringent formula to how they selected the lineups - one old, male, white comedian; one young, male, white comedian; one man of colour; one woman; another white male who is not a comedian but is probably weird. However the show did seem to have quite progressive ideals and the anarchic nature of it meant that Greg Davies, who generally I think is fairly progressive, gets challenged on actual prejudices and actually acknowledges them in the show. He also calls them out in other people if the way they complete the tasks or their gags are off-colour, albeit gently and without wrecking the atmosphere.
Spoilered for sexual content.
Greg's Taskmaster character is mainly just himself turned up to 11, but there is an air of pansexual frisson and flirtation to almost everything he does that has resulted in all three of us developing a crush on him. Because part of his whole gimmick is being the person in charge of the space and ordering them to do things, plus being generally massive and having authority, he has a real dom energy to him. I think back to some of the things that fascinated me as a child or pre-teen that I realise with hindsight were sexy, and I just didn't realise, and wonder if there are people who are finding out that they are subs by enjoying Greg giving orders just a little bit more than they were expecting to.
It's generally a lovely, nice, warm space for us to be, one that seems to share many of our ethics, is generally just good fun, is low-stakes, and features a lot of people we like. But it's that last part that can be a problem.
Even the comedians participating in this show are generally quite out of their element, as it is not a joke-centric show, but task-centric; being funny while doing the tasks is obviously the primary goal and often people are trying to funny rather than anything else, but none of them are doing their material, even if they are quite gimmick-heavy comedians doing shtick. A lot of the real people seems to come out in these tasks sometimes, and in the vast majority of cases this has been delightful, but a few people that we had previously liked quite a lot showed unpleasant aspects to their character in the making of these shows.
In the first season, Frank Skinner despite being an old, cis, white man showed himself to be fairly down-to-Earth and not a depressing, racist relic. The only woman in the cast this time, Roison Conaty, has a gimmick that is largely making fun of herself. She's also best mates with Davies, and so he makes a lot of jokes at her expense that she finds funny, but it occasionally leaves a bit of a sour taste to see four male contestants and the two male hosts, plus a whole studio audience laughing at the one woman on the show.
The second season was what made us decide to watch pretty much the entire run. It featured Joe Wilkinson, a guy who I've generally found dismally unfunny, but he was actually quite sweet and ridiculous in this show. The highlight, though, was Katherine Ryan, who called out the sexism in the show at every single opportunity, won almost any physical task despite mostly wearing glorious evening gowns and heels and won the show overall. Like a badass.
The third season was the most disappointing. Rob Beckett, a guy I knew primarily as someone who publicly mocked a venue one of my ex-students worked in when they pissed him off, which is just bad form really, actually turned out to not be so bad. However, there was Al Murray - known mainly in the UK for a parodic right-wing character called the Pub Landlord, whose gag was that he said outrageously stupid, right-wing things and we should laugh at him. Murray retired this character at one point, publicly stating that he knew half of his audience wasn't in on the joke and he was literally afrai of them, but then brought the character back when he needed the money, erm, felt the time was right for it. He's out of character for the show, and mainly pays his way towards winning tasks, which just felt a bit grim. The bigger disappointment, however, was Dave Gorman, a guy with a sense for the absurd minutae of life and someone I thought quite warmly of. He turned out to be an aggressively competitive cheat, with a ridiculous macho streak that he couldn't live up to. And the thing is, this is still a TV show - that could still just be part of his comedy. But it wasn't funny, it was kind of unpleasant.
Series four made me realise that the reason I hated Noel Fielding when I was a teenager was primarily jealousy of the fact that he was completely comfortable with his weird self and able to express it and I wasn't.
Series five featured Bob Mortimer, one half of my beloved childhood favourites Reeves and Mortimer, who turned out to be ableist as fuck and just not especially funny.
Anyway there's five more series and I've ranted for hundreds of words about this bollocks already but uh... yeah we've been watching that!
