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Let me dust off the first rule of show business. That is to say: always leave ’em wanting more. By this point, it’s an ancient and threadbare adage – but still intractably true. And it’s one that came to mind as I flicked through this week’s TV schedule, and came upon Channel 4’s Thursday night slot. There, at 9pm, was Taskmaster, the comic game show hosted by Greg Davies, returning yet again for a 19th series.
It shouldn’t really be a surprise at this point. Taskmaster has been on TV every half year since 2015, when the series first launched on Dave, the channel that now broadcasts under the doggerel name U&Dave. (The series moved to Channel 4 in 2020.) Created by comedian Alex Horne (who also serves as Davies’s sidecar deputy presenter), Taskmaster quickly became a beloved staple of Brit TV. People loved the premise: five comedians attempting a series of bizarre, inventive or downright pointless “tasks”. They loved the contestants: a Who’s Who of British comedy’s best and brightest, emerging and established acts alike. They loved Davies, too – maybe the least-cancelled Greg on British television – steering proceedings with a sort of jolly cynicism. To be clear, it’s not like the series has ever fallen out of favour. But how long is it, really, until nobody is left wanting more at all?
It’s not that long-running series cannot possibly remain good, that there are not ways of staying fresh and reinventing a formula over time. But mostly, longevity simply leads to a rut. Whether it’s dramas such as Doctor Who or Grey’s Anatomy, animations such as The Simpsons or South Park, or – perhaps the closest cousin to Taskmaster – panel shows such as Have I Got News For You, television is littered with examples of long-running series that have simply refused to die while their reputation slowly erodes. A series can only stay hot and popular for so long, before it starts showing the signs of age, even if the product is, essentially, the exact same show that viewers first fell in love with. It’s only a matter of time before Taskmaster starts appearing starchy and wan, the TV equivalent of Bryan Johnson, that odd-duck billionaire who’s undergone a panoply of experimental procedures to reverse the ageing process.
The format of Taskmaster is both the key to its longevity and, at this point, perhaps its greatest limitation. While the scatty and creative nature of the tasks does create a lot of variety from episode to episode – last night’s instalment included such tasks as “do something cool”, “transfer raisins into a wine glass with your mouth” and “the pealympics”, a series of games involving the tiny vegetable – there has, over time, emerged something of a pattern. The structured format of the series – a sturdy matrix of controlled chaos – has a sort of stabilising effect, meaning that weaker or less amusing contestants don’t bring the show to a screeching halt. But it also confines some of the better ones, who must adjust their comic sensibilities to the show’s pre-built comic framework.
This framework, too, has lost the element of surprise. Back when Taskmaster first launched, the very concept of the show – the nutty and pointless tasks – was the main source of humour; the execution was almost secondary. As it’s gone on, the novelty has worn off, and the onus falls increasingly on the contestants to provide the comic spark. It’s a problem that also applies to the hosts: there are only so many different ways to react to Taskmaster’s shenanigan conveyor belt, and it feels like we’ve seen them all by now.
Taskmaster started out with a very British modesty of ambition; the low-rent nature of most of the tasks makes it both easy to iterate on, from week to week, and offers a sort of scrappy, don’t-take-us-seriously charm. But the longer Taskmaster goes on, the less sincere the DIY approach seems, the more it seems like a sort of calculated pretence. More than a dozen international versions of the show have been launched, as well as the spinoff series Junior Taskmaster last year. There was the Taskmaster Live Experience, a London-based immersive game that people could attend. The Taskmaster podcast. Taskmaster books. The Taskmasker board game. No longer can it be considered any form of underdog. It’s a bit like Have I Got News For You, the panel show that started out, in its early days, as a provocative and establishment-challenging forum for satire; now, that couldn’t be less true.
My complaints are all rather moot at this point: Taskmaster already has two further series commissioned, lasting until at least 2026. It seems hard to believe that it will finish there. But when, then, will it finally pull to a close? Must it wait until everyone is sick to the teeth of it, until it has thoroughly outlived its own relevance and goodwill? There’s a lot to be said for knowing the right time to leave a party: before you know it, you’ll be idling in a kitchen, amid empty bottles and wilting balloons, with a host who can’t wait for you to leave.
‘Taskmaster’ continues at 9pm on Channel 4 every Thursday
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