I don’t generally talk about TV shows, but here we go.
I had YouTube on autoplay with Taskmaster related content and one of the videos was about ranking all the contestants on the first ten series of Taskmaster. Or nine. I forget. So, I thought to myself, should I do this? Should I try my hand at ranking them?
The answer I arrived at is no. I’m not telling anyone else not to do this, but I’m not going to do it. Why? Because I don’t really want to, which is weird, because I do love ranking things. I have my top 100 films list, which I update every five years in a very long and drawn-out process, where I watch hundreds of movies and write a whole book’s worth of text using a piece of software I’ve custom made myself just for this purpose for every time I’ve done this (four times). The whole thing takes me about a year (of course, not full time, but a lot of time anyhow) So, yeah. I take ranking things seriously.
Still, I don’t want to rank the 55 (or 60 or 65) contestants on these shows. I probably could do it, but I’m just unwilling. The thing is, while I haven’t liked all of the contestants from the beginning of each series, I’ve grown to like each of them through their respective series.
That’s the nature of the show: You have people who are willing to put themselves out there by doing these ridiculous tasks. They all bring their own perspectives and have moments of pure genius… or pure stupidity or both. Looking at #Hometasking, you can see that people just enjoy doing this stuff.
I mean, there’s no actual point to it. You don’t really win anything. The prizes brought by the other contestants are just jokes and apparently the contestants aren’t always willing to let go of them either despite the premise. Like Jamali Maddix noted on the Taskmaster Podcast, no one is keeping score about who actually wins in panel shows. It’s all about participation.
The conceit of the show is that we have a taskmaster, who just wants people to do weird stuff for him. And people do them often without question. Sometimes they do say no, like when Katherine Ryan decided not to eat the raw egg, but that’s not something that happens very often. Dave Gorman basically tried to cheat just for the heck of it. Mostly they just do it. Of course, there is money involved for the contestants, but some of them must be quite wealthy, so it’s not only about that. Nor do the #Hometaskers get anything more than possible recognition
Then again, why do we do things in general? No one is paying me for writing this. I don’t even have many readers and these random articles tend not to get many at all. Still, I enjoy this. Maybe I can contribute just a little bit to the world, but probably not. I might even just mess up search results or something. In this way Taskmaster might just be onto something deeper.
Bonus: Even though I don’t want to rank all the contestants, I’ll give you my favorite execution of a task from each season.
- Romesh Ranganathan for Tree Wizard
- Jon Richardson’s music video
- I loved each of the trailers for the Taskmaster movie and I’m not going to pick between them
- Lolly Adefope playing hide-and-seek
- While Sally Phillips had several memorable performances in her chosen role, Kumar’s and Watson’s song just came so out of nowhere that it’s actually the task I think of first when I have to explain the series to someone
- Liza Tarbuck’s homage for the Taskmaster was quite weird
- Rhod Gilbert being creepy
- Sian Gibson’s worst thing to do to Alex (mostly with how giggly she became)
- Rose Matafeo’s Taskmaster song
- Mawaan Rizwan’s sleight of hand obfuscating the real trick
- We’ve seen only four episodes, but Charlotte Ritchie’s ‘Wheeeee!’ might just win.