Cuz we out droppin' science, son..........

Spoilers follow for the season-20 finale of Taskmaster, which premiered on YouTube at 5 p.m. Eastern on November 13. 

Every episode of the British game show Taskmaster is a new experiment in reading comprehension, creative thinking, and wondering, Which of these five contestants will lose their patience first? It’s harder than it looks to win a horse race while eating a plate of olives and grapes and throwing darts, or painting a portrait using only substances you can dribble out of your mouth. It’s great television.

Taskmaster has a simple conceit: Five comedians or performers compete against one another for the approval of the tyrannical Taskmaster, a role played with gusto by Greg Davies. The Taskmaster’s “assistant,” “Little” Alex Horne, introduces the contestants to the Taskmaster House in London, presents them with their tasks, and oversees their performance over a number of weeks. (Horne, who created and executive-produces the show, also designs all the tasks and scores and performs the series’ music with his band, the Horne Section.) After the tasks are finished, the five contestants meet in a studio in front of a live audience, where they watch the tasks back with Davies and Horne and receive points for their performances from Davies. At the end of the season, the contestant with the most accumulated points wins a meaningless prize: a bust of Davies’s head.

Over ten years, Taskmaster has gathered a rabidly adoring fan base in the U.K., where it’s a cornerstone of the comedy-panel-show circuit and spawned a cottage industry of podcasts and international versions. Its joys are many: the discovery of new comedians, the chemistry among the cast members, the outlandishness of the tasks themselves, and the lovingly prickly dom-sub dynamic between Davies and Horne in studio. Each season feels like a highly choreographed descent into comedic madness, especially this year’s two offerings. Season 19 featured the series’ first American contestantThe expat Desiree Burch competed on season 12, but Mantzoukas was the first American based in the U.S. to appear on the show., Jason Mantzoukas, who made it his mission to destroy as much of the Taskmaster House as possible. Season 20 returned to an all-British lineup with contestants Maisie Adam, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Phil Ellis, Ania Magliano, and Reece Shearsmith, whose varying reactions to the tasks — hysteria, confusion, and, in Bhaskar’s case, couldn’t-be-fucked resignation — demonstrate the series’s comedic range.

Thanks to Taskmaster’s growth in viewers and YouTube subscribers, the 20th season also featured a new release model. For the first time, weekly episodes aired simultaneously in the U.K. and U.S. on YouTube. And with Taskmaster renewed by Channel 4 through 2026 and series 21 already filmed, Horne and Davies are keeping the momentum going. “Greg and I know less about the show than any of the people who watch it. We wouldn’t know if we were filming episode No. 200 or 113,” Horne says. “We move on fairly swiftly to the next weird, intense bit. Series 20 goes, and we’ve done Series 21. In our heads, they’re the next special people.”

You’ve now made more than 200 episodes of Taskmaster and the show has been on for a decade. Did you do anything different from previous seasons to celebrate? Greg Davies: I don’t think we ever discussed doing anything special because it was number 20. I don’t think him and I are sentimental enough about round numbers.

Alex Horne: It’s exactly that. Each series, we think, Let’s make this one better than the last one. But you don’t want to single out this particular group of five people. It’s more of the same and hopefully completely different, rather than saying, “This is special.”

G.D.: Otherwise we’d have a lot of upset comedians thinking we didn’t think No. 17 was special. Each one does feel like a whole new thing. The combinations are always unique in their response to things.

This season ended with an unprecedented three-way tiebreak between Ania, Maisie, and Phil. The contestants had to remember how many instances of the letter T were in the American Gothic–style portrait of you two in the house’s living room. None of them correctly remembered it was four, but Maisie had the closest guess with five, so she won the season. What do you remember about the energy in the studio when that happened?  A.H.: It was quite weird. It’s the finale, but the audience hasn’t seen anything else. We keep them up to date a bit, but they don’t know the running jokes. We sometimes have to say, “Just so you know, this has happened.” But there is also a sense of occasion by episode 10. We knew this one was close, but we didn’t know it was that close. And it did feel momentous, maybe because it was series 20. But I think it was a surprise mainly because Maisie had been so rubbish throughout, but she ended up in the top three!

G.D.: Yeah, and she’d been very cross, and normally the people who are very cross don’t end up winning.

“I wouldn’t have predicted Maisie would win something that involved measured thought,” says Horne. Photo: Avalon/Channel 4

Part of the series’ in-studio dynamic is this homoerotic relationship between you two, which this season got very specific with Alex mentioning the fan fiction, and Greg, your joke about leaving lube in the park. How do you maneuver acknowledging the fans’ shipping without feeling like you’re crossing some kind of line? G.D.: Well, I think that any homoeroticism on display is entirely those people’s fault. We’re very suggestible human beings, and it’s funnier to lean into that stuff than it is to refute it. But maybe it’s there, Roxana. I’m open to there being feelings between Alex and I that we haven’t yet explored. [Laughs.]

A.H.: I also think it’s quite fluid. Sometimes there’s a season where, for some reason, we are quite intense in our relationship, and sometimes we’re quite cold. It’s just like life.

G.D.: It’s like any marriage.

A.H.: We blow hot and cold. We should organize some special time, though, Greg. You know, make sure we don’t let things die completely.

G.D.: We should. I find it as fascinating as you, Roxana. I don’t know quite where it came from, but all I would say is, We have a lot of fun. And if there’s something about it in the atmosphere, then we’ll explore it.

A.H.: We feel pretty safe in each other’s company in a comedy way. We know each other pretty well.

G.D.: What Alex means by that is he feels safe because he’s a married man. And he thinks that provides some level of “things can’t change.” And what I would say is, Things do change.

Alex, you’ve said tasks really take shape after the fifth contestant has finished, because then you get a sense of the edited narrative of the task. Was there a task this season that had the easiest narrative to envision? A.H.: The Snakes and Steps task was pretty clear. It was such an elaborate setup. A two-parter task is really annoying for us in production because it’s twice the work. You film half of it at the house and half of it on location. We let them design the board, and they didn’t know what was coming. It was out of our control, and it was very nearly that all five of them completed it so simply, but the fact that the game didn’t fall Reece’s way, that was just a really fun, easy narrative to go, “We’ll have four people doing it quickly, and then there’s Reece.” It wasn’t hard to tell the editor what we wanted.

Do you have a favorite task from this season? G.D.: My problem is remembering, isn’t it?

A.H.: Me too. We’ve done another series since. The making-things-awkward task was good.

G.D.: That was great. That was my favorite from the season.

A.H.: We did this heist one, which happened to come out the same week as the heist at the Louvre, which I really enjoyed. I do like the big-scale team tasks.

G.D.: The heist was the most excited I’ve seen our director, Andy Devonshire, and he’s quite an excitable gentleman, so that’s saying something. He loved the filmic nature of that.

A.H.: Sometimes we literally forget 50 percent of the tasks or more.

G.D.: That’s me. He’s being kind. I’m the one that has to be reminded of whom we’ve had on the show. Granddad gets sleepy!

Every season casts five people who have palpable chemistry. What do you consider to be a successful dynamic for the cast? G.D.: I’ve never not been confounded by how any group of five have presented themselves under pressure. There is a science to putting the right people together, but I don’t think the science ever adds up the way we thought it would.

A.H.: We do try to think about, if we’ve got somebody who’s a bit dry, we need somebody sparky next to them. If you’ve got somebody who’s older, we try to have somebody younger. But there’s no magic formula. Sometimes the person you think to be dry is a real live wire. Sometimes they’re a really friendly group, and sometimes they’re really prickly — we can’t see it coming. We just try to make variety. We don’t want two of the same people, but we’ve also discovered there aren’t two people who are the same, really.

Is there one cast that surprised you the most?  A.H.: I would say series one was quite interesting, because it kicked it off. They immediately set up a WhatsApp group and some of us went to Cologne as a group afterwards, which you don’t normally do after a TV show.

G.D.: There was one group we thought were going to be hard work in that we thought there were some fairly strident people in it, people who have sort of traded on confrontation, like Julian Clary. And then it was just a ’60s love-in. They all fell in love with one another. It was in the Sue Perkins year, series 16.

A.H.: That was the one, because it was Sam Campbell and Julian. And we thought Julian was spiky on camera and off camera, but he was so lovely.

G.D.: They were hanging out all the time! To a great or a lesser extent, they all end up in weird lifelong friendship bonds, which speaks of what I said about how intense the world is for the time we’re there.

How does casting work? Do people submit themselves? Are you reaching out? A.H.: It is a rough-and-ready process. Sometimes we’ll hear that someone’s interested. With Jason Mantzoukas, he came to us, which is unusual. Greg and I both have people we think would be brilliant, and we might talk to them personally. We hear about people through the grapevine who are sort of newer, because we don’t have our finger on the pulse quite as much. But we have friends, like Ed Gamble or Tim Key, who do seem to know more than us. It’s a small comedy community, and we know most people, I suppose. We talked about Eric Idle today. I suddenly realized, we’ve never asked Eric Idle! I think he’d be brilliant.

“There is a science to putting the right people together, but I don’t think the science ever adds up the way we thought it would,” says Davies. Photo: Avalon/Channel 4

Greg, in season 16, you referred to Julian and his teammates, Sam and Lucy Beaumont, as “Uncle Julian and the two lunatics,” which really speaks to the generational nature of the show. Often on teams, there is one older person paired with two younger people, like Sanjeev, Ania, and Phil this season. Why is that multigenerational balance is so important to the show?  G.D.: The comedy world over here is ever-changing. There are comics from different generations who treat performance and comedy in a different way, and it’s fascinating that performative styles are ever-shifting. If we had all 25-year-olds, there’s a good chance we might have a group that’s not too dissimilar from each other. You break that by having different generations. I also think a lot of good comedy is basically a family unit — we often end up having a mum, dad, or some version of a broken family. I love it when a family bond starts.

A.H.: Although we split them into a two and a three for the teams, which is kind of arbitrary and weird because it’s not fair, but it balances out somehow. Sometimes it’s an uncle and two lunatics. With Ed Gamble, it was him, Katy Wix, and Rose Matafeo, who were quite similar ages, and then Mom and Dad were David Baddiel and Jo Brand together. You had the generations with each other and Brand and Baddiel having cups of tea all the time. Hopefully it’s different dynamics each time. For teams, it comes down to who’s available when. Sometimes I do think, Who would go well with someone? But at the end of the day, if they can’t make filming work, they’re just shoved into whichever side that fits.

James Acaster was on Vulture’s Good One podcast, and he described coming into the Taskmaster House thinking he would tackle each task with a certain strategy, but when he got there, all that planning went out the window. Greg, you mentioned watching that happen with every cast, to a certain degree. Do you think this is a show that can support strategy, period? A.H.: I don’t think you can have much of a plan, because we want people to be themselves and react in the moment. If you’re thinking, I plan to do it in this way, I just don’t think you’re going to be as funny. Jason actually had more of a plan than anyone else because he knew the show inside out and he wanted to make a splash and do his thing. But in general, I tell people, no pre-prepared jokes, nothing that you’ve rehearsed.

G.D.: It doesn’t really allow for that. They don’t get a chance to apply an existing comedic persona to this, because there’s, you know, ducks to be fished out of a pond or whatever. And Alex is very good at wrong-footing people. If I go on a panel show about current events, I will enforce the Greg Davies comedy persona as best as I can. You can’t with Taskmaster, you just have to roll with it. People reveal sides of themselves they wouldn’t normally reveal.

Alex, how are you coming up with tasks? What is your process?  A.H.: Without seeming too pretentious, I do see it as writing jokes. I did stand-up comedy for a long time. You have a constant bubbling of ideas as a comic; you notice things and think, That’s interesting. Now my intuition is tuned to what would make a good task. I do have a constant load of notes on my phone, and then I go away for two days somewhere and try to solidify them. I used to go to my hot tub a lot because there’s no distractions. I don’t have a hot tub currently, which is tragic. It’s dog walks now. Each season, I have a general number, which is about 30 individual ones. You only need 25 because you have the team ones as well. We’re quite lucky that if a task fails, often, it’s still funny. And if I look bad, then that’s funny.

G.D.: Roxana, his ability to constantly churn out tasks is borderline perverse. It’s as close to an illness as you can get. And I’ll honestly say, in 20 seasons, I’ve not heard him complain once. When I write, I smash my home up with rage. He just has this bizarre ability to keep surprising us.

A.H.: I’m coming up with half a script where they complete it. I write the setup line and they do the punchline.

G.D.: It’s still remarkable. And I’m not one to praise him, as you know.

James also said that on his first day, he filmed five tasks. Alex, do you have a sense of how many tasks it takes for competitors to feel like they’ve found their groove?  A.H.: Day one is definitely different to day two. Day one, they’re slightly mad and slightly more skittish. By day two, they’re ready. We often give two different contestants different tasks on day one and day two. They might come at it from a day-two persona compared to a day-one persona. It’s quite nice to not have everyone rabbit-in-the-headlights on the same task.

G.D.: I didn’t actually know that. That’s interesting.

A.H.: It’s slightly manipulating them, but only insofar as they’re getting the same task on a different day.

Greg, have you ever suggested a task? G.D.: In our very early discussions for the show, when Alex first approached me, he did say, “If you’d like to be part of the task team, we could make that part of the deal,” but it quickly became apparent that he doesn’t need me to do that. I would happily sit and brainstorm, but I just don’t think he needs it.

A.H.: It’s only me and the tiny production team who know all these tasks intimately. When people suggest tasks, we tend to say, “Yeah, we’ve done that one,” or “Yeah, we tried that, it didn’t work.” I’m sure Greg could come up with loads of good stuff, but I think we know our roles. There’s something funny about the fact that Greg doesn’t come up with the tasks that they have to complete for him.

G.D.: We’ve always enjoyed that idea, that I’m such a lazy dictator that my instruction is “I want them to be put through a difficult situation. You decide what.” It’s quite in keeping with dictators from history, really. They’re very rarely on the detail of it.

Taskmaster has one the best editing teams in television in terms of creating distinct narratives about the tasks and how they’re performed. One of the recurring elements is that if one person’s performance for a task has been singled out, that means they either did well or they did horribly. How else would you describe the approach to the performance montages?  A.H.: The editors are the most important, unheralded group. Hopefully each montage is slightly different. As soon as we get five people having completed a task, we start the editing of that task. Each one takes like a week, so that’s about 30 weeks. We have three editors, and it’s a rolling thing. It’s laborious, in a positive way. There’s a lot of instinct, and people thinking, This feels like this would work next to that one. You have the light and shade, somebody being really talkative next to someone being silent. We treat each task individually as a mini little film.

G.D.: Nearly every task, there’s someone who absolutely loses their mind, and then there’s someone who’ll find a funny angle and someone who’s victimizing Alex. So much ends up on the cutting-room floor because the contestants give us so much to do with the edit.

A.H.: We do an edit for the studio guessing where the laughs will be. We’re trying to leave a little gap after a funny line. And then we do another edit after the studio to tighten up the tasks. It goes through a lot more editing than most comedy panel shows.

Greg, sometimes when a contestant tries to advocate for themselves, or for other people, you seem to have a reaction of, “I’m not going to do what you tell me to do.” I’m curious how much of that is you maintaining the Taskmaster persona.  G.D.: If you watch the series from the beginning, you can see a real change in the Taskmaster in the studio. I’ve got quite soft in recent years, but that our dynamic has changed subtly as well; perhaps I’m not so vindictive to Alex anymore. In the last couple of seasons, I’ve allowed people to change my mind, whereas perhaps in the early seasons, I would do exactly what you’ve said, be dogged in scoring it the way I wanted to. It’s much easier to say, I am this mad dictator who won’t change his mind. In recent seasons, it’s a bit more nuanced because we all know what we’re doing. People don’t mind that flexibility. Sometimes they’ll do a big group task where everyone did so many creative, wonderful things, and if we take the letter of the law, there will be people who should score zero because they didn’t tick off one aspect of the task. More recently, we’ll let those things slide because it feels in the spirit of the response. But at the same time, we’ve reserved the right to decide.

A.H.: In the old days, Greg and I used to meet up in the week before and prepare a bit more. Now we try to keep it as fresh as possible. Greg will have some things he knows he might say, but I won’t tell him what I’m gonna say, and he won’t tell me what he’s gonna say.

G.D.: There’s no lies in what you see. I don’t prejudge the tasks. I’ll sometimes watch some of the more complicated videos beforehand, because otherwise I’ll miss things in the studio — it’d be preposterous for me to suggest I’m seeing them all for the first time. But I watch them in isolation. And I try not to score them until we’re in the room. I can’t explain it — there’s a bizarre alchemy in the studio that affects what you’re watching. Social media is constantly accusing me of being inconsistent and throwing people under the bus on a whim. That’s never the case. I always, in the moment, score it the way I see fit. I’m frequently wrong. But in that part of our universe, they are subject to my whims. And I’m a judge who’s been asked to make multiple judgments over a 2.5-hour piece of improvisation.

Have there been any contestants whose in-studio personas were really memorable to you? I’m thinking of Fatiha El-Ghorri on season 19 trying to get you to marry her, or this season, Ania’s running gag that you, Greg, are secretly her biological father and abandoned her.  G.D.: Fatiha deciding she was going to make me her husband happened fairly spontaneously in one of the episodes, and we both kept looping to it. I think Ania had thought of how the dates add up that I could be her father, which I find vile and depressing. But I loved her runner. I love seizing on those things.

A.H.: For me, Fern Brady and John Kearns in series 14 were sparky and funny. We didn’t know what they were going to say. And similarly, Sam Campbell was definitely one of our favorites. It’s always nice when there’s someone who we think, Oh, we’ve not had that type of person before.

G.D.: My favorite thing that’s been said to me personally was Sam Campbell asking me if I was a child of divorce. It’s simply the best thing that’s been said to me on 20 seasons.

Have you ever considered or have people ever asked to be repeat contestants, outside of the tournament of champions? A.H.: People want it, which spoils the magic. The question I get asked the most is, “Will you do a Loser of Losers?” Champion of Champions is one thing, but as soon as they’ve done it once, the bubble’s burst a bit. They know how to play the game, and it’s not as natural. Also, having someone back means we don’t have someone new. However, never say never. And we have some idea for the future where we might do something where some people come back, so we can’t say much more.

Jason was the first American contestant from the U.S. who was coming over to film, rather than an American who now lives in the U.K. Has his appearance opened the door to other Americans? A.H.: We’re really open to it. We’re not trying to court America, but there are voices that can be on the show. Yes is the answer.

G.D.: We love that we’ve got different nations wanting to be part of the madness.

A.H.: It helps that Jason wasn’t well-known here, but everyone said, “Oh, that guy!” He’d been in a lot of things, but he’s not your go-to. If you were to name an American comedian everyone’s heard of here, it wouldn’t be him. He was a really useful first.

I’ve been asked by my colleagues to say certain names to you, and I’m wondering if you would tell me, have you ever approached them to be on the show? The first one is Matt Berry. A.H.: He’s on a list and I think he’d be great. I don’t think we’ve approached him, and I’d like to know if he’d want to do it. He’s got a great persona. I haven’t seen him be Matt Berry that much.

G.D.: That’s what I was going to say. I would be absolutely fascinated by that, because there’s such a strong flavor to every character Matt plays. I have met him, but very briefly. He couldn’t be as flamboyant as his characters; he seemed quite quiet by comparison. That would be intriguing.

Emma Thompson. G.D.: A national treasure over here, and famously outspoken. I think she’d be a great challenge for me in my role. She immediately commands more authority than me, so I’d have to dig deep.

A.H.: I can’t imagine her agreeing to do 10 episodes of our stupid show, but one would be great. She’s from Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s era at Footlights. Any of that bunch would be great.

G.D.: She’d be great to have on one of the specials. You’d have to see a return to me being quite dogmatic and strict. That’s the only way to contain someone as flamboyant as Emma.

David Mitchell, whose wife Victoria Coren Mitchell was on season 12.  G.D.: We’ve asked Mitchell loads.

A.H.: We’re friends with David and we know him, and he said he didn’t want to go on a show where he would be rubbish. And I think we can assure him he wouldn’t be rubbish. And also, if he is rubbish, that’s really funny. I haven’t given up hope because we all know he’d be great on the show.

G.D.: He’s one of the people we’ll keep asking.

Stavros Halkias.  G.D.: I think Stavros is hilarious. I was watching him on a podcast two nights ago. There’s a wealth of people in your country we would love to have on the show. I’d like to have Andy Samberg on it.

A.H.: I wanted Ali Wong. I think Ali Wong would be terrifying on it. She’s a funny lady.

There are so many international versions of Taskmaster now. Do you watch any of those, and if you do, have you learned anything about other countries’ comedy cultures from doing so? G.D.: I’ve seen clips here and there, and I don’t indulge past that point because I am a sponge. If I see one of the Taskmasters with a certain characteristic or a new tick, I know I’ll start doing it.