More Taskmaster (series 8, 10, 11, New Year Treat 2021, and podcast)
Thank you guys for the comments on my last post. I think I've responded to everyone, but apologies if I've missed you -- your comments and virtual hugs and everything are appreciated.
I've been been alternating doomscrolling with Taskmaster (and earlier, crazy work with Taskmaster), which is how I've watched 3 more series and listened to like a dozen and a half podcast episodes, so you get the dump of that.
Taskmaster, series 8 -- This was an interesting one for me because it was the first series I started without having seen ANY clips or highlights or tasks a priori -- I think maybe the YouTube channel just hadn't gotten around to clipping them yet? So I was going in completely cold, with no notion about any of the contestants or expectations for what I was going to see. And I found the first episode a bit slow at first -- the contestants didn't seem as vivid/differentiated as in many of the past series. Like, in most previous series, by the middle of episode 1 I had some sense of "X is the wild/clever/sweet/oddball/raunchy/competitive/etc. one", but here it took longer for me to get a sense for what these people were like.
series 8 spoilers
But once we got to the final task of episode 1, the hide and seek at the train station, I started getting a better feeling for them individually, and Lou became an early favorite after the trick with the bin, which was both clever and very committed (and color-coordinated to boot!) I did continue to like Lou -- she went all out, even when things didn't work out (like trying to make "delicious dust" out of burnt porn), as well as her tendency to overstuff her prize tasks with two or three different takes on the prompt. But also, she was so firmly ahead most of the time, that I pretty much didn't bother rooting for her, and also after a while only found her really interesting in team tasks, more on which below.
Very unexpectedly, my favorite for the series ended up being Iain, but not in the same way as past favorite contestants: I didn't find him the funniest, necessarily (I'm actually not sure that I found any of these people funny, per se -- not, like, in an intentional, comedian way), nor the most likeable, nor even the most entertaining to watch necessarily (although he did tend to be one of the most entertaining ones, because he clearly had the most tendency to fly off the handle when things weren't working). But no, the reason I was most interested in Iain is that, amazingly, he had an honest to goodness CHARACTER ARC! He starts out with puppet pedantry (which, that was a great puppet and I'm glad he got his 5 points) and hubris (the volcano -- "I genuinely don't want to talk about it", which Greg respected -- and counting his championship chickens before they were hatched; showboating and ruining his performance in the pink ladies task), and being a jerk in team tasks, which he comes to recognize and feel bad about, and by the studio segments towards the end, he's got this air of rueful humility/ability to laugh at himself that did not seem to be there at the beginning at all, and it's kind of amazing. Anyway, so Iain was the MVP in that regard, being the most interesting to watch, and quite often also the funniest to watch, not because he was being intentionally funny, but because he had a funny way of losing his shit. Some other favorite Iain moments: the "best face" prize task, which Iain won with the combination of onesie with Greg's giant face on it and T-shirt and tigths with Greg's face all over them which Iain was wearing underneath his studio clothes, and then sat in the whole episode -- now that's some commitment! Also Greg saying, after Iain stumbles reading the task in the same episode that had the "sangwich" and "chootney" reveals, "Turns out there are quite a few words that are a problem for you" and Iain responding, with a complicated smile: "I've got a law degree." There was a lot going on with Iain, and it was fun to watch.
But actually there were no contestants at all this season that I didn't like, and I thought that the five were a good mix -- especially brilliantly paid off in team tasks, which I will get to, but even just on their own I thought they were all nicely different. I pretty much always enjoyed Paul Sinha's cerebral approach, combined with being very bad at the physical side of the tasks, between his recovering shoulder and I guess general physical ineptitude (very relatable). It was interesting because it was not always possible to predict up front if he was going to be brilliant at a task or (more usually) terrible -- like, the caviar mustache was amazing (although Lou's willingness to put live mealworms on her face was impressive as well), and his ability to recall the cards with only one mistake too (but not as surprising), and then you had tasks that were a mixture of clever and inept, like moving the beach ball with water: which he did not do well on even after making the very clever switch of moving the finish line to where it was 1 m from the start and slightly downhill. Oh, also, I didn't make the connection myself, but reading about it on the wiki, knowing that the bathrobe was a reference to Arthur Dent/H2G2 made me like him even more.
Joe Thomas was an interesting case for me, in that he looked depressed and/or confused and/or blank most of the time, which had not worked for me at all with some previous contestants (e.g. Paul Chowdhry), but there was just enough balance with Joe that while he wasn't my favorite, he did work for me on the whole -- he had enough brilliant performances and enough outbursts to punctuate his overall confused/bummed out demeanor that I enjoyed watching him, and I thought they'd matched him up with a partner really well, so that I particularly enjoyed him in team tasks.
Speaking of, I probably have the least to say about Sian, but I actually always enjoyed her take on the tasks (and also go her for calling out the show for being "heightist"). Like, she was seldom the flashiest, but she seemed like a nice, fun person, and I appreciated how she embraced the glitter and princesses thing to the hilt. (I've also now listened to the podcost episode where she's the guest, and she sounds equally adorable there. I had not realized she was a huge fan of the show before being on it herself, but that is also sweet.)
I also really enjoyed the dynamic between the five, which was different from the ones I'd seen to date. Series 5 gang felt like a nicely supportive cohort; series 7 bunch were bickery like kids; series 1 were competitive and kept trying to undercut each other. This bunch had a whole interesting dynamic where they took potshots at each other but then also came together, and interacted in interesting ways, even outside the very interesting microcosm of team tasks which I will talk about separately. So you had all these little moments like Iain disparaging everyone else's puppets, and then a couple of episodes later getting upset when Paul Sinha offered to weigh in with his opinion (as a former GP) on the "best present for a doctor" prize task, saying that Iain's gift was aimed at the wrong kind of alcohol consumption and that his favorite would actually be Joe's BMX bike (rather than his own beard disguise thing): Iain thought it was weird Paul wasn't using it as an opportunity to tout his own gift, to which Paul Sinha replied, "Well, not everyone's as dysfunctionally competitive as you, Iain." Or even earlier, with the rice transport, when Alex pointed out that Lou had washed the honey jar before trying to use it to transport rice (in contrast to Iain, who'd poured rice into the jar with the honey still in), and Lou was like, "A woman!" -- and then when Sian, in last place of those who did not get disqualified, gave her a look, Lou amended it to "A better woman." (and, on that task, I was also so impressed to see that Lou saved the honey in a bowl instead of just pouring it out!) Or the moment in one of the live tasks, where you were supposed to put on sleeping bags and salute, when Joe, who had been the first to complete all the parts, by a long shot, failed to salute for the correct amount of time, and Lou quipped, "Men always think it's longer than it is" and Iain, who saluted for the correct amount of time and ended up winning, shouted out "Not all men!" But for all the entertaining sniping at each other, I liked the way, from the start, the lot came together to help Paul with the sleeping bags in the live task which he couldn't do due to his injured shoulder (which he had previously not mentioned), and cheered him on in other tasks. Similarly, when preternaturally-calm Joe loses his cool in the final after Paul and Iain flush their erasers down the toilet when he spent 20 minutes actually rubbing it out of existence, it was very neat that the others got up to give him a standing ovation (I was also very glad that Greg gave him an unprecedented 3 bonus points). I think that, really, this cohort felt the most like a group of friends, who will give each other shit but come together when it matters.
I feel like there were some particularly fun tasks in this series -- maybe as the show is getting bigger and having more resources than just coconuts and eggs? Like, one of my favorite bits was the one with the very cute toddler and stuff designed to engage her; I was not surprised that the lowest score in the task was 3 points (for Lou's duck pinata, with the next highest going to Joe Dough and Iain's puppet), because they were all fun to watch, and while Sian's iPad video with the pretty princess was not a surprising hit (Sian being the only parent I'm sure helped), Paul's ducks-and-shark ecosystem being so engaging to the toddler was delightful to see. The final tasks where they had to drive a scooter around a parking lot was also really funny, and I really enjoyed the moving the beach ball with water task and the different approaches; as a side note, I immediately thought of pushing it with ice (which Joe eventually hit on, which Greg called genius). Alex snorting cheese dust through a celery was also something else.
The best, though, were the team tasks. I'd said in series 7 that the teams broke down along fairly boring lines, but definitely not so here! Joe and Sian were an interesting mix, with him so morose and her perky and maternal, and I feel like, really, some of their very best performances came out in the team tasks -- the rock album cover, the "moving together as one person" which really did look solemn and majestic. And I was impressed by how calmly Joe took it when Sian's attempt at cheating in the complicated ball-catching task -- because she felt bad that she had contributed nothing, having missed the blue ball which it was her only job to catch -- disqualified them both. But the best part of the show was the team of Lou, Iain, and Paul, being AMAZINGLY dysfunctional. The heavy-things-in-the-bath task was already great, with Iain stridently announcing, "I'm quietly confident, actually" while Lou tried to argue with him, to Lou saying a little later, "I'd like to apologize for my behaviour. I just thought we should panic." and Iain retorting, "I agree. Which is why I thought we should do all of this." I was then amused to see that the next time we saw them in the task, it had progressed to Iain in the hammock and Lou saying things like "I've got you, baby" to him, while they all worked together (with Iain still bossing people around a bit too much; as I said above, Iain being chagrined watching it back was nice to see). The studio reactions to this were great across the board, actually, with Greg saying, "Thank god Daddy was there, watching on from behind the barrel" and Paul speaking up that, in his defense, it was actually his idea to put things in at the last minute, which prompted the following exchange: Iain: "If it wasn't for Paul Sinha, it would have been me and Lou in the hammock screaming at each other." Lou: "Just how I like it." Greg: "As the Barrel Dad will tell you, these kids have got to make their own mistakes." BUT THEN! The last team task was the "move like one person" one, and it was one of the funniest things I've seen on the show yet, on par with the team task in series 4 where they had to fill and clingfilm the bath. First, the beginning was already great, with Lou and Iain still clashing (Greg: "Not a good start to a task, 'Iain, you bellend'" Iain: "Absolutely justified."), and Paul agreeing to be the arms when he'd just had an operation on his shoulder and was told not to exercise it, and then the second part of the task came up, and the way the whole thing just fell apart, since their "one person" idea was designed for lying on one's back, not actual locomotion, and it really did look like the aftermath of some terrible accident or apoocalypse, the way they were wriggling and rolling around -- I was weeping with laughter, and had to rewind a couple of bits because I couldn't see what was going on with tears streaming out of my eyes / couldn't hear what the team of three was shouting at each other over the sound of my own laughter. I was amused to hear, on the podcast, that Sian would've liked to poach Lou for her and Joe's team; I do agree that Lou would've likely liked that a lot more, but so much comedic value would have been lost!
So that ended up being a lot more fun than I'd been initially expecting. I don't have any individual contestant favorites coming out of that, though I AM looking forward to hearing Iain on the podcast (note to self: episode 43 for s4e5), but I did enjoy it quite a bit as a series thanks to the interpersonal dynamics and the tasks.
With that I had reached the end of the sequentially available series on Taskmaster's official YouTube channel, except that they seem to also have Series 12 there at the moment. I did find a channel that has series 10 and 11, and proceeded to watch that next, and then I think I'll go on to 12, before I go and look for the more elusive 9.
series 10 spoilers
Anyway, so, series 10 was the 2020 series that got disrupted by Covid, and it was interesting/weird to see how social distancing affected things, especially as some of one team's team tasks got filmed before Covid and some after, so you had Daisy and Richard getting up close and personal and the team of three in their own boxes. And then all the studio stuff was post social-distancing, which meant contestants sitting farther apart (meaning also nobody was hugging or holding hands supportively, and I think overall lessened the in-studio interaction) and even Alex and Greg separated more than usual. And the live studio tasks were rather more lackluster/less exciting than usual, since they had to try to keep the contestants apart -- but, well, they made do, and I still found some of them quite fun. I think my favorite was the noises charades (and I was genuinely impressed by some of the contestants did for that, like Mawaan's masterful impersonation of a microwave or Daisy's fax machine).
I thought I had not seen anything with this bunch either, but actually I had at least seen parts of the "make a thing properly vanish" task, which was actually very cool to see again -- Mawaan's thing with the cow is great, but I also really liked Richard's vanishing Alex and thought Katherine's vanishing couch thing was accomplished in a neat if overly complicated way, and thought it deserved more points than the rampaging chicken. And I knew a little bit about Mawaan trying to fill an egg with helium from the "All Star" vid, but actually the whole task was way more fun than I'd been expecting, not just Mawaan's assorted helium-based misfires, but also Johnny's, and Daisy's appearance of unlikely success (when we didn't see the egg in the pan, I was definitely wondering if it wasn't as successful as it seemed, because I've learned by now how this show likes to play it, with reveals of things like Joe Nicholdson's potato); and also you had to admire Richard's determination till the last smear of egg on the paper airplane -- and attempt after attempt failing utterly.
This is another cohort where I had no strong favorites but also didn't have anyone I didn't like. Katherine was a wonderfully cuckoolander contestant, and seemed to be floating through a different show entirely at times, but in an entertaining way, and I also was amused by the contrast between her usual dreamy demeanor and moments where she would lose her cool, like in the "draw a monster from Greg's description" task, where Mawaan asked her what a tusk was (poor Mawaan, animal body parts are clearly not his strong suit, what with that and the duck lips XD) and she responded with "Fuck off, I'm not telling you!" And sometimes her off-the-wallness failed utterly, like never even leaving the room in the spider-shoeing task, and sometimes it paid off wonderfully, like when she was the only one to go and get some coconut water from the fridge instead of trying to open up the coconuts. And I thought her upsidedown film was the best of the bunch, the chin characters (eyes drawn on her and Alex's chins) really unsettling in an oddly compelling way XD
Mawaan was also interestingly bimodal, alternating between nailing some tasks with unorthodox approaches (the chicken-driving swap, which he executed perfectly; the barmat building one, where he brought the doorbell with him, the only one to figure that out -- and then also chose to build a lighthouse with a rotating lens, or on the equally clever but for more disgusting side, "bin juice" ("getting trashed" XD) for the cocktail task, and doing things in an unorthodox way that didn't pay off but were still fun to watch. Anyway, Mawaan was great fun, and also had some of the more interesting prize tasks in an otherwise pretty boring cohort in that regard -- his shrine to himself XD -- and was also just really fun to watch in the studio. I think he was definitely my favorite in terms of livening up the studio portions, between banter with Greg, interacting with what the other contestants were claiming, and his colorful outfits with matching nail polish. I ended up liking Mawaan way more than I thought I would from the first couple of tasks -- I feel like in terms of entertainment value, he was the MVP, over Katherine even, just because I thought her performance was fairly consistent in the ways it was inadvertently funny, but Mawaan kept being funny in different ways.
The other really entertaining contestant was Johnny -- he could always be counted on to run around shouting like his hair was on fire and mostly to fail, or at least flail, amusingly. He was a little bit one-note, too, compared to Mawaan, but at the same time I was consistently amused by him berating and/or apologizing and/or talking to the inanimate objects he was interacting with. And some of his entries, like the balloon portrait of Greg, or the cloudy mule cocktail with a sparkler, or the house of cards (before it fell apart) were really quite impressive. I was also very amused by his interpretation of the "draw the animal in the mirror that is wearing a hat and watching you" task, because, fair, and I'm glad he got full points for that interpretation.
Which leaves Richard and Daisy, winner and runner-up, who kept swapping frontrunner positions throughout the show, before Richard's extremely narrow win in the final task. I didn't especially enjoy Daisy's performance, but damn I'm impressed by her just going for broke while being pregnant, especially the fairly intense tasks like the boat-on-concrete one, or the way she managed to be quickest in the spider booting task despite being the only one running back and forth the whole way. Like, RESPECT, lady! Also, I was impressed by her knowledge of wasp facts, which Alex corroborated (I did not need to know that wasps can recognize landmarks and faces, but it is an undeniably cool fact) after the dead wasp Katherine brought in for a prize task XD And Richard was just, like, solid? pleasant? I liked him, and was reasonably happy with his win, but don't have much to say about him. I did think their team dynamic was interesting -- it was neat/unusual to have the two consistently highest performers on the same team of two; I guess the "girls team" on series 7 was also like that, but somehow it didn't feel like it, not sure why -- maybe because Kerry and Jessica's approaches were quite different in general, but I felt like Richard's and Daisy's were more similar. And Hippogate aside, I thought they made a good, solid team.
I thought that, Greg's announcement that he was going to be a hardass about the rules notwithstanding, it was actually kind of a fluffier-than-usual series. There was the contestants helping each other (starting with helping Daisy) in the first live studio task, which was sweet. I thought Alex was helping people more than usual (Katherine especially, but not just Katherine). And then I felt like Greg was more giggly and more generous with points (e.g. giving third place as the lowest score and tied first and second in the homework task to spend $20 out of character, or THREE first places + a second + a third in the water balloons task -- which, OK, was super impressive, given that everyone's balloon held and three of them maxed out the height, so on that one it was less subjective). I wonder if some of it was, like, pandemic wildness, where they were all a little punch-drunk and just enjoying hanging out with people. Also, randomly, I thought they were playing up the Alex/Greg stuff more than before -- but I also wonder if it's just that they SAID suggestive stuff more because they were less able to touch each other. (Also, on that note, Richard's bedding prize XD XD)
Some other favorite tasks I have in my notes was the naming words live task, mostly because of the contrast between Katherine's methodical approach, going through rhyming words, vs Daisy going through all the swearwords (Greg: "Two very different approaches so far.") I also really enjoyed the cocktail making task, both because it was really unusual and because the decibel restriction made it really hard, and the frustration of the contestants was fun to watch (especially Daisy losing her shit and needing to bleed off some of the frustration). I mentioned already Johnny's lovely-looking (and apparently tasting) cocktail and Mawan's brilliant "bin juice" idea to salvage things at the very end, but I also appreciated Alex pronouncing the name of Daisy's cocktail ("the fuck sake") as if "sake" was the liquor.
So, solid series overall, but another one where I did not come away with any contestants I would add to a list of all-time favorites.
I was actually starting to think that maybe I was reaching some kind of saturation with the format, because I enjoyed the last two series I watched, but there were no standouts for me outside of a couple of individual tasks, but then I watched series 11 and was like, nope, this is still brilliant, so long as you've got the right set of contestants -- which this series definitely did -- it joins my list of favorites alongside 2, 4, and 7.
series 11 spoilers
A lot of the credit for that goes to Mike Wozniak, who was my favorite contestant of these five hands down, and also joins the list of my all-time favorites. He was just... so delightfully weird, and so impressively committed -- like, the perfect Taskmaster contestant, really -- if you grew one in a vat for the explicit purpose of fitting well into the TM format, you'd get Mike. And he was just so odd, but, like, in a genuinely funny way. I'm not surprised Greg called him an eccentric English robot, because there really does seem to be something preternatural about how unflappable he is about all the weirdness thrown at him. And just the general air of him -- it's like if a fey creature with shapeshifting powers had learned how to be human from watching Ned Flanders XD I can't even pick out any favorite Mike moments because every moment he was onscreen was a delight, but I did especially enjoy his team dynamic with Lee -- they were such a stark contrast to each other, but also worked together so well! (My least favorite moment was the (ew) hemorrhoid one, so I could have done with less dwelling on that.) But I knew I was going to enjoy the hell out of Mike as a contestant from the very first moment -- the prize task of the first episode -- and his song about prawns (for "something you can carry but only just" prize task, which Mike chose to interpret metaphorically with "a tune"). Mike was also great fun in studio tasks, where mostly I feel like people don't differentiate themselves except by being very bad or throwing tantrums when things go badly. Like, in the slap-and-tong marshmallow grab, after Mike, in a tactical crouch, kept snapping his tongs in an effort to get Jamali to bat first, Greg voiced the thought that had been going through my head: "That's another activity that Mike Wozniak's clearly done before" -- and Lee put the cherry on it: "Just when I thought he couldn't look more like a praying mantis." XD
I also really liked Lee and Sarah "Following the Rules Can Be Fun" Kendall (which makes it all three of the top contestants, series standing-wise) -- Lee's spangled jacket and gruff Northern farmer routine, especially when it came to bossing Alex around, and Sarah's generally straightforward but effective approaches in tasks and funny studio remarks. I think Lee was my second favorite, because he was a fun mix of actual competence, caring about the competition, and having good humour about his mishaps (although I did think Greg was a bit mean to him, like he tends to be to other men in their 50s -- I wonder if this is some kind of Greg-feeling-his-own-mortality thing, since Greg and Lee appear to be exactly the same age, as is Rhod Gilbert, and Richard Herring is only a year older, and they all got ribbed about their age, stamina, cognitive deterioration, etc.) Also, poor vegan Lee, biting into a battered egg and a leather wallet -- I think he managed to pick out the only two likely-non-vegan items to bite into XD (although Alex confirmed the wallet wasn't actually leather, at least). Sarah, meanwhile, just seemed like a very competent contestant and also a fun person to hang out with -- she is one of the few Taskmaster contestants where I could see myself genuinely being friends with them. And I liked that she talked back to Greg; actually, this series in general was pretty high on talking-back-to-Greg, which was fun. I particularly enjoyed Sarah making a face at him/silently parroting back something he was saying about her that she didn't agree with -- it was such a delightfully childish gesture from someone who was generally very put-together and mature. I was very pleased that she won, but I would've also been happy with a Mike or Lee win.
Charlotte was adorable (and looked about 8 in her task outfit overalls XD -- I had to look up how old she really was and could hardly believe it was 30+). I did not particularly like Jamali as a contestant, and thought the points Greg awarded to him often felt too high, but he was entertaining to watch in some tasks, especially with his go-to approach of stamping as hard as possible on things, and also his vendetta against tap water. I actually did not enjoy his interaction with Alex very much, and found his banter with Greg less interesting than the interaction of other characters and Greg, but you can't have everything. I do have to acknowledge that Jamali often came up with innovative techniques, which didn't always work out for him, but were good ideas -- like carrying the plates in a sling for the first task (which paid off for Lee but definitely not for Jamali), or recording himself saying "metronome" so he could munch in peace, and some things in the studio tasks that other people then copied (usually with better results XD). I did think he tended to get a pass on some things that I thought should have disqualified him. Like, in the toilet paper task, was Jamali not disqualified for his loo roll touching the ground because he wrapped it in a baggie before he threw it at the ground? I can see that reasoning, but I thought it was weird that this point wasn't even touched on.
Besides the characters, I was amused by the aesthetic of this season, the Soviet-style poster for the art, the matryoshka decor, the music.
There were a lot of tasks that struck me as really fun in this series, and I wonder if it's the effect of a Covid series, actually -- this one being the first that was planned with social distancing eventualities in mind, so I wonder if it led to some additional creativity on Alex's part to come up with tasks that would be resilient to social distancing, and so kind of explored a different space. One of my favorites was the "catch the rat" one -- I was especially amused by Charlotte being scared of the fake rat, and Lee got bonus points from me for petting the mechanical rat that delivered the task -- and that was before the task proper had even started! As far as what the contestants did, I enjoyed everyone's take except Jamali's, and was amused that several people actually baited their traps with real peanut butter or stand-in for cheese, and definitely agree that Lee's Mousetrap setup deserved to win. I also really enjoyed the "make a uniform for this bee" task, partly for Lee's Beevil Knievel (whom he kept trying to make jump over the buses fruitlessly) but mostly for the studio banter around it: Charlotte, when all five bees were projected on the screen: "This looks like a family of bees: these are their names, and these are their accomplishments." another contestant: "They're all quite proud of Charlotte [whose bee was dressed as the Pope, with six little papal slippers], probably." The do-a-thing-one-handed-under-the-table task from the first episode was also quite fun; I'm not surprised Mike knows or figured out how to play a balalaika, blindly and one-handed, even though the result did not sound much like the Taskmaster tune to me (Jamali: "It's like a horror film at the Kremlin"), but I thought Sarah putting makeup on Alex and Jamali's cushion-spinning deserved to be higher (at least Jamali got the bonus point when Greg failed to spin the pillow later in the episode, but I don't think one point was enough to rectify matters; maybe that's why Greg was giving him higher points than I thought he deserved in later episodes...) Another task I really, really enjoyed was the speed reading/long set of alphabetical instructions one, both for the successes, like Mike Undermining the Vole ("You've got no chutzpah! Your time-keeping skills are abysmal!" and Greg's reaction: "His poor children."), and the not-so-successes (Sarah's ("Argh, fucking zebra!"), and Lee's broken-clock strategy where he remembered that he had to attack something, so he proceeded to attack everything, in the hopes of getting one point, and as a result also got the point for whacking the xylophone, yanking the zebra, and something else. I also really enjoyed the different scientific/swag approaches to weighing Alex's feet and head -- water displacement for Lee (who got it bang on, and used Alex's bare thighs for scratch paper) and (less successfully) Mike, density approximation for Sarah (which didn't work very well), and some kind of scaling and estimating for Charlotte.
But one of the crowning joys of this series for me were the team tasks, in large part because they paired Mike and Lee together, and man, that was a glorious team-up -- quite probably my favorite in all of the ten series I've watched for sheer efficiency (displacing previous favorite duo of Mel-and-Hugh). On the podcast, Ed and Rick Edwards described the team of Lee and Mike (in the tossing a bag of salt from one table to another task) as "Lee taking his enthusiastic dog for a walk", which was very cute and also quite apt. I was sold on this matchup from their very first team task, having an argument -- I'm with Sarah that it was better than a play, and then we had the studio task command performance that was them miming nursery rhymes ("They're being penalized by my idiocy," said Greg, justly). More broadly, I was amused to see that this series had another take on the series 1 task of getting to 11 points where you had to do something with an arcane system that wasn't explained, in the "walk to the gate without setting off the alarm" team task. But my favorite team task was the one with one person directing the blindfolded other(s) to a circle. I think I've done a similar team-builder as part of Management Through People training (it's a good metaphor for managing admittedly), so was especially able to appreciate it. The clipped efficiency of Lee and Mike's cooperation (Lee directing, Mike walking) was really impressive, especially considering that was on the first day they were doing it, I guess. Mike did say earlier that he likes being told what to do, and Lee clearly has no problems giving clipped directions (he does it to Alex all the time without being instructed to), so it was really the perfect match. Except for the compass directions detour, when Lee decided to deviate from clockhands for some reason, that was, like, perfectly played. And the team of three outing was hilarious! Sarah's "tuuuuuuuurn" technique was really brilliant, given the word constraints, but then everything else was just hilarious chaos. But I did like how bad Sarah felt about making Charlotte run in circles and sending Jamali into the hedges full of stinging nettles. (In general, I found part of Sarah's charm to be the contrast between how no-nonsense and sort of gruff she was about herself and how ready she was with praise for the others and apologies when something went wrong and she'd inadvertently hurt another person, like when she accidentally fired a staple at Alex's face during the photocopier art task (about that, I was thinking the same thing Greg said, that she should've brought that for the "makes you look tough" prize task which got her dubbed "picnic girl" for her apocalypse backpack). Oh, and while the gameplay wasn't all that interesting to watch in the take-turns-drawing-a-British-animal task, I thought the results were both adorable, especially in 3D, as was the lore that Mike spun about theirs.
I also thought this was a very quotable series, and apparently Greg agreed, since he kept reading out the quotes more than I ever remember him doing -- but some of the studio banter was also particularly great. Besides quotes that I wrote down in the context of the tasks, some of my other favorites were Lee going "I've got a BAFTA, me" through a mouth full of papadoms in the metronome task, and also his philosophy on anatomy: "It's a grey area, isn't it? Where do the feet end and the hands start?" in the foot-painting task. Probably my favorite quote is Sarah summarizing her performance in the sort-objects-with-your-face task: "Just the thought of me sightlessly licking objects, snuffling around like a salamander on the bottom of the ocean" (which is not how anything works, but is a powerful image XD) And of course there are all the odd little things Mike says, but all of that was just kind of the general tapestry of Mike being Mike.
I feel like this series was clumpier than others -- Charlotte, in last place, was still well above 100 (125), and the top 3 were all in the 150s (Lee, Mike, and Sarah), and I do think that made it feel more fun, more balanced.
I got curious and checked AO3 again to see if people were writing about this bunch. Mike Wozniak does make the top 10 characters filter, and people seem to ship him with Greg (I suppose as a D/s thing it's understandable) and Charlotte, which I wonder if I'm missing some context, because I don't even remember any interaction between the two of them? What I was expecting was Lee/Alex (especially on the basis of the head-and-foot-weighing and the photocopier dinosaur task) and Lee/Mike (on the basis of all their teams stuff), but there seems to be only one Lee/Mike story from awhile back (and sadly it's not great). Well, the ways of AO3 are ineffable...
Partly I wanted to move on to 10 soonest because I've started listening to the podcast, too, and it's been great fun to hear the behind the scenes stuff.
I started with episode 13 of the podcast, which is the one that goes back to the beginning and series 1, but I want to be able to watch the earlier episodes, which deal with series 10 before I get too far. So far have listened to the podcast episodes for Series 1, which means episodes with Alex, and with Tim Key, Josh Widdicombe, and Romesh Ranganethan of the contestants. Alex's episode was was informative, and it was fun to hear what was going on behind the smug exterior with Tim (like how much he hated the "hi-five a 55-year-old" task) and to learn about the trip to Cologne (with Tim, Josh, and Frank, and Alex joining them for brunch), and Josh was just plain adorable -- it was neat to hear about his trepidation with the "GREG" tattoo, and how he feels bad about playing his dad's book for laughs (having brought it in for the "most significant thing"), and the bit he shared at the end, about how at the Champion of Champions, which was just after his daughter had been born, a task for his baby girl was left in his dressing room -- "have the best life possible, your task starts now" -- and almost moved him to tears (and, honestly, me too) was wonderful. Also, I was very amused to hear, on the episode of the podcast about ep5, that Ed also thinks Josh looks like a Hobbit :D And then I was happy to discover, in Romesh's episode, that I seem to like the him we heard on the podcast more than I did his Taskmaster persona, by like a lot. (I was less happy to learn that there's a more horrible, fuller edit of Romesh eating the watermelon, which was deemed by the channel to be too disturbing for TV.)
Then I listened through the series 2 retrospective, which was mostly fun. I did not at all enjoy the episode where Joe Wilkinson was the special guest; I hadn't liked him much as a contestant, and I liked him even less in 1:1 conversation with Ed, and, honestly, I'm baffled by why so many people, Ed and Doc and others had such great things to say about Joe -- no idea what I'm missing there, but I just don't find him at all funny. Maybe it's one of those things where you have to see him live to appreciate him? But the other episodes were fun; I enjoyed the one with Sian Gibson and Kerry Godliman, from the later series people (Ed and Kerry sorting everyone on series 7 into what kind of tapas they would be was hilarious, and I agree with them that Kerry is patatas bravas, Rhod is chorizo, and James is something counterintuitive that might turn out to be delicious and might really not work at all). From the series 2 participant episodes, I really enjoyed the one with Richard Osman, and I enjoyed the one with Ben (Doc) Brown, too, although in a different way, since he was the only one to say he had HATED being on the show. Which I still don't really get, because he'd done fine, and was funny and really charming on it, as he was on the podcast, and it didn't look like he was regretting all of his choices when he was on the show. But at least I got to hear him doing his William Tell Overture on hands and cheeks party trick (really impressive!), and got the background story behind why he ended up crooning for the "impress the mayor" task (his original plan had been to stage a mugging that he'd rescue the mayor from, but the producers told him they couldn't do that). It sounds like the podcast experience at least was cathartic for him in exorcising his Taskmaster demons (he told Ed it was like therapy, except he wasn't going to pay him), so I'm glad about that, and it was a really entertaining episode, because Doc is such a charming guy.
Since I finished series 10, I also went back and started listening to the very early podcast episodes which cover series 10. It's definitely different listening to the episodes that were recorded as the series was running -- as Ed says, it feels more like a sports podcast, where they are going through the individual moments and contestants and dissecting everyone's choices and making predictions, which is interesting from the standpoint of having watched the whole thing and knowing how it ended. I've only watched the first two episodes so far, in part because I was really eager to get to the one where Nish Kumar is the special guest, and it was just as fun as I'd been hoping it would be. There were a lot of really fun quotes, in particular: "You've got to stop applying your Western, monotheistic measures of success to how I did on Taskmaster." and "If any show's fanbase would make a spreadsheet of fun, it would be this show. [...] In fact, I'm surprised they haven't done it already." I know Nish is also doing an episode on series 5 later on, and I'm looking forward to seeing him again then.
And then, since I had just watched series 11, and after series 2 the podcast goes into covering series 11 episodes as they aired, I started listening to those, too, and have done the first 4 episodes of that. The one with Richard Herring was mainly interesting to me for the series 10 insights, but I was amused when Richard was talking about the "alpha male" balance in 11 vs his series, 10, and Ed's very just observation: "In your series, no matter how alpha any of your were, Daisy would have crushed you with an iron fist." (Richard: "Thats a good point.") I actually enjoyed the episode where Jamali was the special guest more than I'd been expecting to -- I liked him better when he wasn't acting annoying and picking fights with Greg. It was fun to learn why his prize tasks were so rubbish -- his attitude had been, "this show doesn't pay me enough to do homework", and it was also neat to learn that he'd been putting minimal effort into his tasks and then when he got to the studio on the first day, realized that he actually wanted to win. Jamali and Ed also bonded over Alex being not helpful enough to them, especially when they could see him helping other contestants (in an earlier episode with Alex as the guest, he kind of revealed that he tends to help the women more, which is either chivalrous or sexist, they couldn't quite decide). The third episode was with Katherine Parkinson, and she sounded just as delightfully ditzy as she did on the show; I was sad to hear about her being actually hurt by Greg disparaging her clay masks, which stopped her from working on them after that (even though Richard Herring, when he won them, and members of the crew tried to reassure her that they were good). The fourth episode was with a non-contestant as a special guest, but was quite fun anyway.
When I started listening to the podcast episode about s1e4, the special guest was Nicola Coughlan, so I had to go and watch the New Year's treat (2021) in which she appeared.
New Year Treat 2021 spoilers -- That was definitely different! It was not quite my first glimpse of pandemic-era TM -- I'd seen the studio portion of series 10 by then already -- but it was my first glimpse of pandemic-era tasks, with the little outdoor bubble. The one-shot vibe is definitely different, but I found it surprisingly fun anyway. Nicola was adorable, Shirley Ballas was impressively into it, Krishnan Guru-Murthy made for a pretty fun straight man, and Greg's running joke about Rylan needing to start a cult because he can sell any pile of BS was quite funny, but I think my favorite in that was actually John Hannah, just because, honestly, I'm a sucker for a handsome bearded man of a certain age (although it is pretty surreal that Jonathan from The Mummy is now a man of a certain age XD) and for that accent, and while he may not have done all that well, he definitely seemed up for all the nonsense.
And with that, I have just two series (9 and 12), another New Year Treat, and the Champion of Champions tournament (2 episodes). Fortunately, at least I have a bunch more seasons of the podcast to look forward to, though I'm moving through them at a good clip, too.
I've been been alternating doomscrolling with Taskmaster (and earlier, crazy work with Taskmaster), which is how I've watched 3 more series and listened to like a dozen and a half podcast episodes, so you get the dump of that.
Taskmaster, series 8 -- This was an interesting one for me because it was the first series I started without having seen ANY clips or highlights or tasks a priori -- I think maybe the YouTube channel just hadn't gotten around to clipping them yet? So I was going in completely cold, with no notion about any of the contestants or expectations for what I was going to see. And I found the first episode a bit slow at first -- the contestants didn't seem as vivid/differentiated as in many of the past series. Like, in most previous series, by the middle of episode 1 I had some sense of "X is the wild/clever/sweet/oddball/raunchy/competitive/etc. one", but here it took longer for me to get a sense for what these people were like.
series 8 spoilers
But once we got to the final task of episode 1, the hide and seek at the train station, I started getting a better feeling for them individually, and Lou became an early favorite after the trick with the bin, which was both clever and very committed (and color-coordinated to boot!) I did continue to like Lou -- she went all out, even when things didn't work out (like trying to make "delicious dust" out of burnt porn), as well as her tendency to overstuff her prize tasks with two or three different takes on the prompt. But also, she was so firmly ahead most of the time, that I pretty much didn't bother rooting for her, and also after a while only found her really interesting in team tasks, more on which below.
Very unexpectedly, my favorite for the series ended up being Iain, but not in the same way as past favorite contestants: I didn't find him the funniest, necessarily (I'm actually not sure that I found any of these people funny, per se -- not, like, in an intentional, comedian way), nor the most likeable, nor even the most entertaining to watch necessarily (although he did tend to be one of the most entertaining ones, because he clearly had the most tendency to fly off the handle when things weren't working). But no, the reason I was most interested in Iain is that, amazingly, he had an honest to goodness CHARACTER ARC! He starts out with puppet pedantry (which, that was a great puppet and I'm glad he got his 5 points) and hubris (the volcano -- "I genuinely don't want to talk about it", which Greg respected -- and counting his championship chickens before they were hatched; showboating and ruining his performance in the pink ladies task), and being a jerk in team tasks, which he comes to recognize and feel bad about, and by the studio segments towards the end, he's got this air of rueful humility/ability to laugh at himself that did not seem to be there at the beginning at all, and it's kind of amazing. Anyway, so Iain was the MVP in that regard, being the most interesting to watch, and quite often also the funniest to watch, not because he was being intentionally funny, but because he had a funny way of losing his shit. Some other favorite Iain moments: the "best face" prize task, which Iain won with the combination of onesie with Greg's giant face on it and T-shirt and tigths with Greg's face all over them which Iain was wearing underneath his studio clothes, and then sat in the whole episode -- now that's some commitment! Also Greg saying, after Iain stumbles reading the task in the same episode that had the "sangwich" and "chootney" reveals, "Turns out there are quite a few words that are a problem for you" and Iain responding, with a complicated smile: "I've got a law degree." There was a lot going on with Iain, and it was fun to watch.
But actually there were no contestants at all this season that I didn't like, and I thought that the five were a good mix -- especially brilliantly paid off in team tasks, which I will get to, but even just on their own I thought they were all nicely different. I pretty much always enjoyed Paul Sinha's cerebral approach, combined with being very bad at the physical side of the tasks, between his recovering shoulder and I guess general physical ineptitude (very relatable). It was interesting because it was not always possible to predict up front if he was going to be brilliant at a task or (more usually) terrible -- like, the caviar mustache was amazing (although Lou's willingness to put live mealworms on her face was impressive as well), and his ability to recall the cards with only one mistake too (but not as surprising), and then you had tasks that were a mixture of clever and inept, like moving the beach ball with water: which he did not do well on even after making the very clever switch of moving the finish line to where it was 1 m from the start and slightly downhill. Oh, also, I didn't make the connection myself, but reading about it on the wiki, knowing that the bathrobe was a reference to Arthur Dent/H2G2 made me like him even more.
Joe Thomas was an interesting case for me, in that he looked depressed and/or confused and/or blank most of the time, which had not worked for me at all with some previous contestants (e.g. Paul Chowdhry), but there was just enough balance with Joe that while he wasn't my favorite, he did work for me on the whole -- he had enough brilliant performances and enough outbursts to punctuate his overall confused/bummed out demeanor that I enjoyed watching him, and I thought they'd matched him up with a partner really well, so that I particularly enjoyed him in team tasks.
Speaking of, I probably have the least to say about Sian, but I actually always enjoyed her take on the tasks (and also go her for calling out the show for being "heightist"). Like, she was seldom the flashiest, but she seemed like a nice, fun person, and I appreciated how she embraced the glitter and princesses thing to the hilt. (I've also now listened to the podcost episode where she's the guest, and she sounds equally adorable there. I had not realized she was a huge fan of the show before being on it herself, but that is also sweet.)
I also really enjoyed the dynamic between the five, which was different from the ones I'd seen to date. Series 5 gang felt like a nicely supportive cohort; series 7 bunch were bickery like kids; series 1 were competitive and kept trying to undercut each other. This bunch had a whole interesting dynamic where they took potshots at each other but then also came together, and interacted in interesting ways, even outside the very interesting microcosm of team tasks which I will talk about separately. So you had all these little moments like Iain disparaging everyone else's puppets, and then a couple of episodes later getting upset when Paul Sinha offered to weigh in with his opinion (as a former GP) on the "best present for a doctor" prize task, saying that Iain's gift was aimed at the wrong kind of alcohol consumption and that his favorite would actually be Joe's BMX bike (rather than his own beard disguise thing): Iain thought it was weird Paul wasn't using it as an opportunity to tout his own gift, to which Paul Sinha replied, "Well, not everyone's as dysfunctionally competitive as you, Iain." Or even earlier, with the rice transport, when Alex pointed out that Lou had washed the honey jar before trying to use it to transport rice (in contrast to Iain, who'd poured rice into the jar with the honey still in), and Lou was like, "A woman!" -- and then when Sian, in last place of those who did not get disqualified, gave her a look, Lou amended it to "A better woman." (and, on that task, I was also so impressed to see that Lou saved the honey in a bowl instead of just pouring it out!) Or the moment in one of the live tasks, where you were supposed to put on sleeping bags and salute, when Joe, who had been the first to complete all the parts, by a long shot, failed to salute for the correct amount of time, and Lou quipped, "Men always think it's longer than it is" and Iain, who saluted for the correct amount of time and ended up winning, shouted out "Not all men!" But for all the entertaining sniping at each other, I liked the way, from the start, the lot came together to help Paul with the sleeping bags in the live task which he couldn't do due to his injured shoulder (which he had previously not mentioned), and cheered him on in other tasks. Similarly, when preternaturally-calm Joe loses his cool in the final after Paul and Iain flush their erasers down the toilet when he spent 20 minutes actually rubbing it out of existence, it was very neat that the others got up to give him a standing ovation (I was also very glad that Greg gave him an unprecedented 3 bonus points). I think that, really, this cohort felt the most like a group of friends, who will give each other shit but come together when it matters.
I feel like there were some particularly fun tasks in this series -- maybe as the show is getting bigger and having more resources than just coconuts and eggs? Like, one of my favorite bits was the one with the very cute toddler and stuff designed to engage her; I was not surprised that the lowest score in the task was 3 points (for Lou's duck pinata, with the next highest going to Joe Dough and Iain's puppet), because they were all fun to watch, and while Sian's iPad video with the pretty princess was not a surprising hit (Sian being the only parent I'm sure helped), Paul's ducks-and-shark ecosystem being so engaging to the toddler was delightful to see. The final tasks where they had to drive a scooter around a parking lot was also really funny, and I really enjoyed the moving the beach ball with water task and the different approaches; as a side note, I immediately thought of pushing it with ice (which Joe eventually hit on, which Greg called genius). Alex snorting cheese dust through a celery was also something else.
The best, though, were the team tasks. I'd said in series 7 that the teams broke down along fairly boring lines, but definitely not so here! Joe and Sian were an interesting mix, with him so morose and her perky and maternal, and I feel like, really, some of their very best performances came out in the team tasks -- the rock album cover, the "moving together as one person" which really did look solemn and majestic. And I was impressed by how calmly Joe took it when Sian's attempt at cheating in the complicated ball-catching task -- because she felt bad that she had contributed nothing, having missed the blue ball which it was her only job to catch -- disqualified them both. But the best part of the show was the team of Lou, Iain, and Paul, being AMAZINGLY dysfunctional. The heavy-things-in-the-bath task was already great, with Iain stridently announcing, "I'm quietly confident, actually" while Lou tried to argue with him, to Lou saying a little later, "I'd like to apologize for my behaviour. I just thought we should panic." and Iain retorting, "I agree. Which is why I thought we should do all of this." I was then amused to see that the next time we saw them in the task, it had progressed to Iain in the hammock and Lou saying things like "I've got you, baby" to him, while they all worked together (with Iain still bossing people around a bit too much; as I said above, Iain being chagrined watching it back was nice to see). The studio reactions to this were great across the board, actually, with Greg saying, "Thank god Daddy was there, watching on from behind the barrel" and Paul speaking up that, in his defense, it was actually his idea to put things in at the last minute, which prompted the following exchange: Iain: "If it wasn't for Paul Sinha, it would have been me and Lou in the hammock screaming at each other." Lou: "Just how I like it." Greg: "As the Barrel Dad will tell you, these kids have got to make their own mistakes." BUT THEN! The last team task was the "move like one person" one, and it was one of the funniest things I've seen on the show yet, on par with the team task in series 4 where they had to fill and clingfilm the bath. First, the beginning was already great, with Lou and Iain still clashing (Greg: "Not a good start to a task, 'Iain, you bellend'" Iain: "Absolutely justified."), and Paul agreeing to be the arms when he'd just had an operation on his shoulder and was told not to exercise it, and then the second part of the task came up, and the way the whole thing just fell apart, since their "one person" idea was designed for lying on one's back, not actual locomotion, and it really did look like the aftermath of some terrible accident or apoocalypse, the way they were wriggling and rolling around -- I was weeping with laughter, and had to rewind a couple of bits because I couldn't see what was going on with tears streaming out of my eyes / couldn't hear what the team of three was shouting at each other over the sound of my own laughter. I was amused to hear, on the podcast, that Sian would've liked to poach Lou for her and Joe's team; I do agree that Lou would've likely liked that a lot more, but so much comedic value would have been lost!
So that ended up being a lot more fun than I'd been initially expecting. I don't have any individual contestant favorites coming out of that, though I AM looking forward to hearing Iain on the podcast (note to self: episode 43 for s4e5), but I did enjoy it quite a bit as a series thanks to the interpersonal dynamics and the tasks.
With that I had reached the end of the sequentially available series on Taskmaster's official YouTube channel, except that they seem to also have Series 12 there at the moment. I did find a channel that has series 10 and 11, and proceeded to watch that next, and then I think I'll go on to 12, before I go and look for the more elusive 9.
series 10 spoilers
Anyway, so, series 10 was the 2020 series that got disrupted by Covid, and it was interesting/weird to see how social distancing affected things, especially as some of one team's team tasks got filmed before Covid and some after, so you had Daisy and Richard getting up close and personal and the team of three in their own boxes. And then all the studio stuff was post social-distancing, which meant contestants sitting farther apart (meaning also nobody was hugging or holding hands supportively, and I think overall lessened the in-studio interaction) and even Alex and Greg separated more than usual. And the live studio tasks were rather more lackluster/less exciting than usual, since they had to try to keep the contestants apart -- but, well, they made do, and I still found some of them quite fun. I think my favorite was the noises charades (and I was genuinely impressed by some of the contestants did for that, like Mawaan's masterful impersonation of a microwave or Daisy's fax machine).
I thought I had not seen anything with this bunch either, but actually I had at least seen parts of the "make a thing properly vanish" task, which was actually very cool to see again -- Mawaan's thing with the cow is great, but I also really liked Richard's vanishing Alex and thought Katherine's vanishing couch thing was accomplished in a neat if overly complicated way, and thought it deserved more points than the rampaging chicken. And I knew a little bit about Mawaan trying to fill an egg with helium from the "All Star" vid, but actually the whole task was way more fun than I'd been expecting, not just Mawaan's assorted helium-based misfires, but also Johnny's, and Daisy's appearance of unlikely success (when we didn't see the egg in the pan, I was definitely wondering if it wasn't as successful as it seemed, because I've learned by now how this show likes to play it, with reveals of things like Joe Nicholdson's potato); and also you had to admire Richard's determination till the last smear of egg on the paper airplane -- and attempt after attempt failing utterly.
This is another cohort where I had no strong favorites but also didn't have anyone I didn't like. Katherine was a wonderfully cuckoolander contestant, and seemed to be floating through a different show entirely at times, but in an entertaining way, and I also was amused by the contrast between her usual dreamy demeanor and moments where she would lose her cool, like in the "draw a monster from Greg's description" task, where Mawaan asked her what a tusk was (poor Mawaan, animal body parts are clearly not his strong suit, what with that and the duck lips XD) and she responded with "Fuck off, I'm not telling you!" And sometimes her off-the-wallness failed utterly, like never even leaving the room in the spider-shoeing task, and sometimes it paid off wonderfully, like when she was the only one to go and get some coconut water from the fridge instead of trying to open up the coconuts. And I thought her upsidedown film was the best of the bunch, the chin characters (eyes drawn on her and Alex's chins) really unsettling in an oddly compelling way XD
Mawaan was also interestingly bimodal, alternating between nailing some tasks with unorthodox approaches (the chicken-driving swap, which he executed perfectly; the barmat building one, where he brought the doorbell with him, the only one to figure that out -- and then also chose to build a lighthouse with a rotating lens, or on the equally clever but for more disgusting side, "bin juice" ("getting trashed" XD) for the cocktail task, and doing things in an unorthodox way that didn't pay off but were still fun to watch. Anyway, Mawaan was great fun, and also had some of the more interesting prize tasks in an otherwise pretty boring cohort in that regard -- his shrine to himself XD -- and was also just really fun to watch in the studio. I think he was definitely my favorite in terms of livening up the studio portions, between banter with Greg, interacting with what the other contestants were claiming, and his colorful outfits with matching nail polish. I ended up liking Mawaan way more than I thought I would from the first couple of tasks -- I feel like in terms of entertainment value, he was the MVP, over Katherine even, just because I thought her performance was fairly consistent in the ways it was inadvertently funny, but Mawaan kept being funny in different ways.
The other really entertaining contestant was Johnny -- he could always be counted on to run around shouting like his hair was on fire and mostly to fail, or at least flail, amusingly. He was a little bit one-note, too, compared to Mawaan, but at the same time I was consistently amused by him berating and/or apologizing and/or talking to the inanimate objects he was interacting with. And some of his entries, like the balloon portrait of Greg, or the cloudy mule cocktail with a sparkler, or the house of cards (before it fell apart) were really quite impressive. I was also very amused by his interpretation of the "draw the animal in the mirror that is wearing a hat and watching you" task, because, fair, and I'm glad he got full points for that interpretation.
Which leaves Richard and Daisy, winner and runner-up, who kept swapping frontrunner positions throughout the show, before Richard's extremely narrow win in the final task. I didn't especially enjoy Daisy's performance, but damn I'm impressed by her just going for broke while being pregnant, especially the fairly intense tasks like the boat-on-concrete one, or the way she managed to be quickest in the spider booting task despite being the only one running back and forth the whole way. Like, RESPECT, lady! Also, I was impressed by her knowledge of wasp facts, which Alex corroborated (I did not need to know that wasps can recognize landmarks and faces, but it is an undeniably cool fact) after the dead wasp Katherine brought in for a prize task XD And Richard was just, like, solid? pleasant? I liked him, and was reasonably happy with his win, but don't have much to say about him. I did think their team dynamic was interesting -- it was neat/unusual to have the two consistently highest performers on the same team of two; I guess the "girls team" on series 7 was also like that, but somehow it didn't feel like it, not sure why -- maybe because Kerry and Jessica's approaches were quite different in general, but I felt like Richard's and Daisy's were more similar. And Hippogate aside, I thought they made a good, solid team.
I thought that, Greg's announcement that he was going to be a hardass about the rules notwithstanding, it was actually kind of a fluffier-than-usual series. There was the contestants helping each other (starting with helping Daisy) in the first live studio task, which was sweet. I thought Alex was helping people more than usual (Katherine especially, but not just Katherine). And then I felt like Greg was more giggly and more generous with points (e.g. giving third place as the lowest score and tied first and second in the homework task to spend $20 out of character, or THREE first places + a second + a third in the water balloons task -- which, OK, was super impressive, given that everyone's balloon held and three of them maxed out the height, so on that one it was less subjective). I wonder if some of it was, like, pandemic wildness, where they were all a little punch-drunk and just enjoying hanging out with people. Also, randomly, I thought they were playing up the Alex/Greg stuff more than before -- but I also wonder if it's just that they SAID suggestive stuff more because they were less able to touch each other. (Also, on that note, Richard's bedding prize XD XD)
Some other favorite tasks I have in my notes was the naming words live task, mostly because of the contrast between Katherine's methodical approach, going through rhyming words, vs Daisy going through all the swearwords (Greg: "Two very different approaches so far.") I also really enjoyed the cocktail making task, both because it was really unusual and because the decibel restriction made it really hard, and the frustration of the contestants was fun to watch (especially Daisy losing her shit and needing to bleed off some of the frustration). I mentioned already Johnny's lovely-looking (and apparently tasting) cocktail and Mawan's brilliant "bin juice" idea to salvage things at the very end, but I also appreciated Alex pronouncing the name of Daisy's cocktail ("the fuck sake") as if "sake" was the liquor.
So, solid series overall, but another one where I did not come away with any contestants I would add to a list of all-time favorites.
I was actually starting to think that maybe I was reaching some kind of saturation with the format, because I enjoyed the last two series I watched, but there were no standouts for me outside of a couple of individual tasks, but then I watched series 11 and was like, nope, this is still brilliant, so long as you've got the right set of contestants -- which this series definitely did -- it joins my list of favorites alongside 2, 4, and 7.
series 11 spoilers
A lot of the credit for that goes to Mike Wozniak, who was my favorite contestant of these five hands down, and also joins the list of my all-time favorites. He was just... so delightfully weird, and so impressively committed -- like, the perfect Taskmaster contestant, really -- if you grew one in a vat for the explicit purpose of fitting well into the TM format, you'd get Mike. And he was just so odd, but, like, in a genuinely funny way. I'm not surprised Greg called him an eccentric English robot, because there really does seem to be something preternatural about how unflappable he is about all the weirdness thrown at him. And just the general air of him -- it's like if a fey creature with shapeshifting powers had learned how to be human from watching Ned Flanders XD I can't even pick out any favorite Mike moments because every moment he was onscreen was a delight, but I did especially enjoy his team dynamic with Lee -- they were such a stark contrast to each other, but also worked together so well! (My least favorite moment was the (ew) hemorrhoid one, so I could have done with less dwelling on that.) But I knew I was going to enjoy the hell out of Mike as a contestant from the very first moment -- the prize task of the first episode -- and his song about prawns (for "something you can carry but only just" prize task, which Mike chose to interpret metaphorically with "a tune"). Mike was also great fun in studio tasks, where mostly I feel like people don't differentiate themselves except by being very bad or throwing tantrums when things go badly. Like, in the slap-and-tong marshmallow grab, after Mike, in a tactical crouch, kept snapping his tongs in an effort to get Jamali to bat first, Greg voiced the thought that had been going through my head: "That's another activity that Mike Wozniak's clearly done before" -- and Lee put the cherry on it: "Just when I thought he couldn't look more like a praying mantis." XD
I also really liked Lee and Sarah "Following the Rules Can Be Fun" Kendall (which makes it all three of the top contestants, series standing-wise) -- Lee's spangled jacket and gruff Northern farmer routine, especially when it came to bossing Alex around, and Sarah's generally straightforward but effective approaches in tasks and funny studio remarks. I think Lee was my second favorite, because he was a fun mix of actual competence, caring about the competition, and having good humour about his mishaps (although I did think Greg was a bit mean to him, like he tends to be to other men in their 50s -- I wonder if this is some kind of Greg-feeling-his-own-mortality thing, since Greg and Lee appear to be exactly the same age, as is Rhod Gilbert, and Richard Herring is only a year older, and they all got ribbed about their age, stamina, cognitive deterioration, etc.) Also, poor vegan Lee, biting into a battered egg and a leather wallet -- I think he managed to pick out the only two likely-non-vegan items to bite into XD (although Alex confirmed the wallet wasn't actually leather, at least). Sarah, meanwhile, just seemed like a very competent contestant and also a fun person to hang out with -- she is one of the few Taskmaster contestants where I could see myself genuinely being friends with them. And I liked that she talked back to Greg; actually, this series in general was pretty high on talking-back-to-Greg, which was fun. I particularly enjoyed Sarah making a face at him/silently parroting back something he was saying about her that she didn't agree with -- it was such a delightfully childish gesture from someone who was generally very put-together and mature. I was very pleased that she won, but I would've also been happy with a Mike or Lee win.
Charlotte was adorable (and looked about 8 in her task outfit overalls XD -- I had to look up how old she really was and could hardly believe it was 30+). I did not particularly like Jamali as a contestant, and thought the points Greg awarded to him often felt too high, but he was entertaining to watch in some tasks, especially with his go-to approach of stamping as hard as possible on things, and also his vendetta against tap water. I actually did not enjoy his interaction with Alex very much, and found his banter with Greg less interesting than the interaction of other characters and Greg, but you can't have everything. I do have to acknowledge that Jamali often came up with innovative techniques, which didn't always work out for him, but were good ideas -- like carrying the plates in a sling for the first task (which paid off for Lee but definitely not for Jamali), or recording himself saying "metronome" so he could munch in peace, and some things in the studio tasks that other people then copied (usually with better results XD). I did think he tended to get a pass on some things that I thought should have disqualified him. Like, in the toilet paper task, was Jamali not disqualified for his loo roll touching the ground because he wrapped it in a baggie before he threw it at the ground? I can see that reasoning, but I thought it was weird that this point wasn't even touched on.
Besides the characters, I was amused by the aesthetic of this season, the Soviet-style poster for the art, the matryoshka decor, the music.
There were a lot of tasks that struck me as really fun in this series, and I wonder if it's the effect of a Covid series, actually -- this one being the first that was planned with social distancing eventualities in mind, so I wonder if it led to some additional creativity on Alex's part to come up with tasks that would be resilient to social distancing, and so kind of explored a different space. One of my favorites was the "catch the rat" one -- I was especially amused by Charlotte being scared of the fake rat, and Lee got bonus points from me for petting the mechanical rat that delivered the task -- and that was before the task proper had even started! As far as what the contestants did, I enjoyed everyone's take except Jamali's, and was amused that several people actually baited their traps with real peanut butter or stand-in for cheese, and definitely agree that Lee's Mousetrap setup deserved to win. I also really enjoyed the "make a uniform for this bee" task, partly for Lee's Beevil Knievel (whom he kept trying to make jump over the buses fruitlessly) but mostly for the studio banter around it: Charlotte, when all five bees were projected on the screen: "This looks like a family of bees: these are their names, and these are their accomplishments." another contestant: "They're all quite proud of Charlotte [whose bee was dressed as the Pope, with six little papal slippers], probably." The do-a-thing-one-handed-under-the-table task from the first episode was also quite fun; I'm not surprised Mike knows or figured out how to play a balalaika, blindly and one-handed, even though the result did not sound much like the Taskmaster tune to me (Jamali: "It's like a horror film at the Kremlin"), but I thought Sarah putting makeup on Alex and Jamali's cushion-spinning deserved to be higher (at least Jamali got the bonus point when Greg failed to spin the pillow later in the episode, but I don't think one point was enough to rectify matters; maybe that's why Greg was giving him higher points than I thought he deserved in later episodes...) Another task I really, really enjoyed was the speed reading/long set of alphabetical instructions one, both for the successes, like Mike Undermining the Vole ("You've got no chutzpah! Your time-keeping skills are abysmal!" and Greg's reaction: "His poor children."), and the not-so-successes (Sarah's ("Argh, fucking zebra!"), and Lee's broken-clock strategy where he remembered that he had to attack something, so he proceeded to attack everything, in the hopes of getting one point, and as a result also got the point for whacking the xylophone, yanking the zebra, and something else. I also really enjoyed the different scientific/swag approaches to weighing Alex's feet and head -- water displacement for Lee (who got it bang on, and used Alex's bare thighs for scratch paper) and (less successfully) Mike, density approximation for Sarah (which didn't work very well), and some kind of scaling and estimating for Charlotte.
But one of the crowning joys of this series for me were the team tasks, in large part because they paired Mike and Lee together, and man, that was a glorious team-up -- quite probably my favorite in all of the ten series I've watched for sheer efficiency (displacing previous favorite duo of Mel-and-Hugh). On the podcast, Ed and Rick Edwards described the team of Lee and Mike (in the tossing a bag of salt from one table to another task) as "Lee taking his enthusiastic dog for a walk", which was very cute and also quite apt. I was sold on this matchup from their very first team task, having an argument -- I'm with Sarah that it was better than a play, and then we had the studio task command performance that was them miming nursery rhymes ("They're being penalized by my idiocy," said Greg, justly). More broadly, I was amused to see that this series had another take on the series 1 task of getting to 11 points where you had to do something with an arcane system that wasn't explained, in the "walk to the gate without setting off the alarm" team task. But my favorite team task was the one with one person directing the blindfolded other(s) to a circle. I think I've done a similar team-builder as part of Management Through People training (it's a good metaphor for managing admittedly), so was especially able to appreciate it. The clipped efficiency of Lee and Mike's cooperation (Lee directing, Mike walking) was really impressive, especially considering that was on the first day they were doing it, I guess. Mike did say earlier that he likes being told what to do, and Lee clearly has no problems giving clipped directions (he does it to Alex all the time without being instructed to), so it was really the perfect match. Except for the compass directions detour, when Lee decided to deviate from clockhands for some reason, that was, like, perfectly played. And the team of three outing was hilarious! Sarah's "tuuuuuuuurn" technique was really brilliant, given the word constraints, but then everything else was just hilarious chaos. But I did like how bad Sarah felt about making Charlotte run in circles and sending Jamali into the hedges full of stinging nettles. (In general, I found part of Sarah's charm to be the contrast between how no-nonsense and sort of gruff she was about herself and how ready she was with praise for the others and apologies when something went wrong and she'd inadvertently hurt another person, like when she accidentally fired a staple at Alex's face during the photocopier art task (about that, I was thinking the same thing Greg said, that she should've brought that for the "makes you look tough" prize task which got her dubbed "picnic girl" for her apocalypse backpack). Oh, and while the gameplay wasn't all that interesting to watch in the take-turns-drawing-a-British-animal task, I thought the results were both adorable, especially in 3D, as was the lore that Mike spun about theirs.
I also thought this was a very quotable series, and apparently Greg agreed, since he kept reading out the quotes more than I ever remember him doing -- but some of the studio banter was also particularly great. Besides quotes that I wrote down in the context of the tasks, some of my other favorites were Lee going "I've got a BAFTA, me" through a mouth full of papadoms in the metronome task, and also his philosophy on anatomy: "It's a grey area, isn't it? Where do the feet end and the hands start?" in the foot-painting task. Probably my favorite quote is Sarah summarizing her performance in the sort-objects-with-your-face task: "Just the thought of me sightlessly licking objects, snuffling around like a salamander on the bottom of the ocean" (which is not how anything works, but is a powerful image XD) And of course there are all the odd little things Mike says, but all of that was just kind of the general tapestry of Mike being Mike.
I feel like this series was clumpier than others -- Charlotte, in last place, was still well above 100 (125), and the top 3 were all in the 150s (Lee, Mike, and Sarah), and I do think that made it feel more fun, more balanced.
I got curious and checked AO3 again to see if people were writing about this bunch. Mike Wozniak does make the top 10 characters filter, and people seem to ship him with Greg (I suppose as a D/s thing it's understandable) and Charlotte, which I wonder if I'm missing some context, because I don't even remember any interaction between the two of them? What I was expecting was Lee/Alex (especially on the basis of the head-and-foot-weighing and the photocopier dinosaur task) and Lee/Mike (on the basis of all their teams stuff), but there seems to be only one Lee/Mike story from awhile back (and sadly it's not great). Well, the ways of AO3 are ineffable...
Partly I wanted to move on to 10 soonest because I've started listening to the podcast, too, and it's been great fun to hear the behind the scenes stuff.
I started with episode 13 of the podcast, which is the one that goes back to the beginning and series 1, but I want to be able to watch the earlier episodes, which deal with series 10 before I get too far. So far have listened to the podcast episodes for Series 1, which means episodes with Alex, and with Tim Key, Josh Widdicombe, and Romesh Ranganethan of the contestants. Alex's episode was was informative, and it was fun to hear what was going on behind the smug exterior with Tim (like how much he hated the "hi-five a 55-year-old" task) and to learn about the trip to Cologne (with Tim, Josh, and Frank, and Alex joining them for brunch), and Josh was just plain adorable -- it was neat to hear about his trepidation with the "GREG" tattoo, and how he feels bad about playing his dad's book for laughs (having brought it in for the "most significant thing"), and the bit he shared at the end, about how at the Champion of Champions, which was just after his daughter had been born, a task for his baby girl was left in his dressing room -- "have the best life possible, your task starts now" -- and almost moved him to tears (and, honestly, me too) was wonderful. Also, I was very amused to hear, on the episode of the podcast about ep5, that Ed also thinks Josh looks like a Hobbit :D And then I was happy to discover, in Romesh's episode, that I seem to like the him we heard on the podcast more than I did his Taskmaster persona, by like a lot. (I was less happy to learn that there's a more horrible, fuller edit of Romesh eating the watermelon, which was deemed by the channel to be too disturbing for TV.)
Then I listened through the series 2 retrospective, which was mostly fun. I did not at all enjoy the episode where Joe Wilkinson was the special guest; I hadn't liked him much as a contestant, and I liked him even less in 1:1 conversation with Ed, and, honestly, I'm baffled by why so many people, Ed and Doc and others had such great things to say about Joe -- no idea what I'm missing there, but I just don't find him at all funny. Maybe it's one of those things where you have to see him live to appreciate him? But the other episodes were fun; I enjoyed the one with Sian Gibson and Kerry Godliman, from the later series people (Ed and Kerry sorting everyone on series 7 into what kind of tapas they would be was hilarious, and I agree with them that Kerry is patatas bravas, Rhod is chorizo, and James is something counterintuitive that might turn out to be delicious and might really not work at all). From the series 2 participant episodes, I really enjoyed the one with Richard Osman, and I enjoyed the one with Ben (Doc) Brown, too, although in a different way, since he was the only one to say he had HATED being on the show. Which I still don't really get, because he'd done fine, and was funny and really charming on it, as he was on the podcast, and it didn't look like he was regretting all of his choices when he was on the show. But at least I got to hear him doing his William Tell Overture on hands and cheeks party trick (really impressive!), and got the background story behind why he ended up crooning for the "impress the mayor" task (his original plan had been to stage a mugging that he'd rescue the mayor from, but the producers told him they couldn't do that). It sounds like the podcast experience at least was cathartic for him in exorcising his Taskmaster demons (he told Ed it was like therapy, except he wasn't going to pay him), so I'm glad about that, and it was a really entertaining episode, because Doc is such a charming guy.
Since I finished series 10, I also went back and started listening to the very early podcast episodes which cover series 10. It's definitely different listening to the episodes that were recorded as the series was running -- as Ed says, it feels more like a sports podcast, where they are going through the individual moments and contestants and dissecting everyone's choices and making predictions, which is interesting from the standpoint of having watched the whole thing and knowing how it ended. I've only watched the first two episodes so far, in part because I was really eager to get to the one where Nish Kumar is the special guest, and it was just as fun as I'd been hoping it would be. There were a lot of really fun quotes, in particular: "You've got to stop applying your Western, monotheistic measures of success to how I did on Taskmaster." and "If any show's fanbase would make a spreadsheet of fun, it would be this show. [...] In fact, I'm surprised they haven't done it already." I know Nish is also doing an episode on series 5 later on, and I'm looking forward to seeing him again then.
And then, since I had just watched series 11, and after series 2 the podcast goes into covering series 11 episodes as they aired, I started listening to those, too, and have done the first 4 episodes of that. The one with Richard Herring was mainly interesting to me for the series 10 insights, but I was amused when Richard was talking about the "alpha male" balance in 11 vs his series, 10, and Ed's very just observation: "In your series, no matter how alpha any of your were, Daisy would have crushed you with an iron fist." (Richard: "Thats a good point.") I actually enjoyed the episode where Jamali was the special guest more than I'd been expecting to -- I liked him better when he wasn't acting annoying and picking fights with Greg. It was fun to learn why his prize tasks were so rubbish -- his attitude had been, "this show doesn't pay me enough to do homework", and it was also neat to learn that he'd been putting minimal effort into his tasks and then when he got to the studio on the first day, realized that he actually wanted to win. Jamali and Ed also bonded over Alex being not helpful enough to them, especially when they could see him helping other contestants (in an earlier episode with Alex as the guest, he kind of revealed that he tends to help the women more, which is either chivalrous or sexist, they couldn't quite decide). The third episode was with Katherine Parkinson, and she sounded just as delightfully ditzy as she did on the show; I was sad to hear about her being actually hurt by Greg disparaging her clay masks, which stopped her from working on them after that (even though Richard Herring, when he won them, and members of the crew tried to reassure her that they were good). The fourth episode was with a non-contestant as a special guest, but was quite fun anyway.
When I started listening to the podcast episode about s1e4, the special guest was Nicola Coughlan, so I had to go and watch the New Year's treat (2021) in which she appeared.
New Year Treat 2021 spoilers -- That was definitely different! It was not quite my first glimpse of pandemic-era TM -- I'd seen the studio portion of series 10 by then already -- but it was my first glimpse of pandemic-era tasks, with the little outdoor bubble. The one-shot vibe is definitely different, but I found it surprisingly fun anyway. Nicola was adorable, Shirley Ballas was impressively into it, Krishnan Guru-Murthy made for a pretty fun straight man, and Greg's running joke about Rylan needing to start a cult because he can sell any pile of BS was quite funny, but I think my favorite in that was actually John Hannah, just because, honestly, I'm a sucker for a handsome bearded man of a certain age (although it is pretty surreal that Jonathan from The Mummy is now a man of a certain age XD) and for that accent, and while he may not have done all that well, he definitely seemed up for all the nonsense.
And with that, I have just two series (9 and 12), another New Year Treat, and the Champion of Champions tournament (2 episodes). Fortunately, at least I have a bunch more seasons of the podcast to look forward to, though I'm moving through them at a good clip, too.