Wasn’t that one of Alex Horne’s inspirations for the original Taskmaster live show he created for the Edinburgh Fringe, that eventually became the TV series? Thanks for the suggestion!
No, it wasn’t even on at that point. According to Wikipedia his inspiration was The Crystal Maze, which was an action puzzle game show similar to Legends Of The Hidden Temple.
Alex Horne has been a contestant on House Of Games, though.
I haven’t read through the thread yet, but I doubt this has been mentioned.
A few months ago I kept noticing how dark David Mitchell’s eyes were. Like really dark.
Eventually I looked it up. Turns out there’s an actual, medical reason for it.
On the topic of David…I had been watching both WILTY and Taskmaster for quite a while and it wasn’t until this specific clip that I found out that David is married to Victoria Coren Mitchell.
Also, I have to say how much I love it when Lee (on WILTY) knows (or has decided) that one of his own teammates is lying and starts poking holes in their story too.
And can we talk about Jimmy’s completely unnecessary joke.
And for this one, if you’re not familiar Jimmy had some tax evasion issues that he’s very open about. He jokes about not paying his tax as often as he jokes about all his cosmetic surgery. This one goes downhill in a hurry. Even if you don’t like the show or don’t like Jimmy, just stick with this one from where I have it cued up to the first question the next contestant gets and see if you can turn away.
I’m guessing most of you have seen this, but I always love seeing Greg’s reaction to Katherine saying “I changed it”.
In this one, I like her “I just don’t care” joke, but it is a semi-scripted joke. I’ve seen her shoehorn the same shtick in other shows as well. I’m not going to be able to quickly find it but I remember Jimmy saying something on 8OO10CDC and you could see her start with the fake tears. But I still like it.
I’m putting this in it’s own post because it’s important. Carrot In A Box is required viewing for anyone that’s a fan of these shows or Jon or Sean in particular. If you haven’t seen it, can you come up with the right answer?
Carrot in a Box 2 and 3 are also hilarious.
And the infamous Bad Dong.
And how about a couple of Rhod vs Greg videos
“I saw you out”
Greg’s double take, priceless:
Can I just say “I think we all know what happened to BT” and everyone will know what clip I’m talking about?
Something I’ve noticed on Big Fat Quiz is that they must film for several hours without a break. If you watch outtakes, you’ll often see contestants eating when it’s not their turn.
Richard getting his food stolen and the Biff line is great:
Roisin brought an entire cake as her ‘mascot’ on Countdown.
Oh, yes. It’s very sweet. I don’t know how far you’ve gotten in TM, but in Victoria’s series, one of the tasks was “propose to Alex in the most irresistible way.” When she read the task, Victoria immediately blurted out an impromptu proposal. In the studio, she explained that she’s so besotted with her husband - her words - that she couldn’t propose to another man, even as a joke.
Mr Blobby.
I’ve seen that (I think I’ve seen pretty much all of Taskmaster (or all that youtube has to offer)).
That reminds me of all the times (perhaps justifiably) Aisling would get weirded out by certain tasks. “Give Alex A Special Cuddle” comes to mind. Though that was one of the odder tasks to begin with. But Bob and Sally certainly had fun with it.
And for no particular reason, that reminds me of another one of my favorite clips. Liza declaring her love for the taskmaster. I do love Liza.
This one I’m not going to cue up. If you’ve seen this season (or Series), you know what’s going to happen. If you haven’t, just understand that Nish and Mark are the contestants you generally expect the least out of.
I feel like diving back into individual tasks. Rob doing accents was great.
Unrelated, but there was one of the ‘communicate with a swedish person’ or ‘you can’t speak in english’ type task where one of the people, maybe Katherine Ryan, ended up communicating in ASL. When they asked her about it she (or whoever it was) said their high school offered it as foreign language credit. That’s something I really wish was more common. It’s a great idea. I think a lot of kids would take it because it seems fun. Plus, between high school and today, working in retail, I could absolutely have used ASL more times than I’ve had the chance to use any of the Spanish I still remember. I think one of the only times I’ve used it is when someone said “Hablas Espanol?” and knowing they didn’t speak English, I replied en Espanol “No”.
Jack and James getting drunk and ordering food.
Ardal having an IRL epiphany gets me every time.
And some of my favorite Sean Lock jokes:
Nazi Island
Good luck trying it without spit
This was a classic moment from 8 Out Of Ten Cats Does Countdown. (Sean Lock: “That’s a challenging wank.”)
Sean Lock was an international treasure. A true loss for comedy, too.
When you think about it, how can they not be married? That’s a pair that belong together.
So I think QI is still the gold standard of British panel shows (we only tried Taskmaster as we’d run out of QIs to watch on Amazon Prime)
They also pulled off a rare trick of successfully replacing a presenter. The show was completely synonymous with Stephen Fry, I couldn’t imagine them successfully replacing him. But Sandi Toksvig totally managed it, and made it her own, if anything surpassing Stephen Fry.
Well, he makes no secret of going to public school (he’s not boasting about it, of course) but more importantly, he’s really good. Intelligent and funny - one of the up and coming British comics. We saw him live under awful conditions (first show we saw out of lockdown, everyone in masks, and the gig moved out of the small room and into the big one to space us out more, so that three quarters of the seats were empty) and he was still really good.
Here’s a pretty representative clip of him.
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It made sense, but only in retrospect. Sandi was always highly intelligent and quick-witted. Intellectually curious as well. I had no idea she would do so well, but she is downright amazing.
I’d say she equaled Stephen, not surpassed.
And her accent is fake! She has an American accent. You can hear her talk about that here:
