'Taskmaster is at risk of being milked to death'

There was a triumph of sorts for the much-maligned comedy star Rosie Jones in the grand final of the latest series of Taskmaster on Thursday night. She may not have walked away with the golden Greg Davies head trophy, but when Rosie got her guns out and did 100 press-ups in ten minutes it was surely one in the eye for the online trolls who had been doing their best to make her life a misery for the preceding two months.

My guess is most of them would struggle to master even ten press-ups in ten minutes. Not least because they’d probably have to use up half the time clearing some floorspace in their tiny bedroom at their mum and dad’s house. Given she has cerebral palsy, Jones choosing such a physically demanding task will have perhaps come as a surprise to some viewers.

I’d count myself among that group, and I will further admit to typing "Can people with cerebral palsy ballroom dance?" into my search engine — because I have a funny feeling where Rosie might be heading next if the BBC is bold enough.

The fact that Jones managed to crack a few jokes while she was down on the exercise mat in the Taskmaster house would have no doubt further enraged the trolls, who had decided right at the start of this series that she’d only been invited on for box-ticking reasons.

That was clearly nonsense all along. In the fiercely subjective world of comedy, Rosie has been as successful commercially as many of the other acts who’ve appeared on Taskmaster. I would also argue that the rapport she developed with Jack Dee over the course of this series will go down as one of Taskmaster’s all-time happiest accidents.

Mind you, Rosie still finished in last place on the final leaderboard, trailing the eventual winner Andy Zaltzman by over twenty points. The fact that cricket-obsessed Radio 4 star Zaltzman had arrived at the final in the lead and with his Hot Dog joker still to play, means that his victory won’t exactly go down as the biggest shock this show has ever conjured up.

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Inevitably, in terms of excitement that led to a rather flat final contest, particularly once it had become clear that his closest challenger Dee wasn’t about to start making up ground anytime soon. It was still an enjoyable enough end to the 18th series, although I did find myself dipping in and out of this ten-part run more often than I’d done during any of this BAFTA-winning show's previous outings.

Taskmaster is far from losing its mass appeal, but even its most ardent fans must admit that some weeks it was beginning to look a little frayed around the edges. I’m afraid it’s another case of a TV show becoming a victim of its own success. Twenty-six series in some incarnation or another in a little under ten years tells its own story.

Admittedly, in Channel 4 terms that’s nowhere near A Place In The Sun or Come Dine With Me levels of ubiquity. There’s a danger that Taskmaster could end up being milked to death though. The recent children’s version on Channel 4 and the new Live Experience show in London’s Docklands aren’t helping to dispel those fears either.

Luckily, the programme’s policy of booking just one big name each series and filling the other four seats with lesser lights appears to be holding strong, and it’s always a bonus when one of the relative unknowns grabs the spotlight as brilliantly as Emma Sidi just did.

However, if Channel 4 continues to demand two main series of Taskmaster a year it might not be long before we see a big name coming back for another run. Not that I would necessarily complain about that — especially if the big name was, say, Bob Mortimer or Rob Beckett.

The worrying thing for Taskmaster is that the area in which its joyful whimsy is starting to look most thinly spread is the tasks themselves. Given the sheer volume of content and ingenuity required, chief creator Alex Horne’s well was always in danger of running dry. Of course, this series still produced some notable moments, with the likes of Take A Bite Out Of Alex’s Carrot easily making it onto the list of classics.

I also enjoyed the final’s "counting the seats in a cinema" challenge, which offered viewers the chance to yell their own tactics at the screen like the old days, despite the fact that a) the contestants couldn’t hear them and b) said tactics wouldn’t work any better than the contestants’.

Far too often though, this series’ tasks fell into the "overly childish" or "mildly diverting" categories. That meant Greg Davies and the contestants regularly found themselves having to do some heavy comedy lifting back in the studio. To borrow Davies’ old favourite question: so what have we learned from this series?

Well, though I hate to say the clue’s in the name, I think the Taskmaster production team really needs to get back to basics and start mastering those tasks again.

Taskmaster is streaming on Channel 4.