Vale Taskmaster Once Again

So that was it for another season of Taskmaster. Don’t worry though, it’ll be back in a few months*, because nothing says event television like running a format into the ground.

Then again, isn’t pretty much all television “event television” these days? Shows like The Cheap Seats and Have You Been Paying Attention? increasingly feel like abnormalities. Who wants consistency when you can roll the dice and maybe get some classic television**?

Which is a long way of saying that this season of Taskmaster probably would have been the one you’d tell people to watch if there hadn’t been so bloody much of it over the last few years. It wasn’t a classic or anything, but it was a rare example of a show where Dave Hughes didn’t make us want to die.

Look, all the format’s flaws were still there. Five people doing a task where you’re lucky to get one really funny result means a lot of television that isn’t funny. Worse, often it’s having to sit through the unfunny responses that makes the final one laughable, so you’re locked in. It’s television that almost never feels like it deserves your full attention, but if you look away it instantly becomes a waste of time. Worst of both worlds, baby!

And this season was a bit of a slow burn on top of that. After a few weeks, sure: Tommy Little started serving up comedy gold. Dave Hughes? Turns out if you’re stuck watching him for weeks on end eventually his demented shoutings suck you in. But it’s still a pretty poor return on a pretty big investment.

All of which is baked into the format. This season, it often all worked out. The tasks were often both smart and silly, the results amusing yet also impressive. Imagine if someone created a cryptic crossword where the answers were funny. It’d be a pain in the arse to solve, and completely not worth it if you were just after a laugh. But if you liked lightweight puzzle-solving and treated the comedy as something of a bonus? Well, have we got a television show for you.

Not us, let’s be clear: you. We can admire the results while still feeling the process was largely a waste of time. Taskmaster is a lot of work for not much of a reward if you’re looking for laughs. While this season worked better than most, the limitations of the format are always going to mean it’s not a favourite of ours.

After all, if a television series can make Dave Hughes look good, it must be doing something wrong.

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*Next season’s cast: Celia Pacquola, Brett Blake, Rove McManus, Joel Creasey and Anisa Nandaula. It could be worse

*classic television not guaranteed.