Greg Davies says Taskmaster is more fun now than it was when it began, after 21 seasons and more than 200 episodes. The host said the show’s roles have become organically defined over 11 years, and that the production now feels easier, looser and funnier.
That is why people are searching for Taskmaster and, in some cases, Joanna Page now: the latest season has just wrapped, and viewers want to know whether the long-running format has finally run out of steam. Davies’ answer is the opposite. He said it feels “a lot more fun now,” because the pair understand the world they are working in and its limits.
Alex Horne, who created the format and appears alongside Davies, said they have “worked out how to do it over the years.” He said there was a time when he would go to Davies’ flat and the two would think carefully about what they were going to say, worrying over every line. Now, he said, they know how to be funny and how to have fun with it.
The scale of the show helps explain that confidence. Taskmaster began in 2014 and has grown into a series that has now passed 200 episodes, with bigger budgets, more elaborate tasks and higher-profile guests than in its early years. Davies said that growth has not made the format stale. He said he does not feel bored by it and does not feel the show has lost its edge.
That point matters because Davies recently joked in a season 21 episode that they were running out of ideas for jokes and tasks. He said that was only him finding something else to say. “The show is as fresh as it ever was,” he said, and praised Horne’s ability to keep generating ideas that are different and surprising.
Horne was blunter about the show’s longevity. He said Taskmaster was so outlandish from the start that it had already “jumped the shark” in episode one, when it was doing things such as asking contestants to do the biggest splat. His view is that this gives the pair freedom now, not pressure.
Season 21 is now available in full on the official YouTube channel outside the United Kingdom, while viewers in Britain can watch it on Channel 4. For a show that started as a strange experiment, that reach suggests the real story is not whether Taskmaster has exhausted itself, but how much further Davies and Horne can push it while it still feels this loose.
