I went to Taskmaster Live and had a wonderful time, even though I came absolute bottom of the scoreboard with one single point.
This post isn’t really about magic, but it’s sort of relevant and I wanted to share it. It’s about motivation and surviving in bleak times.
It’s also about eating as much melon as you can in 2 minutes. Your time starts now.
For those who don’t know, Taskmaster is a television programme which began life as an experimental live show in Edinburgh, got picked up by Dave¹, then moved to Channel 4 and has spawned international spinoffs in New Zealand, Sweden and Australia. The format of the show is a group of 5 comedians competing to complete tasks set by the titular Taskmaster, Greg Davies, and facilitated by the Taskmaster’s assistant, Alex Horne.
Sort of.
In reality the show is written and devised by Alex Horne, he even fronts the band who wrote the theme tune. Greg Davies was brought in to be the Taskmaster because the Taskmaster’s role is a deeply antagonistic force in the show, which Alex didn’t want to embody. This was an excellent decision as he is far better suited to the underdog role.
Other spinoffs from Taskmaster include the board game, the card game, a book of tasks you can set for your friends and of course the Ipswich Magical Society Taskmaster nights. Our treasurer Daniel Bean is the Alex Horne of our club and arranges excellent magic adjacent tasks for us all once a year. He also arranges Taskmaster evenings at his home through a group chat in Whatsapp, which is where we decided to sign up to the brand new attraction in London, Taskmaster Live.
Taskmaster live has achieved something utterly exceptional. You see the Taskmaster show, from its inception, is based around pre-recorded segments of celebrities completing tasks alone with a whole crew of people setting up every single aspect of the house the tasks take place in. The segments are all filmed in a few days and then the house has to be reset for the next contestant and the footage of the tasks have to be edited and evaluated to see how they performed, if they sneakily broke the rules etc. Then there’s months of post production where the footage is scrutinized to ensure the task was correctly completed within the constraints of the rules.
Somehow they managed to compress all of that into a 100% realtime hour long sequence of tasks, where 14 people compete simultaneously and are immediately evaluated. If thats not mad enough, there are 4 groups of 14 people entering the game every half hour². It runs like a fucking machine and it is
It’s also hugely fun, although my wife simply doesn’t understand the appeal. She didn’t want to go but she came along and participated. We worked together on one team task, in which we earned u
Our one single point. Oh that’s something I didn’t mention. We actually came joint last, with one point each.
I get really into Taskmaster.
Contestants in the game on TV typically have one of two approaches to the game. They either follow a methodical and thoughtful path of cleverly interpreting the task to seek extra insight, loopholes, and strategies… Or they come up with a wacky idea and just fucking go for it. Surprisingly, the two techniques have a roughly equal success rate. You might think from my writing that faced with such challenges I take the contemplative route, but in truth I follow the scientific approach. Make some observations, formulate a hypothesis, test it and then oops, that was your one go. Sorry.
Now you might think that sounds incredibly frustrating, and I think that’s the core of my wife’s problem with such games, but I find it freeing in a way that I had trouble putting into words until I saw Doom Patrol season 3 episode 4, in which for reasons far too complicated to explain³ the main cast all slowly turn into zombies. After they are cured they briefly talk about their experiences and Larry says this:
The one upside to being a zombie was the only thing I worried about was finding brains. It was sort of… I dunno… Peaceful.
That to me is the experience of Taskmaster for one hour the only thing that matters is throwing a potato into a hole, solving a combination on a lock or building a bridge over a little model river⁴. The rest of the problems in your life evaporate as you focus 100% on pleasing the Taskmaster and his various minions. Then at the end of the event when you’re bottom of the pack and everything you tried failed… It doesn’t matter. It’s like being a child again, there are zero consequences for your actions or lack of skill.
I wasn’t planning to segue this into a magical topic but it does remind me of a sentiment regarding stage fright and perfromers nerves that I’ve heard from a few different people. There’s no need to be nervous performing magic because at the end of the day, even if the trick goes badly, you’re just there playing pretend with your toys. Yes it’s nice to do well but if you mess up no one dies, you aren’t crashing a plane or botching an open heart bypass surgery. You’re swapping a 6 of clubs for an indifferent card.
Have some fun.
Your time starts now.
¹ Yes the UK has a television station called Dave. I can’t really offer any explanation but they’ve produced some surprisingly good programming for a channel which shares a name with the lead character of Red Dwarf, who is a self confessed intergalactic slob. Amusingly Dave rebooted Red Dwarf after decades off the air and the feature length comeback episode strongly implied the channel was named after the character.
² What this means is that the Taskmaster Live house has 8 assistants in it, talking a constant stream of 112 contestants per hour through a facsimile of a game which normally takes several days to get 5 contestants through a similar process. That’s pretty impressive, and there’s also a museum of notable taskmaster props before you even get into the Taskmaster ‘house’.
³ All episodes of Doom Patrol are too complicated to explain, it’s why I love the show. It has that rare property in a television programme in that it has a continually evolving plot which builds to a seasonal climax, but if I explained the events of a single episode it would make zero sense without the context of everything that came before it, and therefore spoil virtually nothing. The only other TV show I know with this property is the Netflix adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Hollistic Detective Agency.
⁴ One thing I should point out is that we all took a vow of secrecy over the actual nature of the tasks at the live event so every task I have described in this post is from the show, and not something I actually did.