Taskmaster, “Getaway sticks” | Series 19, Episode 9

It’s the penultimate episode of Taskmaster series 19, and what a run it’s been. Battling hard for Britain’s hollowest prize are Fatiha El-Ghorri, who throws a croissant on a roof; Jason Mantzoukas, who wins his second episode and celebrates, naturally, by breaking shit; Mathew Baynton, whose short shorts continue to be a poor choice of clothing; Rosie Ramsey, who tries to bribe the Taskmaster with a crisp new £50 note; and Stevie Martin, who lowers a tiny basket of tiny breadsticks into Little Alex Horne’s mouth.

The theme this week seemed to be body parts: we’ve got boobs, we’ve got balls, we’ve got vacuum cleaner appendages. Just another very normal Taskmaster episode.

The Prize Task

This week, the contestants had to bring in the best thing that could be used as a jelly mo(u)ld, and is there even anything to discuss besides Aisling Bea’s boobs? Of course Mantzoukas went with boobs; of course Bea agreed to make a mold; of course they made the jelly in the colors of the Irish flag. (Actually, I thought El-Ghorri’s hollow foot was pretty funny; definitely deserved more than a single point. And Mantzoukas’ quip: “We’re currently witnessing a Reddit forum being created.”)

The Other Tasks

• The first task, taped to their respective backs like a “kick me” sign, was to place something somewhere surprising with a bonus point for the most surprising answer to the question, “How did that get there?” Mantzoukas called in wild-haired doppelgänger and past Taskmaster contestant Nish Kumar for a bizarre (obviously) sketch involving a banana peel and a mostly naked Mantzoukas crouching in a cupboard. Did this really all happen in under 30 minutes? (If the internet is to be believed, Kumar lives in South London, possibly in Brixton. It’s nearly an hour from Brixton to Chiswick, where Taskmaster is filmed, whether you’re traveling by Tube, car, or bike. Maybe he just happened to be in the neighborhood, but if the producers agreed to stop the clock to get Kumar on set—THANK YOU, it was worth it.)

• The second task was to create the most exciting new bodies so that you and Alex become a dynamic duo. They then had to do something dynamic together. I have no idea what I would have come up with for this task, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as creative as any of our contestants.

  • Even El-Ghorri, who got only one point, put on a weird and impressive show—Hijab vs. Raging Horne—with her and Little Alex Horne wearing hand-painted egg-shaped cardboard cutouts.

• I didn’t find Martin’s cardboard horse sketch quite as funny or as moving as Taskmaster Greg Davies did, but I did love her take on “new bodies,” with her and LAH’s heads atop their hands. Ramsey’s dancing skeletons were also very funny and clever. And who knew Little Alex Horne would look so good in a long dark wig?

• Mantzoukas was, predictably, chaotic and inane, but Little Alex Horne as a vaguely crab-shaped Pipe Beast? Priceless. (Side note: My former colleague William Hughes wrote up this season of Taskmaster for The A.V. Club’s best TV of the year so far, and referred to “invasive species Jason Mantzoukas,” a better joke than I’ve come up with in nine weeks of reviews.)
• But nothing could possibly beat Baynton’s beautiful butterflies. The glitter! The wide-eyed smiles! The camel toe!

• The third task was to conquer the multitask, one of my favorite types of task, where the producers just keep dogpiling on the poor contestants. Baynton did as poorly at this as he did brilliantly at the previous task, taking 51 minutes to complete it. I wonder what sequence this was filmed in, because Baynton’s utter obliviousness to some very obvious clues were real rookie mistakes. El-Ghorri seems to excel at this type of task—like E7’s “what’s in the yellow box?” game—and completed this one in just six minutes.

• The live task this week was a word game—similar to one from season 4, which also involved coming up with words of certain lengths that fit certain categories—and this is one of those tasks that I’d be completely hopeless at. Words, I can do; but counting letters as the clock ticks down? Absolutely not. Live tasks can be a crapshoot, but they’ve been pretty uniformly solid (“surprisingly watchable”) this season. And in keeping with this episode’s apparent theme, Martin used the word “boobs” and Baynton used “penis” in Round 1.

Elsewhere in the Taskmaster Universe

Kerry Godliman posted to Instagram the list of all of S7’s prize tasks with her notes:

Mantzoukas appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers this week, and it’s worth the full 13 minutes. Among other things, he talks about everything the Taskmaster safety folks wouldn’t let him do.

Until next time: Other than the chemistry and camaraderie of this season’s contestants, what or who will you miss the most after next week’s finale? For me it’s gotta be Fatiha El-Ghorri’s quips. “What in the pasty hell is this?”