Reaction: Taskmaster, “Maybe we’re the monsters” | Series 19, Episode 5

Chaos reigns, at last

Popping balloons during the live task made Rosie Ramsey horny.

We’re halfway through Taskmaster series 19, and I love this group of contestants more and more with each episode. This week, Fatiha El-Ghorri calls her aunt a bitch, chaos demon Jason Mantzoukas wins his first episode, Mathew Baynton performs an act of altruism, Rosie Ramsey recalls my second-favorite Mitchell and Webb skit, and Stevie Martin sings about sausage.

This week’s episode is a near-perfect assortment of tasks that bring out the funniest—if not always the best—of the contestants. Martin is the most fun to watch when she’s spiraling while trying to defend herself; same goes for El-Ghorri when she’s given the runway for rambling tangents and non-sequiturs, innit. I believe that the studio segments for an entire season are shot over the course of a week or two, but five episodes in, I’d believe that these contestants had been hanging out for five weeks.

The Prize Task

This week’s prize task was to bring in the best object to bestow in your will to a relative against whom you are seeking revenge. Let’s start with El-Ghorri, who’s on a roll with weird-ass items (and even better backstories). This week, she brings in pillows and a note that reads in all-caps, “I hope these give you a good night’s sleep because I will be seeing you in your dreams bish!” These are intended for her aunt who sounds lovely and thoughtful and also makes the world’s best couscous. I am dying to know if El-Ghorri’s family watches Taskmaster together each week and what havoc she hath wrought among them. (Remember in Champion of Champions, when Katherine Ryan attempts to make the biggest mess by accusing her brother-in-law of infidelity and shrugging it all off with, “my sister will know I’m joking”? Lower stakes, but same energy.)

Also, we need to talk about Mantzoukas’ creepy painting of … haunted doll heads? Curséd children? I do not know. I reverse-image searched this to try to identify an artist, but came up blank. Probably for the best, honestly.

For this week’s prize task, Jason Mantzoukas evidently descended into the bowels of hell to bring back this painting. Artist unknown, thank god.

We’ve seen creepy art on Taskmaster before — Jessica Knappett’s terrifying Victorian Christmas cards from S7 comes to mind — but none that I’ve had such a visceral reaction to. The unfortunate plot twist: Because he won the episode, Mantzoukas also won the painting he’d planned to offload on an unsuspecting contestant.

But the winner of the prize task goes to the deceptively petty Mathew Baynton, who bequeaths a thousand-piece puzzle of the Mona Lisa… but plans to be buried with one of the pieces. Diabolical.

The Other Tasks

• The first task, located in a cave, is to be the least annoying person ’round the campfire. Contestants had to sing a folk song, tell a ghost story, or recite a beat poem … about fast cars, barbecues, or DIY.

  • And forgive me, but I was trained as a copy editor early in my career, so Mantzoukas pointing out the missing apostrophe in ’round — and fixing it — made my heart grow three sizes. (Fast facts: The apostrophe should always “open” toward the missing letters. So it’s ’round, not ‘round, and ’90s, not ‘90s or <shudders> 90’s.)

• “Be the least annoying” anything sounds like a task designed for Mantzoukas to fail at spectacularly, and indeed, Taskmaster Greg Davies found the following things annoying in Mantzoukas’ song:

  • your smile

  • your confidence (only a Brit would be annoyed by this)

  • your tone of voice

  • the soundtrack you chose

  • the rhyming scheme

  • the mawkish insincerity

  • the proposal [to Little Alex Horne], and

  • the smug explanation of your art.

Mantzoukas’ delight is contagious when he discovers pre-recorded tunes on the keyboard.

• I was charmed by Martin’s moorhen call, by Ramsey’s quite lovely voice, and by Baynton’s gentle guitar music. The less said about El-Ghorri’s story about eating pregnant goat, the better. (But Baynton’s in-studio quip was excellent: “Did you mistake ghost story for goat story?”)

• How many times now has poor Baynton lost on a technicality?

• The second task was to draw the monster. Although we’ve seen so many art tasks over the last 18 seasons, this one felt fresh, with the ensuing scene unfolding like an acid-fueled Sesame Street episode. It was so robustly conceived, too — a traffic cop fining the “driver” in pens, the monster’s photo on the driver’s license, the lollipop lady (aka crossing guard).

Mathew Baynton looks worried about his passengers.

• Martin: “Where’s the horn?” That’s what 150 hours of driving lessons gets you.

• Ramsey: “We were the monsters, weren’t we?” immediately made me think of the David Mitchell and Robert Webb skit “Are we the baddies?” (For the record, my very favorite Mitchell and Webb skit is “Homeopathic A&E.”)

• The third and final task was the first task they filmed, which means, as Little Alex Horne pointed out in the studio, that Mantzoukas threw an empty plastic bottle at his head the first time they met. In the official Taskmaster podcast, Mantzoukas tells host Ed Gamble that he needed to establish dominance, to make Little Alex Horne think that he could be in danger.

• This one was a two-parter. Part one: Shorten these pencils and place your shortened pencils in the pencil case. Your time started when you mentioned the hat. I have questions just in general about how Little Alex Horne’s twisted brain has apparently endless capacity to think up new tasks. But I have even more questions about how tasks like these, with elements that have absolutely no relation to each other, come into being. Did he come up with pencil-shortening first and then decide to add mushrooms? Did he have the Mario-esque mushroom hat and then build a task around it?

• Part two: Write down every word you said in this room before opening the task. The good thing about being a foul-mouthed antagonist is that it’s easy to remember that you just called your host a prick upon first meeting him.

  

  Fatiha El-Ghorri called Little Alex Horne a prick.

• The live task involved a children’s story, wordplay, colors, popping balloons, a horny Rosie Ramsey, and an unprecedented act of altruism from Baynton. Upon Martin despairing, Baynton “accidentally” pops his remaining balloons, paving the way for Martin’s live-task victory. I can’t recall anything quite like this in Taskmaster history.

Elsewhere in the Taskmaster Extended Universe

I’m behind on the official Taskmaster podcast, but I did just listen to the most recent episode, with Jason Mantzoukas. When he won the episode and opened Martin’s prize task, he glitter-bombs himself — you can see the light glinting off his curls as the credits roll.

Zoom in, and you’ll see the glitter sparkling in Mantzoukas’ hair.

Evidently this studio episode was the first of two filmed that day, and it sent hair and makeup into a panic, with multiple people scraping glitter out of Mantzoukas’ beard in preparation for the next episode. “I was finding pieces of glitter on my body for weeks.”

Until next time: Who’s your favorite grouping of contestants? Season 19 may well take the cake, but I’m also quite partial to season four, with Lolly Adefope, Noel Fielding, Mel Giedroyc, Hugh Dennis, and Joe Lycett.