Alex Horne, second right (in armbands) is the creator and co-host of Taskmaster, a comedy show that has taken over the world.
Taskmaster creator Alex Horne reveals how his childish show became an unlikely global TV juggernaut – and why it’s about to get even bigger
If, less than a decade ago, somebody had told you the world’s hottest comedy show would feature comedians Rhod Gilbert gaffer taping his eyes open to stop himself blinking, Josh Widdicombe tattooing Greg Davies’ name on his left foot or Mel Giedroyc struggling to wolf down a 10-layer sandwich stuffed with chocolate, you would not have believed them.
And yet, since it launched in 2015, these indignities (and others, such as Romesh Ranganathan speed-eating a whole watermelon off the floor, or Man Down star Mike Wozniak shaving his head into a mohawk) have turned Taskmaster into a TV juggernaut.
For the uninitiated, each UK series sees five comedians complete a series of challenges set by Alex Horne, the show’s creator and chief ideas generator, and judged by Davies as the all-powerful Taskmaster. The ultimate prize at the end of 10 episodes is a gold-painted papier-mâché bust of Davies’s head. [Hosts of the NZ version are Jeremy Wells and Paul Williams.]
The games range from the straightforward (eat an egg in the fastest time possible, dance to a set of ringtones), to the wacky (put three massive exercise balls on a yoga mat on the top of a hill, paint a picture of a horse while riding a horse) and the downright weird (give Alex a “special cuddle”, impress the mayor of Chesham, Hertfordshire).
Taskmaster rapidly found a cult following after premiering in the UK on the channel formerly known as Dave, and has entered the mainstream since moving to Channel 4 four years ago. But, as the 18th regular series launches, Horne, 46, says he still does not know the secret behind its success. “I think childishness is a good word: we let people use their imaginations,” he says.
“People really enjoy seeing familiar faces being funny, that’s mainly it. We’re just making these people be themselves,” Horne adds. “So you see the real Bob Mortimer, or this time, Jack Dee, but without a script. You sort of strip them back a bit and you can relate to them, because they tend to be tasks that you could do at home. It’s very silly. I think it’s very funny, which sounds like a trite thing to say, but we do try to make sure it’s funny.”
His company is sitting on funds of more than £7.5 million, ($15.9m) according to its latest accounts, up almost £2 million from 2022. The last season, in which Bristolian comic John Robins emerged triumphant, launched to more than 3 million viewers, while the show was Channel 4′s third-most streamed show of 2023. The original programme is now broadcast in 120 countries, while local versions have proved a hit in (deep breath) Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Croatia, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Portugal.
Horne is often asked how a show as peculiarly British as Taskmaster could find such a large global audience, but he reckons local versions having their own flavour helps. There are also tasks in different editions that would never see the light of day in the UK, such as when the Swedish comedians were told to make a train driver beep their horn. The contestants started clambering onto rail tracks and tried to flag down trains.
“The Swedish one is a bit more laissez-faire on health and safety, and the Kiwi one is sort of anal, quite pernickety, whereas the Australian one is a bit more relaxed,” says Horne. “It’s funny, but it’s the same. It’s still people laughing at it for the same reason, but with a twist each time.”
One rare misstep came when Team Taskmaster tried to crack America, with a 2018 attempt to create a new version Stateside (featuring Horne as the sidekick to Reggie Watts in the Davies role) being cancelled by Comedy Central after just eight episodes. “We sort of messed it up, to be honest,” says Jon Thoday, founder of production company and talent agency Avalon.
Horne adds: “We did it their way, which was 22 minutes with a lot of ad breaks, so the format was squeezed. If we did it again, which we would absolutely love to do, we would say we will do it, but we’ll do it our way.”
Yet there was one indication Americans were warming to Taskmaster: they made up the majority of people watching the show on YouTube. Taskmaster’s channel now has more than 1.5 million subscribers, with videos that have been watched almost 750 million times.
Having seen the rapid growth of the YouTube channel, the team decided to launch Taskmaster Supermax+, a paid-for subscription streamer that gives anyone in the world all of the episodes free of adverts. More than 50,000 people around the world have signed up for the £5.99 service (more than the cost of a basic Netflix subscription), with more than half of those viewers in the US. It took less than three months for the streamer to turn a profit. It took Disney+ almost five years.
Taskmaster has been a commercial smash hit. Two books of games, created by Horne, have sold a combined 180,000 copies and both reached the bestseller lists; a board game released in autumn 2019 sold out after one week, and 250,000 have since been shifted; while last year a quarter of a million Christmas crackers were all snapped up in a pre-sale for fans before they hit the shelves. Getting a box was almost as difficult as bagging Oasis reunion tickets.
The quest for world domination shows no signs of abating – or becoming less popular. Next week sees the first preview dates of Taskmaster: The Live Experience, in which regular punters can play Horne’s games at a cavernous hanger in London’s Docklands and explore a museum of the show. Thoday says that the enthusiasm was so great that more than 600,000 people signed up for the first ticket ballot – a number only bettered by Taylor Swift and Oasis in the past year.
“We couldn’t really believe it. We knew people were excited about it but…” he tails off. “It’s a very new thing, and lots of effort has gone into making it good.” If it proves a success in London, Thoday says the next plan is to open a similar attraction in North America.
It is all a far cry from Taskmaster’s modest roots. Horne developed what was then called The Taskmaster as an Edinburgh Fringe show in 2009, partly because he was jealous of his friend Tim Key winning the award for best stand-up while he was at home with his baby son. So he roped in 20 comedian friends and emailed them all an individual task to complete each month, with the results revealed in a drunken live show at the 2010 Fringe.
Those first tasks included a challenge to see who could gain the most weight in a year, to find Horne a hedgehog and to deposit the most money in his bank account. Mark Watson transferred £200; nobody else sent more than a fiver.
“It was meant to just be a one-off, a way to pass the year because I’d had this baby and I was sort of frustrated,” says Horne. “As soon as we did it, I did think we’d definitely do it again, and we did it again the following year, but it was always meant to be a live experience, not a TV show. Everything that’s happened since has been very odd.”
Thoday was convinced that the show ought to be on TV and took a parade of commissioners to see it in Edinburgh — but all of them turned it down. “None of them liked it and I think it’s because it’s different,” he says. “Often, commissioners ask for something that’s different, but what they really want is something that’s the same [as what else is on]. A lot of people say it’s a panel show or they say they don’t really know quite what it is, but really it’s like a proper sitcom.”
Though Channel 4 funded a pilot, the show was passed over until, eventually, Dave came on board. Horne says he never wanted to be the Taskmaster himself and it is hard to imagine anyone other than Davies – a giant of a man who exudes authority like the no-nonsense former teacher he actually is – as judge and jury.
“It’s difficult being a commissioner, because they’re really up against it and trying to find the next hit and a safe option is to commission something that’s like something that is a hit, and there are lots of things that don’t work,” says Horne. “Dave were very good that they took a punt on it and didn’t meddle, either. They let us get on with it, which is great.” Once Davies was in place, Horne credits signing up comedy legend Frank Skinner for the first series as being the “final piece of the puzzle”, that gave fellow comedians the “confidence” to take part too.
With the cancellation of shows such as Mock the Week, Taskmaster is one of the few mainstream outlets for aspiring comedians to get a leg-up and Horne sees it as an important responsibility. Each series has at least one comic that most people haven’t heard of, alongside big names such as Mortimer or Dee.
“So we have our fingers… our ears to the ground, fingers in the pie? We know the comedy circuit. We take it very seriously, with people like Sam Campbell or Fern Brady recently and in the new series, I suppose Emma Sidi and even Andy Zaltzman, who is well known to lots of people, but not on camera that often,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to get somebody out there. And there are so many comics who should be more known than they are.”
Reports of the death of comedy have been exaggerated, he adds. “There’s still great comics, and Edinburgh is in as rude health as always. If I was starting now, I would be slightly… you’d have a different tack. You would have to do Tiktok and stuff like that, but there’s still the same amount of people watching things.”
Though he is the brains behind the operation Horne, who is nicknamed “Little Alex Horne” by Davies on the show even though he stands at 188cm, has been on the receiving end of some severe punishment during tasks.
He has been tied up by Gilbert, locked in a car boot by Mortimer and, most memorably, Liza Tarbuck made him sit his bare bottom on a custard-covered cake. “That sort of changed my life. Once you’ve done that, you’re not really afraid of anything,” he says. “It always goes through my mind that this is going to be embarrassing – but, also, it’s going to be good telly. So I’m fairly happy to do anything.”
Taskmaster won a Bafta for best comedy entertainment programme in 2020 and has bagged the same award in the last two years at the National Comedy Awards. Despite the show’s sustained runaway success, Horne almost seems like he cannot believe what he has created.
“I find it very strange talking about it as if it’s some magnum opus. It is just a nonsense program that is pretty light – that’s a positive, not a negative,” he says. “But, just so you know, I do think it’s ridiculous to talk about it so seriously.”
Taskmaster NZ, UK and Australia are all available to watch on TVNZ+. A new season of the UK series begins tonight.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.