Master of Tasks

Hello! I haven't wanted to write any essays since November, especially on lighthearted topics; I've also been doing quite badly in general. Nonetheless, I'm still me, and this week I felt the machinery creaking into life around one of the things that's keeping me going, the panel show Taskmaster.

Also, and I swear the timing is unrelated, but I have a book coming out on April 15th! Notes from a Regicide is a trans family saga of art and revolution that's been with me in some capacity since 2013, and it's out in a week, and it's really good, so please consider requesting it at your local library or buying it if you have the means.

On with the show!

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My spouse is British, and they've tempered my unfortunate Anglophilia with news about what the UK is really like: the sodden internecine warfare; the moribund upper class brought up on institutionalized cruelty and taught to sigh their words as a signifier of power; the centuries of abandoned architecture Americans would kill for, left to the loam because it's too expensive to heat. Unfortunately, tempering a metal makes it stronger, so now I like England more. I'm fascinated by Britain, and England's tormented relationship with Britain, and with the Republic of Ireland, and with itself. Even though I torment myself for different reasons, after all, I totally get it.

British panel show Taskmaster has a lot of trademark British phenomena, starting with thrones and S&M. Taskmaster, in case you don't know any of its American fans (all cartoonists, so far as I can tell), is about comedians competing to achieve silly but challenging tasks ("draw the biggest and best circle," "destroy a cake beautifully"). The tasks are prerecorded, elegantly edited, and shown in a theatre with the comedians present. The show has a live studio audience, juiced and goosed with an obvious laugh track, and it is a measure of its quality that I find this shit sufficiently hilarious to not experience the laugh track as an intrusive thought. On the stage, the comedians riff over their own failures and endure the barbs of the show's host, Greg Davies, a Welsh giant who reclines on a throne, doling out arbitrary points with lordly condescension. He also abuses his "assistant," Alex Horne, the series' showrunner and only credited writer. Horne has his own smaller throne but doesn't recline on it.

In summary, it's kind of like MST3K, except that Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank are also the riffing crew because of budget cuts. Like MST3K, it's ultimately quite a goodhearted show. One of its strokes of genius, and according to my spouse one of its most profoundly British ones, is its refusal to fully commit to its own bit. Committing to bits is for Americans. That means that Davies constantly cracks up and breaks character, while Horne is openly goading him to greater heights of torment and mockery.

Earlier seasons of Taskmaster had a conceit that Davies and Horne lived together as dom and sub. I imagine that they got rid of this gag partly because bits are for Americans, and partly because the hosts were uncomfortable with the kind of fandom this must have attracted. The subtext continues to be basically text, though, and it works because it captures the S&M truism that the sub is the one with the power, without whom the scene can't go on, whose desires are being catered to and who lays out what can and can't happen. Although Davies is shown writing the tasks in the series' title sequence, the show doesn't even pretend he knows what they will be. Likewise, the tasks Horne writes often involve humiliating him. Horne's persona on the show is that of a bland, childlike man who has relaxed his face permanently into a basset hound's frown. A running joke is that he cannot do comedy and is mocked by Davies when he tries, which, once again, is material they are openly reading off of a teleprompter and which Horne has presumably written. In a paradoxical way, it helps the show beat the "this is a writer's fetish" allegations so common to Drag Race mini-challenges. The idea that this all one massive, thousand-armed fetish – though curiously divorced from measurable sexuality – is baked matter-of-factly into the show. If the first law of improv is "yes, and," it's joined here by a second: "well, yes, and?"

Former contestant Frankie Boyle has described Taskmaster as "a show about humility." The contestants are baffled by what they're asked to do, and often fail. Davies mocks and torments Horne, while Horne demands that Davies – a normal, nice-enough human being – mortify his flesh. Part of the genius of this is that it never crosses from humility to humiliation, except specifically towards Horne, who asks for it. It's about people you like finding common humanity through failing together. Even Davies, as Boyle has also pointed out, isn't immune from the humbling, for the odd and specific reason that he's a very large man – 6'8" and commensurately broad – and must himself experience life as a series of frustrating challenges, not that different from dowsing for grapes in flour or making art with a six-foot-long paintbrush.

Although it's not intuitive to imagine a man who keeps picking up his contestants on national television as disabled, one definition of disability is simply trying to live in a world that doesn't accommodate your differences. To me, it's interesting to read Davies this way, and to read the show as a world-turned-upside-down disability saturnalia. It's about a man with an unconventional body, boisterously judging a group of people with mostly conventional bodies on how well they do when deprived of the use of their hands or eyes, or asked to use an out-of-scale object. Again, this is disability as a lack of accomodation, the product of a society that makes life artificially uncomfortable and embarrassing for some people and not others. (As a side note/counterpoint, I also think it's interesting that autistic contestant Fern Brady found the show surprisingly autism-friendly – each day of filming involved nine tasks in a closely controlled environment, in which she interacted only with Horne.)

I said "saturnalia"; I could have said "feast of fools," because there's something medieval about the show too. Davies is a child's idea of a king, large, shouty, boisterous, enjoying his power; he's clearly in charge because he's bigger than everyone else. If I'm drawing a number of lines under Davies' size in this commentary, it's because size is part of his Taskmaster character in a way that it doesn't necessarily have to be. He could downplay or ignore it. Instead he uses his body expansively, taking up as much space as possible on his throne, his gestures grand, his voice enormous. His largeness is the largeness of an adult to a child. We are asked to believe that the contestants are alive because he doesn't want them dead. He's also endlessly self-deprecating about his size, open about his complex relationship with it, and in fact says something palpably dysmorphic in almost every episode. It makes a real point of the series' artifice, reminds us constantly that we're being asked to pretend that he is a (fantasy, medieval) giant, rather than just a man who can't shop off the rack.

This balance – real and fake power, real and fake disability, real and fake kink – is what makes Taskmaster so engaging after nineteen seasons, which as panel shows go is not excessive, but is certainly a lot for viewers to take on. (It's best to start it a few seasons in, maybe on season four, which was my first.) Britain's top import is comedians, and they're different from our comedians. Raised in a viable economy of shows like this, with real health insurance and limited student debt, they thrive as much as comedians ever can. Whole types flourish that haven't been seen in the U.S. since 1978; Britain has a fleet of Certified Wacky Guys, for example, who on Taskmaster make you realize regrettably often that we gave up on this idea too soon. The medical profession is well represented by Jo Brand, the ultimate psych nurse (I don't think I can explain this any further), and by Mike Wozniak, a sad-eyed doctor who presumably left the field after seeing the Angel of Death. By and large, they're all Oxbridge graduates who will eat anything for $5 (£3.82). I don't know exactly how I'd be doing right now if it weren't for Taskmaster, which rolls up, The Terror-like, at all dark national moments. Like The Terror, it's about a white bear who makes you do things you don't want to do, but that's where the similarities end.