British series:
Series: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen
Specials: New Year Treat | New Year Treat II | New Year Treat III | New Year Treat IV
New Zealand series:
Seasons: One | Two | Three | Four
Australian Series:
Seasons: One
Frankie Boyle
- Greg: Why is your photograph of a child better than a bed, Frankie?"
Frankie: [Shrugging] Who gives a fuck?
"Are you sure you haven't become jaded with the concept of the show?"
A Scottish comedian known for his dark and cynical material, his time on Mock the Week, and hosting Frankie Boyle's New World Order.
- Always Second Best: Frankie was a strong performer throughout the season, coming in just two points behind third-place contestant Jenny and eight points behind Kiell in second place. However, he was the only contestant in this series to never win an episode. Even series Butt-Monkey Ivo managed to win two. Turns out this was invoked deliberately as on the podcast, Frankie admitted he didn't want to win an episode and interact with the items on stage alone with some fans even pointing out a pattern of him seemingly throwing the live tasks in episodes where he had previously been doing well.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Especially in prize tasks which have included, among other things, a diorama of the Childcatcher scene from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, erotic fan art of Wolverine and Captain America, an ouija board designed specifically to contact the deceased members of The Bee Gees while in the bath, and a bag featuring a picture of his crow friend, Arnold Bartleby.note
- Clock King: Frankie has an impressively accurate internal clock from his years of stand-up. When asked to exit the caravan in 20 minutes without a clock, he exits at just over 23 minutes without bothering to use the egg-timers available. At shorter durations his accuracy is even greater: at 9 minutes, he was only 15 seconds out when asked by Alex on his progress.
- Darker and Edgier: While Lighter and Softer than his appearances elsewhere, Frankie remains the contestant most likely to make a particularly dark joke. This is best illustrated when he faked his death during the Fake Something" task, or in the Imaginary Friend task when, upon being asked by Greg why he made no attempt to rescue his friend from burning to death in the oven, he replied "it's cheaper than a cremation".
- Disqualification-Induced Victory: After spending most of the first episode trailing behind, Ivo and Kiell taking each other out in the live task leaves him and Jenny the joint winners by dint of not having their buckets fall over.
- Epic Fail:
- For the series' first pre-recorded task, he talks about being eager to get started because he's never choreographed anything before. The end result is just himself and Alex awkwardly swaying on stage while breathing heavily.
- For the string-unraveling task, he failed to read the whole text and ended up losing by a months-long margin.
- Failed a Spot Check: Frankie manages to unravel the string completely in "The Curse of Politeness" in twelve seconds (the time started only when he said Alex's name, which he avoided doing), but left the room not realising the back of the task where he had to replace it with a neat ball of string. Where everyone else does it in under ten minutes, Frankie comes in dead last at six months and counting.
- Fan Disservice: During the first pre-recorded task in "The Curse Of Politeness", Frankie kisses Alex for a few seconds. Greg proceeds to describe the kiss as "stomach-churning".
- The Gadfly: His entry for "most impressive effect in a single breath" is whistling to distract a golfer on the course next door. Other desired locations were a church or a matinee.
- Genre Savvy: When tasked with painting a set of white fruit and vegetables to match a real set, Ivo has the immediate realisation that it would be easier to paint the real fruit white. Frankie immediately shoots this down, arguing that A- white is an absence of colour and B- the task specified colours, plural, and following Ivo's plan would risk getting them disqualified. Whether this is true isn't commented on, as they compromise by painting both sets of fruit blue and red, earning them five points.Frankie: Have you not seen this show? It's a show about pedantry.
- Graceful Loser: He accepts his disqualification from the egg-boat task in "How Heavy is the Water?" with grace and equanimity, acknowledging that thanks to his own low-effort approach it's entirely fair.Frankie: I had essentially just wrapped an egg in some paper. I can have few complaints.
- On the podcast, Frankie stated that he didn't want to win the show, or even an episode. Fans noted a pattern of Frankie putting in a more consistently strong performance throughout prize and video tasks, only to seemingly throw the live tasks.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: For the string-unraveling task, he realised that he could keep the clock from starting by not saying "Alex". After unraveling the string, he smugly says it, thinking that he'd finished the task and would end with a final time of zero. However, he failed to read the additional information on the back of the envelope and walked out of the room, ending with a total-elapsed time of six months.
- Lighter and Softer: Known for his rather dark, explicit and cynical comedic material, he's had to smooth down some of the edges for Taskmaster. That said, he's found ways of remaining true to himself; in many cases through his prize task offerings, which have included an explicit piece of fan art depicting Captain America and Wolverine enjoying a rather intimate moment, and a recreation of the Child-Catcher scene from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang using children's toys.
- Mistaken Identity: When Frankie meets his teammate Ivo for the first time, he doesn't look at Ivo as he is walking down the driveway. In the studio, Frankie reveals that he had mistaken Ivo for a deliveryman, and he only realised who he was once Ivo was closer to him.
- Not So Stoic: Despite his generally deadpan demeanour, Frankie giggles with joy when playing with a bouncy ball and a drumkit.
- Rules Lawyer: While this season's line-up is very willing to nit-pick each other's attempts, Frankie is most likely to really dissect a task's wording.Frankie: This whole episode has been such a thrilling journey through language and meaning.
- In outtakes for the pineapple task in "100% Bosco", a task where he came last, Mae refers to Frankie's argument that an image of an object can count as the object, which he gladly argues for again out of principle.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: When tasked with building a tower of pineapples, there's a hidden stash of them around the corner, on the path the contestants would walk when leaving the area. Compared to the frustration of other contestants who failed to find them during the task, Frankie simply walks past them. He later explained that the fact he could have used them in his attempt never occurred to him, as he thought they were there to be set up for the next contestant.
- Violent Glaswegian: Exhibits his destructive side in Episode 4, wherein one task he both throws a wheelie bin over a gate and starts a plastics fire in the garden.
- In the finale, rather than do some sums to figure out the code to a padlock, Frankie just stomped the locked box to pieces. Alex commented that he wasn't particularly surprised.
Ivo Graham
"Please stop using me as a yardstick for failure."
"It does make me feel quite sorry for you sometimes when you grip your head like a chimpanzee whose habitat is under threat."
—Frankie Boyle
A stand-up comedian. The youngest ever winner of So You Think You're Funny, and co-presenter of Dave's British as Folk alongside Series 14 contestant Fern Brady.
- Bait-and-Switch: Ivo's attempt for the "fake something" task in "Old Honkfoot". Ivo leaves the room early on, and he keeps promising Alex that he will be transported back to Ancient Egypt. He then walks in, fully wrapped in toilet paper, and barely responds to Alex's questions. When the task finishes, Ivo enters the room, revealing that the mummy was somebody else all along.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Despite his polite and bumblingly awkward manner, Ivo proves himself to be surprisingly cunning by knocking Kiell's bucket over during the live task, eliminating them both, and celebrates being called a "bad boy" for the first time in his life.
- Butt-Monkey: Both emotionally over-invested in the show and prone to mishaps, Ivo is often mocked by Greg in the studio.
- Did Not Think This Through:
- Knocking over Kiell's bucket in the first studio task would have been sound gamesmanship... if he'd waited until Kiell had thrown all his objects. But Ivo jumped the gun, and Kiell responded by immediately knocking over Ivo's bucket in retaliation.
- In the spoon collecting task, he got so fixated on the idea of going to the kitchen to get spoons out of the silverware drawer that he stubbornly beelined to it as Frankie tried to guide him to the lab, despite having already been informed that there were mere seconds remaining on the clock. As a result, he failed to reach the lab within the time limit and got disqualified. He also later acknowledged on the podcast that even if he had gotten there sooner, his plan would have required him to blindly grab at whatever items his magnet picked up from the drawer, not knowing whether they were spoons or very sharp knives.
- Epic Fail: After his other attempts in the breath task fail, Ivo decides on blowing a basketball onto a tray of glasses. The ball bounces off the glass without a speck of damage.
- Failed a Spot Check: During the "Bingo" task, Ivo is required to "sit in the shed for three minutes and think about what he's done." He leaves the house and immediately... heads to the caravan, not realizing his mistake until he returns to Alex.
- Genre Savvy:
- Ivo was the only contestant to look under the table in the second live task to find the hidden scissors.
- In the third live task, he scores full marks on the sausage exam because he turned over the booklet and discovered the answers written on the back.
- Quintessential British Gentleman: Gives this impression right out of the gate with his posh accent and awkward stilted delivery, which make him sound like a BBC Radio 4 host.Ivo: Thank you for having me on the show. Obviously very hard to follow Frankie's beautiful, family-orientated art, but I would argue-Greg: Are you alright?
- Illustrated beautifully in the Bingo task, where it leads to his polite desperation to end a phone call to his doctor in order to complete the task without seeming rude.
- The Jelly Baby task may well be the defining example. During the task, each team has to decipher a code based on the unpleasant and unusual flavour of jelly babies. He quickly identifies the correct method... only to politely wait for a chance to interject as Frankie barrels on with a series of increasingly complicated and incorrect methods involving adding the numbers together. They lose by a margin of almost 25 minutes.
- Upper-Class Twit: More of an Upper-Middle Class Twit, but Ivo is a graduate of both the exclusive Eton College and Oxford University, and attended boarding schools all over the world. His clear intelligence is often contrasted with his performance in tasks, which is often amongst the most chaotic.
Jenny Eclair
"Oh, this sounds brilliant. I'll be so bad at this!"
A comedian, novelist and actress, best known for her roles in Grumpy Old Women and as a panellist on Loose Women.
- Batman Gambit: For her prize entry of "the sneakiest thing", she brings in an Alsatian mask to grab attention, then reveals what's under the mask: her novel
, which she felt didn't get enough publicity. She snuck the book onto the show for promotion, impressing Greg. - Blatant Lies: Her claim of being on her period in an attempt to research the year 1642.
- Catchphrase: Some variation of "Why would you do that to me?" following a particular indignity, such as being asked to roll up a ball of string she'd just unravelled.
- Cool Old Lady: A cheerful, colourfully dressed and gleefully profane contestant who successfully argues in Ivo's favour during the bargepole task, saying that he shouldn't be penalised for the tiller breaking after she and Frankie had filmed before him.
- Cutting the Knot: When told to place a neat ball of string on a cushion, Jenny simply cuts the string into a shorter length and hands in a much smaller ball.
- Disqualification-Induced Victory: After spending most of the first episode trailing behind, Ivo and Kiell taking each other out in the live task leaves her and Frankie the joint winners by dint of not having their buckets fall over.
- Drives Like Crazy: Easily the worst driver in the bargepole rubber ring task, crashing multiple times.Greg: So there were three crashes?Alex: We showed three...
- No Periods, Period: Averted. When tasked with giving a one-minute lecture on the year 1642 with no research, Jenny asks to use the bathroom only to immediately claim to be having her period when denied the opportunity. Played with since, at 63 (being the oldest Taskmaster contestant at the time of recording), this was most likely an attempt to perform some research.
- Scatterbrained Senior: Joked about in Episode 4, when she is reduced to walking around barefoot in the garden, while desperately calling for a man called John and complaining about her feet hurting. Jenny recoils from this image in mock horror, wailing that it's a vision of her future.
- Silly Walk: In the live task for "Schrödinger's Egg", Mae, Kiell and Ivo all imitate her odd hunched goblin walk. Mae and Kiell had to as part of the task was to copy another contestant's walk; Ivo was meant to imitate Frankie but did Jenny's anyway for fun.Jenny: When does this cross into bullying?
- Tempting Fate: When untying a ball of string, Jenny comments that it would be too cruel of the show to ask her to roll it back up again...
- Too Much Information: Complains early on in the first task of getting "trench vagina".Jenny: I don't know why I said it out loud!
Kiell Smith-Bynoe
♫ "One on a barge pole, for meee!" ♫
"Honestly, Kiell, you are having a fucking nightmare on this show."
—The Taskmaster
Click to see Kiell in “Spider in My Pocket” Spoilers!
Actor best known as Mike Cooper from Ghosts (UK),note and from roles on Stath Lets Flats and Man Like Mobeennote .
- Boring, but Practical: His first prize task submission for "most dependable thing that weighs about 1kg" is a toaster, since it never fails to toast bread. Greg puts it second because it's a boring entry that nonetheless fills the brief.
- Broken Record: After being forced to remove his shoes for the bingo task in Episode 4, he complains multiple times, "I haven't got any shoes on!"
- Competition Freak: Despite not doing that well in tasks generally, Kiell is the most competitive in this line-up and acts with mild outrage if he feels Greg is being unfair to him.
- Ear Worm: In "The Curse of Politeness", Kiell starts singing whenever he manages to hook a ring onto the bargepole. Greg finds the song so catchy that he sings "for meee!" at certain moments for the rest of the episode.♫ One on a barge pole, for meee! ♫
- I Hate Past Me: As discussed below in The Load, Kiell was the least active member of the team when they have to free themselves from handcuffs. During filming, however, he was - in his own words - "a monster" and made things very tense and difficult.
- The Load: For the handcuff task in "Schrödinger's Egg", Kiell takes a backseat while Jenny and Mae taste the jelly babies to figure out the code, reluctant to taste some pretty disgusting flavours (mint and gravy, pepper and beetroot). In the studio, Kiell admits that he was much worse, the clip was edited "very, very nicely in my favour", and he does help identify the code they need, so coming off as this trope may have been for the best.
- My Friends... and Zoidberg: Subbing in for Mae in CoC3, the lineup was repeatedly advertised as "the Champions and Kiell".
- Took a Level in Badass: Kiell spent the first half of the series on the lower end of the leaderboard, before given a sizeable boost in the rankings as part of the live task in episode five, which placed him in a somewhat distant third place behind frontrunners Jenny and Mae. However, he went on to win three consecutive episodes and quickly closed in on Mae in the rankings, with Alex noting in episode 9 that it had essentially become a two horse race.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Greg suggests he has this dynamic with Mae during the breath task, where both decide to blow a ball down a series of pipes like a Rube-Goldberg machine. Where Mae does it gracefully and efficiently, Kiell utterly fails and gets one point. Kiell's red jumpsuit also provides visual contrast to Mae's dark hoodie.
- Waxing Lyrical: For the heroic prize task in "I Love to Squander Promise", Kiell brings in a cape with Enrique Iglesias' face printed on it, because he can be your hero, baby.
Mae Martin
"Are we the meat, or are we the viewer?"
Canadian stand-up comedian, actor and writer best known for creating and starring as the lead in Feel Goodnote .
- Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Played for laughs in "I Love to Squander Promise". During the task, Mae didn't realise that the word 'humiliate' contained more syllables than the preceding word. Once it is pointed out in the studio, Mae claims that in Canada, humiliate is pronounced as 'hoomleyate' after Greg suggests an analogy with "alumin(i)um".
- The Ace: Mae's general competence and savviness in tasks draws rare compliments from Greg in the studio.
- Boring, but Practical:
- Mae scores consistently highly in tasks, often with a combination or fairly simple approaches or by keenly looking for a trick which would allow them to succeed, in contrast to their more chaotic competitors. This has allowed them to quickly accumulate points throughout the series, however this often comes at the expense of the more comedic aspects of the show.
- Mae's task outfit was intended to be laidback and cool, but they admit that it just ended up looking pragmatic and dull.
- Character Development: In as much as a character can develop on Taskmaster. Although Mae remains the most reserved of this series' line-up, they gradually come out of their shell as it continues, becoming more eager to engage in banter with other contestants.
- Divine Intervention: After unraveling the string and needing to replace it with a fresh ball, Mae almost immediately finds one in a drawer. In the studio, they cite this trope, much to Frankie's amusement.
- Genre Savvy: A particularly sharp contestant, who often looks around for the clues Alex has placed.
- The Quiet One: Mae is by far the most reserved contestant in their series, which often results in them being drowned out during the studio segments.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Mae has this going with their teammate Kiell, best illustrated in the breath task. Both blow through pipes to launch a ball, which Mae does successfully; Kiell is left blowing and huffing. Their dark, unadorned hoodie further contrasts with Kiell's bright red jumpsuit festooned with badges.
- Rules Lawyer: If Frankie isn't the one pointing out when someone else has broken a rule during a task, it's Mae.
- Too Clever by Half: In "How Heavy is the Water?", Mae comes very close to being disqualified for an unusual interpretation of the word 'throw' in the first task. Greg was in a lenient mood though and lets them get away with it, mostly to annoy the other contestants.
- Token Religious Teammate: Downplayed, but occasionally references God or makes a sign of the cross.
- Twofer Token Minority: The lone non-British contestant this seasonnote and the first non-binary contestant in the UK version.
