Characters / Taskmaster Series Ten

Taskmaster "characters" index
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

Greg: Never in the history of the whole show have I felt contempt for all of them. Sad day for everyone here. I think we’ll just, uh, have a couple moments of silence.

...

Contestants: all start quietly laughing

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Daisy May Cooper

"Well done, me."

"Amazing how Achievement Woman so quickly could be made to look like Drunk Woman in Magaluf."

— The Taskmaster

An actress who is best known for writing and starring in This Country.

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• Boisterous Bruiser: When Alex ironically asked if Greg wanted to watch two "calm and measured individuals" attempt a task, Greg knew it would be Johnny and Daisy.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Daisy May Cooper was consistently one of the better scorers in the pre-recorded tasks, but was incredibly lazy when it came to the prize tasks, which prompted Greg to joke she just grabbed stuff from her kitchen on the way out. This ended up costing her the series, as Richard managed to scrape past her in the series, and clearly put more effort into his prize task submissions.
• Cluster F-Bomb: When tasked with saying the most words with four letters, she starts listing out obscenities and profanities, including one bad enough that it had to be censored even in a post-watershed timeslot where she can say "shit" and "fuck" without any worries.
• Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: Daisy's outfit triumphantly displays badges of her various achievements as "Achievement Woman." However, that image tends to be ruined because as she plodded through the physical tasks, her badges would come undone and she instead can look quite bedraggled at the end of those tasks.
• The McCoy: On the companion podcast, Rose Matafeo classes both Daisy and Johnny Vegas as the ids of the Series 10 cast, being instinctual creatures with very few inhibitions about how they present themselves. This is most notable during the live task of "Legit Glass" where Greg must guess what noise they are making without any gestures, while the other three are more hesitant.
• Pregnant Badass: Daisy was pregnant throughout filming, and was seven months pregnant by the time of the studio recordings. Despite this, she managed to outperform everyone else in several of the more physical tasks, like the shoe task in "Point of Swivel".
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • Daisy gets frustrated more than the average contestant in her tasks, but the quiet cocktail-making task in "Hippopotamus" was particularly trying. She had to yell at the drinks trolley and pace around the lab to calm down after being forced to repeatedly start over for being too loud.
  • She had another one in the live task in the same episode. She got so angry at Richard for not recognizing her drawing was supposed to be a hippopotamus (later termed "Hippogate" by Greg), that the teams were switched up from then on.
• Rage Quit: When her attempt at Series 10's final studio task failed and she realized Richard secured the championship, she proceeded to trash her items before glaring around angrily.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: She has the dirtiest mouth out of the Series 10 contestants.

Johnny Vegas

"I've been hurt and I want to hurt others."

"Jonny is the only competitor in Taskmaster history who looks like he needs things to go well."

— The Taskmaster

A comedian known for his surreal humour and eccentric personality. Probably best known in Britain for his role in the PG Tips tea ads in the early noughties and for the cult sitcom Ideal.

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• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: He begged for a point more than once when Greg was going to disqualify him from a task and give him nothing.
• Bathos: Johnny is ready to put on a tragic persona when he fails in tasks, but is clearly having great time in the studio.
• Boisterous Bruiser: When Alex ironically asked if Greg wanted to watch two "calm and measured individuals" attempt a task, Greg knew it would be Johnny and Daisy.
• Butt-Monkey: Greg is particularly strict about task rules and requirements with Johnny and gave him the most disqualifications out of any Taskmaster contestant and was unmoved when Johnny begged to at least be given the lowest score rather than no score.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Johnny said he was most demoralised in the episode 9 task to build a house out of beer mats. He thought it would be one he could easily win, as he has genuine talent at constructing houses of cards, but his construction collapsed when he had to go ring the doorbell to complete the task.
  • He also had a mini-breakdown in the "find the phone number to ring this phone" task, wherein he got so flustered by all the running back and forth that at one point Alex gave him a comforting hug.
• The Cast Show Off:
  • Johnny rarely gets to combine his genuine artistic talent with his comedy shows, and he tends to shine in the challenges centred around drawing/painting etc.
  • Johnny also used to be a barman, which showed when he made the best tasting cocktail silently. Alex was surprised at how well the combination of cola, champagne and citrus worked.
• Chekhov's Gun: His costume for the pre-recorded tasks includes a pocket watch on a chain. He says that it's just there to complete his look, but the watch and chain end up making a handy makeshift grappling hook in "Dog Meat Trifle".
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • When tasked with making a large object vanish, he decided to create a socialist screed where a giant chicken destroyed Westminster. Johnny mentions that the crew let him go home early after filming that segment.
    Greg: Of course they did. They were worried about you!
  • When provided a task separate from the rest of his team ^note Due to social distancing from the COVID-19 pandemic, he was asked to make a variety of noises and starts off by repeatedly yelling “I AM NOT A CROOK!”. The rest of the team aren’t sure if it was a coded hint or “Johnny being Johnny”.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes: He looks like he’s walked straight off the set of Peaky Blinders.
• The McCoy: On the companion podcast, Rose Matafeo classes both Daisy and Johnny Vegas as the ids of the Series 10 cast, being instinctual creatures with very few inhibitions about how they present themselves. This is most notable during the live task of "Legit Glass" where Greg must guess what noise they are making without any gestures, while the other three are more hesitant.
• Tempting Fate: During the difficult catapult task in "Point of swivel", Johnny mocks Alex's concerns for his safety by referring to accident at work advertisements. Seconds later he falls through the wooden ladder he's perched on.
• The Tyson Zone: Occupies this in the minds of Greg, Alex, and the contestants. They repeatedly say that any outlandish behavior can be attributed to him and they'd readily believe that it's true.

Katherine Parkinson

"... am I the spider?"

"I think we've taken away any poise you may have had in the early days of this show. I mean, you were instantly swearing at a cow."

— The Taskmaster

An actress best known for her role on The IT Crowd.

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• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: During the final pre-recorded task of "Dog Meat Trifle", she quietly begged Greg not to disqualify her, as she was so far behind in overall points there was no chance she'd win either the episode or the series. It's one of the few times Greg is swayed by begging (partly because he'd been particularly mean to her earlier in the episode).
• Berserk Button: Downplayed, but when Ed mentions the farting incident during her appearance on the podcast, she quickly and loudly denies that she was the culprit. According to Katherine, the noise was actually a member of the production crew sniggering.
• Blatant Lies: When tasked with putting the heaviest object through a Christmas tree bagger, she crawled into the bag herself and claimed to weigh 22 stone (308 lb/140 kg). For reference, that's how much Greg weighs. No one called her out on this however, and she got the full points.
• Captain Oblivious: She can sometimes be oblivious in tasks. For example, she failed to pick up on any of Alex' puns for American states in "I Hate your Trainers", and didn't notice until the end that Alex had broached the barrel in "Hippopotamus".
  • She was also unaware for several tasks that she could actually leave whatever room she was in to prepare or complete a task, leading to her misunderstanding task directions.
    Katherine: “put these wellies on the spider”... Am I the spider?... Where’s the spider?... Did I miss something? (Cuts to the task objective, a massive spider propped up on a bathtub outside the house)
• Cloudcuckoolander: There are too many examples to list, but Katherine's approach to tasks is perhaps embodied by her trying to fill a net with water, then later saying she thought her approach to the task was quite good.
• Fish out of Water: She rarely appears on panel shows and comedy game shows and her unfamiliarity with the show's format is clear. Toward the end of Series 10, she confesses she only realized that the prize task was scored when the studio recordings started. On the companion podcast, she tells Ed that she had not previously watched Taskmaster and mistakenly believed that not watching the series beforehand would give her an advantage with an outsider's perspective.
• Hidden Depths: Her composed persona in the studio belies her Cloud Cuckoolander personality when she's attempting her tasks.
• Insistent Terminology: She frequently states that “we” (as in, Alex and her) are completing the tasks, despite his repeated corrections that the task attempts are all her.
• Madness Mantra:
  • During a treasure-hunt task, she kept repeating the "Pull Sink" clue (with varying inflections), unsure of which sink she was supposed to pull.
  • While playing a Pictionary-style game with Johnny during a team task, she ends screaming "BOX!" repeatedly.
• Not So Stoic: Her default expression is quite poised and serious, but once the antics begin around her, she’ll quickly lose her composure and looks like she's about to break down laughing at any moment.
  • In episode 8, Katherine for once loses her temper during a recorded task and whispers swears at a plastic cow when her hose gets tangled in it.
  • She also appears genuinely hurt by Greg's mockery of her handmade clay masks in the series finale.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: When tasked with learning lines on short notice, she declined to make an effort because she was in the midst of learning lines for a stage performance and didn't want to get the scripts muddled in her head. Instead, she ad-libbed a bit, working off of prompts from Alex.

Mawaan Rizwan

"I love making friends."

"I think when people look back on this series, I think that they will all in unison say: that was the series where a grown man tried to fill an egg with helium. Presumably, in the hope that the egg would float"

— The Taskmaster

An actor and comedian.

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• Agent Peacock: Mawaan's outfits in the studio are usually neon and fabulous, with matching nails.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Sometimes, his thought process is a little too outside-the-box while coming up with solutions to the tasks, including trying to make a egg float by filling it with helium in the first episode.
• Genius Ditz: Mawaan is a classic example in the show, combining occasional lunacy with particularly creative and clever approaches to tasks, the latter of which garner genuine compliments from Greg.
  • For the "carry the drinks to the caravan" task while also lugging around the oversized teddy bear, Mawaan was the only one to think of gaffer taping the bear to himself, but then his next impulse was to push the phone box to the caravan, then he spent time wondering if the balls on the ground meant anything, forgetting he'd thrown them himself, a few minutes before.
  • Mawaan romps home points-wise in "Hippopotamus", repeatedly out-thinking the challenges in the recorded tasks. However, all his accomplishments can never wipe out thinking he could fill an egg with helium, an idea so idiotic that Greg predicted it would define Series 10 for viewers.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten:
  • Greg's opinion of his attempt to complete the "get the eggs down to the pan" task is that, no matter what, from that point on he will be remembered as "the guy who once tried to fill an egg with helium to make it float".
  • In "Point of Swivel," one task asked the competitors to stick as much spaghetti into a grapefruit, with the amount of spaghetti remaining in its original jar being subtracted from the original weight of 1000 grams to determine the winner. Mawaan was caught having dumped the remainder of his unused spaghetti into his dressing room bin. Greg allowed his attempt to stand only on condition that he admit that he was a "sneaky pasta snake."
  Mawaan: [with his head down in shame] But once you've been labelled a sneaky pasta snake, that's it, innit? You'll always be known as that.
• Shrine to Self: He brings in a photo collage of himself that he'd created as part of a shrine to himself when he was in secondary school. He'd seen a shrine belonging to his Hindu landlords, and wanted to set one up before his mother pointed out that Islam forbids the worship of idols. Undeterred, he decided to create one to himself because Islam doesn't say anything about worship of oneself.
• Slasher Smile: During the "silent cocktail" task, he wears one of these when he realizes he can just empty the contents of the bin into his glass and use that as a cocktail. Alex notes this during the task too.
  Alex: I don't like how happy you are.
• The Stool Pigeon: Mawaan outs Daisy for breaking the rules of a task in episode 8, before Alex even had the chance to bring it up on screen.
• Too Clever by Half: He's seen the show and knows that there is sometimes a hidden trick that allows a task to be completed easily. However, this resulted in him trying to push a heavy phone box, thinking that it might be mounted on wheels (it wasn't).
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Mawaan sometimes tries too hard to find "clever" ways of doing a task.
  • All the way back in episode 1, Mawaan gazed at three balls on the lawn for the drinks-carrying task, and wondered how they could be secret clues to completing the task. He forgot that he threw them there earlier.
  • Mawaan wondered whether in episode 8 he could fill a cup "in a metaphorical way". Greg was baffled at how Mawaan thought that could be done.

Richard Herring

"FAILURE!"

"The Oscar goes to the Olivier of our times."

— The Taskmaster

^{Click to see Richard in “The Alpine Darling” Spoilers!} 

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A comedian who is known for hosting As It Occurs to Me (AIOTM), his interview podcast Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (RHLSTP), and for his double act work with Stewart Lee and later Andrew Collins.

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• Boring, but Practical: Richard has admitted that he struggled to think creatively in the recorded tasks under the time pressure, and tended to jump into straight-forward strategies. They tend to pay off as he garners good scores, even if he rarely comes first in tasks.
  • Greg and Ed discuss this trait of Richard's in the Taskmaster podcast. Greg suspects that Richard fell into going for direct and simple strategies out of his desire to win, as he was less likely to risk creative tactics. Richard has himself said that he thinks always going for the creative solution isn't the best strategy points-wise.
  • Averted in the tasks where he had more time to think, such as the 'upside-down film' and 'disappear an object' tasks. Richard has said he was much more pleased with his attempts here, as the extra time to think let him get creative.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Greg occasionally compares Richard in the show to a young boy trying to impress Daddy (aka Greg). Richard readily accepts this as an accurate comparison.
    Greg: (In response to Katherine's attempt) It wasn't a great start Katherine. However, I do think that Richard's was more tragic.
  • In "Moments of Silence", one of the tasks involved the contestants acting out a script. They were each given two out of five parts to learn, and their parts would then be spliced together to create one big scene. Richard ended up learning all five parts, which Alex claimed was the result of an "admin error".
• Competition Freak: Out of the Series 10 cast, he's the most keen to win and ready to argue the wording of tasks to try and rank higher when Greg allots points.
• The Determinator: He divulged that he'd shot his tasks for Champion of Champions II soon after undergoing cancer surgery. He was under instructions not to exert himself and feeling genuine pain, but he was so intent on winning that he gave everything his full effort.
• Dirty Old Man:
  • When Mawaan brought in his favorite travel pillow, which had a hole in the middle, Richard immediately thought of other purposes. This got him called out as a pervert.
  • He brought in a set of bedlinen which featured pictures of Greg and Alex printed on the pillows, so that it looked like you were in bed with them if you used the bedding.
  • In a live task where they had to draw a monster Greg was describing, he added a vagina.
  • In "Moments of Silence" Greg comments that Richard is pretty much perfectly cast as a pervert hiding in the bushes.
  • In the podcast, when the moment he first meets Daisy (which results in some awkwardness when she reacts with shock after he quietly enters the room) comes up in the conversation, some rather unflattering comments about Richard's general appearance and his hairstyle specifically come up, with the point being made that his tendencies towards unfortunate styles throughout his career haven't really helped him in this regard.
• Fingore: During the task to construct a house using beer mats whilst ringing the doorbell at increasingly shortened time intervals, Richard somehow ended up cutting his finger and left bloodstains on the doorframe as he travelled back and forth between the living room and the foyer.
• Genre Savvy: In an interview, Richard mentioned how scoring in the studio relies upon predicting Greg's moods and talking around them. Pushing too hard on a point can annoy Greg and work against a contestant.
• Henpecked Husband: Not actually, of course, but Greg at several points notes that Richard and Daisy's dynamic in their team tasks is generally akin to that of a long-suffering but mild-natured husband quietly trying to make his wife happy (or at least not annoy her further) in face of the Sisyphean fact that nothing he ever does is good enough for her, a fact which she loudly makes clear at every given opportunity. Perhaps comes to a crescendo in the "Turntable Pictionary" task, wherein she ends up screaming at him over his failure to recognise that the rather boxy animal she was drawing was in fact a hippo. In the podcast he admits to being genuinely rather uncomfortable at the time, and one gets the feeling when watching it that if they hadn't been put into different teams in the next live team task, the social services would have had to be called in.
• Nice Guy: Richard is a rare Taskmaster contestant who argued in favour of his competitor's strategy, supporting Katherine's exploitation of the wording of the final pre-recorded task, despite his clear eagerness to win and needing every point against Daisy. So it feels karmic that he won the episode and the series with his efforts in the next task. He also makes a point of complimenting Katherine's handmade masks after they had been subject to particularly mean-spirited mockery from Greg and the others, which had obviously upset her a bit.
• Pet the Dog: He thought Greg was harsher than usual on Katherine in the Series 10 Grand Final, so he advocated for her when it looked like she'd be disqualified from a task and took a moment to praise her prize submission.
• Serious Business: As Richard is a big fan of the show and has wanted to be a contestant for a long time, he took Taskmaster more seriously than most. Certainly helped paid off when he became a Champion of Champions.
• Show Stopper: In "Moments of Silence" he received a standing ovation from the panel for his performance in the murder mystery in which he played all parts and was distinctly better than his fellow competitors, despite the fact that they only had to learn two roles.

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