Taskmaster / Tropes A to F

Taskmaster tropes index
A to F | G to Q (Loophole Abuse) | R to Z (Shout Out)

This is a list of tropes from A to F of the British TV programme Taskmaster.

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A

• Aborted Arc: During initial filming of the tasks, Phil Wang originally imagines that he would develop an intense rivalry with fellow contestant James Acaster, going so far as to write "Fuck You James Acaster" in the "deliver this task to Alex" task ("Lotta Soup"). However, he quickly forgets about it over the course of filming and only remembers when they show his VT for the aforementioned task.
• Absurdly High-Stakes Game:
  • The contestants have a clause in their contracts saying that they are genuinely giving up ownership for their submissions for the Prize Tasks, and are only allowed to request that the winner returns them if they lose. Prizes (particularly in the early seasons) can be of absurdly high value (sentimental or monetary) for a comedy show, including marriage certificates, wedding rings, Guinness World Record certificates and blank cheques. This has gradually been downplayed over the years as contestants have caught on and decided not to risk their prized possessions, with most prizes being either overtly absurd novelty items or, it's hinted, things that the contestants have specially bought from sites like eBay.
  • The show also seems to have a budget for purchasing items for prize tasks on behalf of the contestants at least some of the time, as contestants have openly justified a prize task submission as "I want one of these but they're expensive, so I made the show buy it" on multiple occasions.
• Accidental Pervert: On rare occasions, the tasks are worded in what Greg suspects as a "deliberately saucy" way that can frame Alex as one. The tasks to give Alex a "special cuddle" ("Dignity Intact") and to "excite Alex" as measured by his heart rate increase ("Twelve Blush Majesty Two") come to mind. Special mention to “get the most water from barrel A into barrel B”, which may have been devised solely for Alex to exclusively refer to the barrels as (wine) butts and the stopper for the secret leak in the bottom as the “butt hole plug”.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • While playing Charades in "The FIP", Sara simply starts yelling out guesses and manages to give three correct answers even without Rob miming anything. Then a passerby randomly suggests another correct answer.
  • When put in a squash court full of various objects and simply told "Score 11 points" with zero indication of how it's done, the winning team never actually figures out that points are scored by touching their head and just luck out that they all tend to do it pretty regularly.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Mel Giedroyc gets several references to her double act with Sue Perkins: for the team tasks, she's paired with Hugh Dennis to make team "Mel and Hugh", and a live task where she successfully juices a fruit using a piece of footwear is announced as a victory for "Mel and Shoe".
  • Johnny Vegas brings in a teabag for a prize task and alludes to the adverts he used to do for PG Tips tea.
  • Alan Davies' contribution to a prize task is a VHS cassette of the first two episodes of Jonathan Creek.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • In Series 1, Romesh Ranganathan can at times be seen concealing a grin after Greg makes a crack at his expense, in order to maintain his grumpy persona.
  • During the Series 3 task to create a meal that looks like a flag, Dave Gorman orders champagne as one of his ingredients... and then doesn't use it in his cooking. When pressed by Greg, he admits that he just wanted to drink champagne on the production team's dime. Greg finds this audacious enough that he lets him get away with it scott-free.
  • Greg as a general rule finds Alex's riffing in the show's intro tedious at best, or genuinely annoying. However, he does occasionally crack up and admit it when one of Alex's pieces tickles him, such as when Alex tricks him into drinking undiluted fruit cordial in Series 8's "This Is Trevor".
• Ad Bumpers: Each section ends with specially filmed ad bumpers; the first series used the same ones each week, the second and third series used a mix of ad bumpers, but the fourth series onward has a different set of bumpers for each show. The common link is that each bumper leading into a break will feature Alex waving goodbye, and each bumper starting a new section will have Alex showing which part of the show this is (usually by holding up fingers). However, these are all removed from the official YouTube uploads of more recent series.
  • "BMXing" uses leftover footage from "One Warm Prawn", specifically involving a spinning plastic lizard attached to a cordless drill, which had kept on going for just over an hour and a half.
  • Paul Chowdhry in "A Very Nuanced Character" is set the task of having the most fun on a bouncy castle for an hour, and clips from his attempt are used on each advert break for that episode.
  • Mike Wozniak is given his own special task to fart the fastest in Series 11 episode "Absolute Casserole." Footage of him contorting his body in order to tease one out precedes and follows each ad break.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: In "Fear of Failure", when it looks like Joe Wilkinson's impressive hole-in-one with a potato is going to be disqualified owing to an inadvertent rule violation, Joe becomes so distraught and desperate to salvage his achievement that he ends up crawling across the studio on his hands and knees to beg in front of Greg.
  Greg: God, I got a real sense of power for a moment then.
• All for Nothing:
  • A task in "Tony three pies" requires the contestants to make an exotic sandwich. However, they also get up to 5 bonus points for eating their sandwich (they're not aware of this fact until they've made their sandwich). When the scores are tallied up, everyone has been given the same amount of points, essentially making the task pointless (because, unsurprisingly, the more points they got for the sandwich's "exoticness", the fewer points they got for eating it — the two sets of points were the direct inverse of each other). Noel and Mel do get an extra bonus point each for eating Alex's beard hair and inhaling an M&M via her nose respectively, but those hardly count against this trope, as neither are listed in the task and are given out at the kindness of the Taskmaster.
  • In "A Wind-Dried Puffin", it's revealed that Mark (and only Mark) was given the task of sending a "cheeky text" to Greg every day for five months. He notes that it occupied a considerable cumulative amount of time and attention and because it's a solo task (as well as, supposedly, because he missed a couple days) he gets no points for it.
  • Nobody receives points in the live task in "Tarpeters" because Greg is able to eliminate all the contestants by correctly deducing whether the grape is in each contestant's hand or mouth (in Russell's case, he left his grape in his pocket, and is disqualified).
  • In Series 6 episode "H." everybody manages to successfully Tablecloth Yank without breaking any eggs and receive the full 5 points. Greg gets quite annoyed:
    Greg: And that's the end of Taskmaster, good night!
    [later, to Alex] So we gave them a task where they all got the same points?! Don't you ever, ever do that again! I'll kick you in the leg!
  • In "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man", the Series 8 finale, the live task is a challenging one involving retrieving a rubber duck while wearing vision-distorting goggles. After much effort and confusion, nobody receives any points — only Joe and Iain manage to retrieve a duck within the time limit, and they are disqualified because, in the chaos, they ended up retrieving each other's duck instead of their own.
  • In Series 10, there are three tasks where everybody is disqualified, rendering all that effort meaningless. Two of these tasks come up in the very first episode, although Daisy earns a bonus point for getting an egg closest to the frying pan.
  • In the Series 12 episode "Croissants is Croissants", both teams end up disqualified in the team task for earning negative points totals.
  • Conversely, in several tasks in recent series, the results have been so epic that Greg gives everyone five points... rendering the task irrelevant in picking the winner.
• Almost Famous Name: In the opening spiel of "The System of Endless Plates", Greg attributes an unlikely-sounding saying to Nelson Mandela, before clarifying that he's talking about a different bloke named Nelson Mandela who owns a laundromat in his home town.
• Always Second Best: In Series 1, Romesh. He's in both of the tiebreaker tasks that season but loses both. His overall performance gets him tied for 2nd for the series overall, just 1 point below Josh who becomes the winner. Moreover, despite a relatively high score overall, Romesh is the only person that season to never win an episode.
• Ambiguous Syntax:
  • Intentionally using the specific wording of the task to your advantage is an intended part of the show. Sometimes this is done when setting the task, such as in the "painting in the dark" task in Series 5, in which the task letter intentionally never specifies that the task had to actually be done with the lights off). Other times the contestant will come up with a way of Cutting the Knot, abusing Exact Words, or employing Loophole Abuse. It will be up to the Taskmaster's discretion as to whether or not their unorthodox solution is allowed.
  • In "One Warm Prawn", after a task that involved eating chicken, Alex notes that in one contestant's case they had used vegetarian chicken (meat substitute) instead. Greg reacts with bemusement to the concept of "vegetarian chicken", and Tim quips that as far as he knows all chickens are vegetarians.
  • In "The Pendulum Draws the Eye", the banter segment sees Alex presenting Greg with "a horse-drawn carriage" — a picture, supposedly drawn by a horse, of something that might arguably be a carriage.
• And Now You Must Marry Me: In "Caring Uncle Minpict", one task is to propose to Alex in the most irresistible manner. Guz Khan does this by threatening him with a horse's head, a la The Godfather.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Sometimes a contestant will bring in an item of clothing as a prize. There have been several episodes where the prizes specifically were clothes:
  • In "Pork Is A Sausage", the contestants are asked to put their "trendiest" item of clothing in the pot.
  • In "The Leprechaun Or The Lesbian", the contestants all put in unusual hats.
  • In "My Eyes are Circles", the contestants bring in their "boldest" belts, although two contestants didn't bring in actual belts.
• Annoying Laugh: Nish's laugh is considered to be this in "Dignity Intact" by Greg and even Nish. The prize task for that episode has him bring in a CD that had his laugh looped over and over again.
• Antenna Adjusting: In "Shaqinahat", one task begins with the contestants watching a TV in the caravan. The interstitial that leads into it shows Greg watching TV in the caravan and forcing Alex to adopt an awkward position with the antenna to improve the reception.
• Anti-Climax:
  • Iain's volcano in "Stuck in a Mammal Groove". Construction involves a wheelbarrow full of dirt, a long pipe, stones, little figurines, power tools, a lot of cola and an entire bag full of Mentos. Before activating it, he delivers a tribute to the previous Champion of Champions and expresses a wish to join their ranks one day. And after activating it and running away from the blast zone in slow-mo, the result is... a tiny bit of Mentos bubbling up around the top.
    Iain: I genuinely don't want to talk about it.
  • The finales of Series 9, 10, and 15 both end with a tiebreaker task but by that point, any excitement or tension would have been lost because everyone would have already worked out the champion of the series by that point. By coincidence, the champions of these series are in the tiebreaker challenges. Ed Gamble and Richard Herring win their tiebreakers, and Mae Martin loses theirs.
• Anti-Nepotism: Being Alex Horne's friend of 20 years doesn't get Mark Watson any special privileges. It gets him singled out for the most demanding trick task in the show's history, sending daily cheeky texts to Greg for five straight months. One can almost be forgiven for suspecting that Alex eagerly embraced the opportunity to mess with an old friend.
• Arc Words: "Your Time Starts Now" probably counts. It's said several times an episode, at least.
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Kerry Godliman starts getting a bit shirty about Rhod Gilbert using a calculator in the "guess the circumference of the caravan in baked beans" task, after trying to do sums in her head, his retort quickly shuts her down.
  Kerry: [to Jessica Knappett] Did you think we were allowed to use calculators when you were using bean juice on a window? I was doing sums in my head...
  Rhod: Tell me you didn't use anything from the house in any of the tasks.
  Kerry: [sullen but grudging concession] I see... what you're saying...
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In the "tie yourself up as securely as possible" task, Rhod Gilbert gets around it by instead tying Alex up, with such precision and expertise that it begins to look a bit sinister. To add insult to injury, he then puts a bucket on Alex's head, and then a hat on the bucket. In the studio, while everyone else is united in grudging admiration of Rhod's cleverness in getting around the task, they are equally in agreement that the bucket was just being mean.
• Art Shift: The background theme of the Taskmaster House shifts from season to season. It's often quite subtle, but frequently most noticeable through the large portrait of Greg in the main room, which changes to reflect a particular artistic style (see "Shout-Out" below). While earlier series mainly focussed on changing the portrait (due to general budget issues), later series have expanded the theme by incorporating it into the props/decorations as well. Particularly prominent examples include:
  • Series Three is still quite subtle (again, budget issues) but clearly has a bit of a "pop art" motif running through it; the main portrait of Greg is a homage to Roy Lichtenstein's "Oh Jeff, I Love You Too, But...", and a recurring prop is a model of an American fighter plane^note specifically, as Al Murray notes, a P-51 Mustang similar to the one that appears prominently in Lichtenstein's "Whaaam!". A mural of Greg on the outside wall of the Taskmaster Houser also parodies Banksy's "Girl with Balloon".
  • Series Eight has a very distinct Japanese/Asian theme, reflected in the font of the Taskmaster logo, the music, and the art style (including the anime-style portrait of Greg), and even the font used on the wax seal.
  • Series Nine is also quite subtle, but as the main portrait is a homage to Giuseppe Arcimboldo's style of representing the details of portraits and other objects with fruits and vegetables, many of the decorations in the main living room are also produce or produce-based. The new incidental music for this series is Baroque-themed.
  • Series Ten has a noticeable cowboy/western theme.
  • The New Year Treat special is themed around the Golden Age of Hollywood and filmmaking.
  • Series Eleven goes for a Soviet propaganda / "socialist realist" art style.
  • Series Twelve is Steampunk themed.
  • Series Thirteen has a Mexican/Día de los Muertos theme.
  • Series Fourteen goes for a carnival theme, with a notable focus on clowns.
  • Series Fifteen had a 1960s psychedelia / Swinging London theme.
  • Series 16 is themed around The Roaring '20s and Art Deco.
• The Artifact:
  • Greg Davies began to wear glasses and grew a beard from Series 6 onwards, which made the title sequence outdated, as it still showed Greg clean-shaven and not wearing his glasses. The sequence was eventually refilmed for Series 10. His portrait that is on the stage and in the Taskmaster House foyer also gets an update.
  • The same applies to the Taskmaster trophy, which similarly is based on his Series 1-5 appearance and has not been updated (presumably due to budgetary reasons). Lampshaded in the introduction to one Series Fifteen episode when he acerbically points out that the trophy that's been used since Series Two is clearly outdated, as "I've had a beard for five years."
• Aside Glance:
  • Alex does this a lot. Specifically when the contestants come up with bizarre interpretations or solutions to the task. In "Their Water's So Delicious" Alex gives one to the camera in response to a very honest answer Rosalind tells the contestants.
  • James Acaster manages to do this during the team task in "My Eyes Are Circles", while blindfolded.
• Ask a Stupid Question...:
  • Most questions asked to Alex Horne about what can and can't be done within the rules of a task are usually answered with, "All the information's in the task." Usually to the contestant's exasperation.
  • This gem of an exchange in "Mother Honks Her Horn" between Alex Horne and Kerry Godliman:
    Kerry: [reading from a task letter inside] "E, look under the doormat... where's the doormat?!"
    Alex: Probably under a door.
    [beat]
    Kerry: [now outside the front door to the house] Oh, there's the doormat!
  • For a season 8 task, the competitors have to wear a helmet with a baby monitor and find the other monitor. Also attached to the helmet is a camera, to capture everyone's reactions. Lou Sanders is a bit confused about this last part:
    Lou: And what's the camera for?
    Alex: We're going to show this on TV.
  • This exchange from Richard Herring and Alex, as Richard tries to fill a cup at the top of a long pole:
    Richard: How do I know when it's full, it'll overflow, will it?
    Alex: Yeah, you'll be able to see that with your eyes.
• Ass Shove:
  • "Welcome to Rico Face" has a task where the contestants have to hide a pineapple on their body before Alex then inspects them:
    • Joe Wilkinson hides a piece of pineapple down the back of his pants. During Alex's inspection, it becomes clear that some of the pineapple had slipped into a very uncomfortable place. Joe even requests that nobody looks at his arse when he walks back to the house.
    • Katherine Ryan implies shoving things up a different orifice. She lists out a number of fruits and vegetables she might be able to hide but concludes that a pineapple would be difficult to fit inside. Fortunately for her and the viewers, she does not actually follow through.
      Katherine: I can do a courgette. I can do oranges, an apple...this...[motions towards pineapple]
      Greg: I mean, it is incredible to me that that's the conclusion you'd come to.
  • In "He Was A Different Man", after being made to sit bare-assed on a cake, Alex makes a few remarks that make the audience and contestants react with disgust: one about the chair shape and another about the whereabouts of one of the profiteroles that topped the cake.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever:
  • James, Rhod, and Phil's solution to the "make yourselves look as little or big as possible" task in "Lotta Soup." James and Rhod make themselves look tiny, then Phil appears as a giant and squishes Alex underfoot.

    Phil: FEE FI FO PHIL!!!

  • Johnny Vegas's attempt to make "the largest thing disappear" in "God's Haemorrhoid" becomes a combination of a political commentary on Jeremy Corbyn's decisive defeat in the 2019 general election and this trope as he depicts an attack on Westminster (or a paper replica thereof) by a "400ft" mutant socialist chicken unleashed on the capital by Corbyn against his political enemies.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!:
  • A line placed in a song Nish and Mark had to make in "Their Water's So Delicious" about Nish being momentarily distracted by a tree then continue singing.
    I saw you watching The Hangover DVD
    But I was busy with The Hangover Part III
    I saw you listening to that Mozart symphony
    But my attention span is— hey, look at that tree.
  • In "A fat bald white man", at the start of the first task of the episode, Mel was presented with a cake, which she had to destroy. Before reading the task however, she gets momentarily distracted with complimenting the cake.
  • Mel, again, in "Look At Me." There is a task where the contestants must move an egg into an eggcup without touching either and will gain a time penalty for each tool they touch. She immediately picks up two straws, then briefly ponders why a model horse figurine was provided to move the egg. Upon realizing she's picked up the horse, she impulsively touches all the other items just for good measure.
  • Nell the toddler in "The Barrel Dad", on the grounds of being a toddler. Nell often got distracted by other things in the room, before Alex pointed her back to the item the contestants had to make for her.
  • Subverted by Rhod in the "get the ball in the hole" task, as he refers to his actual ADHD while attacking the task with laser-like focus, completely dominating it with one of the show's cleverest ever bits of lateral thinking:

    Rhod: People say my ADHD makes me shit at problem-solving. No, sir!

• Audience Participation:
  • Roisin asked the audience in "Down an Octave" about her sequined jumper she brought in, and whether or not it looked good. A few people cheered in agreement, but when Greg asked if the jumper looked bad, far more cheered.
  • In the tiebreaker for "Spoony Neeson," Greg asked an audience member who should win the task, as neither Bob nor Sally got close to their goal of flinging yogurt at a target. When the audience member said that Bob should win, Greg immediately (and gleefully) declared Sally the winner.
  • During a final task in which the goal was to get an inflatable donut as high as possible, Rhod kicks his donut into the audience and has them pass it up to the very back row, a considerable height above the stage, winning him the task.
  • On-stage tasks that involve the contestants being blindfolded often result in them asking the audience for help.
• Author Tract: In "BMXing", in the second task of the show (do something manly inside of a box), Asim took the opportunity to talk about men's mental health and the stigma associated with it, while Alice poked fun at the gender pay gap. They both got 4 points.
• Awful Wedded Life: Greg jokes about this happening to Joe Wilkinson after he loses his wedding certificate in "Fear Of Failure".
• Awkward Kiss: In the game of "Greg says, Alex says," at one point the contestants are instructed to blow the Taskmaster a French kiss, with some interesting and unattractive results.

B

• Backhanded Apology: When the competitors were tasked with apologizing to Alex for something they did, Joe Thomas carefully worded his apology so as not to take back what he sang in an insulting song. Lou Sanders, meanwhile, trashed Alex's car and as a way of "apologizing" gave out Alex's genuine phone number to several telemarketers and organizations known for being very pushy.
• Bad "Bad Acting": The beginning of the second part of "Stuck in a Mammal Groove" has Alex read off the autocue as stilted as possible, then abruptly go back to his regular acting style.
• Bad Boss: Greg, as the Taskmaster, tends to be portrayed as somewhere between this and an abusive sadomasochistic dominant for Alex.
• Bait-and-Switch: Throughout "Spoony Neeson," Alex has been wearing a bandana as an attempt to rebrand himself as "Bandana Guy" because he feels his current persona isn't exciting enough. At the end, Greg orders him to surrender the bandana, apparently for the set-up of some final bit of bullying, only to result in this:
  [after Alex has handed over the bandana]
  Greg: [kindly] You don't need it, mate. You're fine as you are.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment:
  • In "Lotta Soup", a hidden condition on one task results in a situation where one competitor would receive 5 points despite completely failing to achieve the supposed objective, while another would receive no points despite an impressive result. Greg says solemnly that it would be very mean-spirited to actually award the points that way... before making it clear that that's exactly what he's going to do.
  • From the opening of "Enormous Hugeness":
    Greg: And next to me is someone who I can be a little bit cruel to but at the end of the day, I'm proud to call my best friend.
    [crowd awws, Alex looks pleased]
    Greg: [producing a stuffed toy] It's Tronky the Naughty Elephant! Love you, Tronky! And next to him, a wretched, hairy weasel: Little Alex Horne!
• Banana Peel: The prize task for "This Is Trevor" had Paul Sinha bring in a banana peel as his slippery object. He goes one further and shows that he also brought in Ban-Jelly pie. He wasn't done. He also, much to Sian's annoyance, brought in slippers.
• Bar Slide: The stage task for "Bready Bready Bready" was to slide a drink to Greg from one side of the table to the other, in order for him to catch it. It starts out with half a pint of vodka (in a pint glass), then a pint of gin (in a pint glass), then sambuca (in a shot glass), and finally white wine (in a wineglass).^note It's plainly all just water.
• Bathroom Search Excuse: Not searching the bathroom, but searching in the bathroom: in "A Show About Pedantry," Jenny deploys a Fake Period Excuse so she can get to the toilet and illicitly look up information about the subject she has to deliver a lecture on.
• Behind a Stick: The ad bumpers for the episode "Dignity Intact" show Alex peering out from behind various trees, including one no wider than his arm that clearly should not be able to hide the invisible portion of him.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Alex plays this part with respect to Greg, suffering mild abuse in moments of pique, and occasionally getting the same from the competitors as well.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: In a series 6 outtake, Alex corrects Greg's grammar and says afterward that he was considering against it because Greg might hurt him. Asim lampshades their relationship.
  Asim: I can never tell if you two are going to fuck or fight.
  Greg: Frequently both.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't mention cardboard boxes to Romesh. Or watermelons, for that matter.
  • Never lie about doing something for charity as it will enrage everyone else, which both Tim Key and Joe Lycett found out to their cost. (In Joe's case, it was someone lying about signing a vegetable on his behalf, which he never asked them to do.)
  • Iain knows a lot about puppets (comes with the territory of being a former CBBC presenter), and he flexes his knowledge on the matter for a task in "Hello". Greg was questioning a puppet Iain had made on its seductiveness, but he fires back as to what constituted a ventriloquist puppet and points out the other contestants hadn't actually made ventriloquist puppets, they had just made regular dummies with mouth holes, or in Paul's case, a bespectacled piggy bank "wearing" trousers. As the task goes on, Iain gets increasingly irate about it, and he is visibly annoyed at the others, and also at the very real possibility of him coming last in a task he knows so much about. He comes first place, but Greg waits until the last possible moment to announce this to deliberately push his buttons, while everyone except Joe gets 4 points (Joe got 1 point for killing his puppet).
• Beware the Nice Ones: Throughout series 8, Joe Thomas was one of the more mild-mannered contestants, to the extent that he wasn't even that angry after Sian was caught cheating in the team task in "Aquatic Sewing Machine", which disqualified both of them. He eventually loses his temper in response to the other contestants' efforts in the first task in "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man".
• Big Beautiful Man: Greg Davies is, by his own admission, a very large man (in both girth and, more prominently, height). This has in no way dissuaded multiple contestants of various genders from being vigorously flirtatious with him, nor the audience from reacting appreciatively when he described himself as "22 stone of prime marbled beef" in "Quisps".
• Big Damn Kiss: In "We Met at Mealtimes," after six seasons of increasingly intense Homoerotic Subtext, Alex suddenly announces that he genuinely wants to kiss the Taskmaster at that moment. Greg and Alex then share a tender kiss to the loud cheers of the cast and the audience.
• Big Entrance: A task from the Series 9 episode "Join Our Cult" is to create the most dramatic entrance. David Baddiel makes a Doctor Who-inspired appearance in the phone booth and imitates the Doctor and Daleks and plays the music. Jo emerges from the shed dressed as Henry VIII and shows off the head of Anne Boleyn (played by Alex) on a platter. Ed makes an appearance as a creepy hooded figure before cheerily saying "Hello" to Alex. Katy creates doppelgangers of herself and hands out a flyer to Alex encouraging him to join their cult. Rose, dressed as a bush, runs out onto the driveway yelling "STELLAAAA!!" Rose wins the task with 5 points, Ed and Jo are joint second with 4 points, Katy receives 3 points, and David receives 1 point for quickly losing confidence in his idea.
• Big Guy, Little Guy: Greg Davies and Alex Horne play this straight-ish behind the scenes (albeit without the "big dumb muscle" angle), as Alex is the actual "Taskmaster"; he's the showrunner and the one who devises and runs the tasks. On stage, however, the typical "little guy's in charge" dynamic is inverted, with Greg lording it over "Little Alex Horne" despite Alex's frequent protests that he's actually 6'2 and Greg, at 6'8 as mentioned above, simply towers over pretty much everyone.
• Big "NO!": Josh is the most prone to shouting a few of these, such as during the final challenge in "The Pie Whisperer", and the tea challenge in "The Poet And The Egg".
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • In the final challenge in "There's Strength In Arches", painted on the side of the toy boat is "debajo de la mesa", which is Spanish for "under the table", a hint to the fact that there were items helpful for the task hidden on the underside of the table. Jon Richardson even notes this during the task, but fails to connect the dots, and laments the fact while watching the footage in the studio.
  • "Boing boing" has Greg, Sally, and Nish peppering French phrases during the flip book task onward. Greg also ends the show by speaking French.
  • In "No Stars for Naughty Boys", the team task involves one team member riding in a wheely bin and not allowed to speak English, and the other(s) steering the bin while blindfolded. Lolly speaks German and Mel speaks French, neither very well but well enough to be understood by their teammates. None of it is translated.
  • In the "airplane safety demonstration" task in "An Orderly Species," the announcement must be in a language or accent other than the contestant's own. Mike's is in fairly pasaable German; Jamali does his in extremely broken imitation French before giving up and reciting basic textbook phrases. (Charlotte and Lee affect accents, and Sarah resorts to screaming gibberish while calmly performing the demonstration.) The banter continues in the studio:

    Greg: Jamali, that is one sweet French accent.
    Jamali: Yeah, I can't say a lot.
    Greg: Où est le cheval?
    Jamali: Merci beaucoup.

  • In the "find the ducks" task from "The Noise That Blue Makes", one of the "ducks" is the word canard (French for "duck") written near the ceiling of the lab.
  • A somewhat non-standard example: in "Enormous Hugeness", when the contestants are tasked to print and laminate as many signs as possible and place them on chairs, John Kearns gets drawn in by the font options on the computer and decides to write some of his signs in Wingdings. This quickly backfires when he is then tasked to obey his signs, and can't figure out what he wrote. Only one of his Wingdings signs gets an on-screen translation ("BUM'S ONLY"), but if you take the time to run the other two through a decoder, they say "PUT YOUR BUM HERE" and "BUM HOME".
• Biting-the-Hand Humor:
  • A few gags in the show relied on Dave (the channel Taskmaster first aired on) and its notoriety for repeating the same shows (such as Top Gear and yes, even Taskmaster) quite often.
  • Some of the ad break reads are Greg basically making fun of adverts, and on more than one occasion has insulted the audience at home for falling for the ads.
  • One of the trailers for the first Channel 4 series was based entirely around mocking the channel for turning it down at first before poaching it from Dave. The letter the Taskmaster partially reads out also mocks the tendency for Channel 4 to show Home Improvement programs of varying kinds on their channels.
• Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game: Literally the case. In "The Last Supper", Tim, Roisin, Josh, Romesh and Frank all had to complete a golf course in the shape of a "T" and an "M" using eggs instead of golf balls. The scores were calculated by shots multiplied by eggs multiplied by the minutes taken to do the task. They had to get the lowest score to win. It went as well as you'd expect it to. Roisin got 1,000 points, and so came first, Frank claimed second place with 1,096 points, Tim came third with 1,200 points, Josh came fourth with slightly over 6,000 points, Romesh came stone dead last with over 38,000 points. Greg summed up the task quite nicely after doling out the points:
  Greg: We're basically saying there are no rules in our version of golf.
• Bizarre Taste in Food: A recurring task theme is to guess various improbable food flavours:
  • The "guess the contents of the pie" task from "The Pie Whisperer" in Series 1. Frank was shown first and made normal guesses (mostly steak-based) through intuition. It was then revealed that most of the pie fillings were... unusual to say the least. (A "Taskmaster photo" pie, a steak pie, a frozen peas pie, a glass marble pie, and a hot mint toothpaste pie - the only normal pie was a steak pie). Despite being forced to munch on the toothpaste pie, Alex claims on the official Taskmaster Podcast that it was the best thing that he has had to put in his mouth for the show, but was otherwise the worst-tasting.
  • Series 6 episode "One Warm Prawn" had one task where the contestants had to guess the contents of three jars of baby food. The three baby food jars contained what Alex imagined that babies would enjoy eating - sausage and sugar puffs (Jar 1), pilchards and coconut (Jar 2), and prawn cocktail, chicken breast, and chocolate cake (Jar 3). During the live segment after the task, Alex revealed how much of the "baby food" each contestant ate: Tim ate none of it (he only smelled them), Alice ate 6 grams, Russell ate 14 grams, Liza ate 33 grams, and Asim (who claimed he didn't have lunch and was hungry) ate 38 grams.
  • In "This is Trevor," the competitors need to guess the flavours of 5 different bags of crisps while wearing a ridiculous costume that reduces dexterity (e.g. a pirate outfit with a hook). The crisp flavours were (in numerical order) gin and tonic, toothpaste and tomato, burnt toast, vegan chocolate, and giant Refreshers crisps.
  • "Absolute Casserole" had contestants trying to identify various items covered in batter: a grape, an egg, a kiwi fruit, a wallet, a clump of batter, and an apple and blackberry pie.
  • The episode-naming task of "Oatmeal and Death" had contestants trying to identify the contents of various bags, either by eating large amounts of each or getting all of them blended together and eating however much they wanted. The bags contained Nutella and nachos, cabbage and caramel, gravy and granola, banana and bovril (or marmite), and mayonnaise and mustard.
  • In "Dafty in the Middle", contestants have to guess ice cream flavours. The flavours were marmite and porridge, curry and naan bread, white chocolate and macaroni cheese, and bechamel sauce and brussel sprout puree. Contestants in this task were told to find all the flavours delicious, leading to a lot of Blatant Lies from Dara and Munya.
  • One part of the escape room task in "Schrodinger's Egg" involved the contestants identifying jelly bean flavours, and then matching them to chemical symbols. The flavours were mint and gravy (magnesium, Mg), wasabi (tungsten, W), broccoli (boron, B), pepper and beetroot (lead, Pb), and seaweed (sulphur, S). Because it wasn't the whole task, they were given a menu to help, with other options including chocolate and sage, prunes and durian, and zest and rye (which would have corresponded to caesium, palladium, and zirconium respectively)
• Black Dude Dies First: During the cup snake task in "It might be wind", as Judi Love opens the door to the barn, she says that she feels like she's in a horror movie and wonders if she's about to be murdered because of this trope.
• Bland-Name Product: One task in "Spatchcock It" features a shopping bag blazoned with the logo of a fictional supermarket called "Tasko", a riff on the Tesco supermarket chain.
• Blatant Lies: Often comes up as contestants try to fudge their way around a task's requirements:
  • For the prize task in Series 3 episode "The Dong and the Gong," ("heaviest item in a box"), Sara Pascoe brings in a "poisonous snake"^note It was a stuffed toy snake and a 12.5 kg weight. She refused to allow Alex to weigh the box and claimed that it could only be handled by a snake handler and was a few kilos heavier than the heaviest item that the other contestants brought (Dave Gorman's lump of marble, which was 27.3 kg). Not surprisingly, Greg sticks her in last place.
  • The prize task for Series 5's "Phoenix" was to bring in the item the contestant was proudest of. Sally Phillips brought in an item of her standing outside the Icelandic Parliament building before what she claimed was a ceremony to reward her for her contribution to research that changed Iceland's laws regarding "how women are treated in pregnancy". As the prize basically amounted to a holiday snapshot, she had tried to claim that "Iceland" in Icelandic was "Icelandinga", and she offered a Suspiciously Specific Denial about how she didn't simply think "lie creatively" in order to win a point, Greg was highly suspicious of her story but, as he couldn't actually disprove it in-studio he was forced to give her points.
  • In the prize task for Series 7's "I Can Hear It Gooping", Phil's offering is a "custom made" "solid gold" pen that's obviously a cheap ballpoint with gold-coloured foil badly wrapped around it.
  • In Series 8's "long distance catch" task, Sian's contributions to her and Joe's attempt mainly involved her and former contestant Romesh Ranganathan standing in different parts of the set of The Reluctant Landlord^note which is shot in Surrey while Romesh intoned dramatically about how great it was to be in Johannesburg / Malaysia / New Zealand.
  • In Series 10, Katherine Parkinson claims to weigh 22 stone (140 kilograms or 308 pounds) to do well in a task where scoring was based partly on weight. This is what Greg actually weighs and he's more than a foot taller and a lot bulkier than she is.
  • Often when a contestant is singled out with additional task stipulations, Alex will claim that there has been "admin errors," such as when Joe Lycett has to smile at the camera every 30 seconds while painting a portrait of Greg, when Mark Watson is prohibited from saying any words containing letters from the word "Taskmaster," or when Richard Herring alone has to learn the lines and supply regional accents for all five characters in a short play.
  • "I'm not bad at this!" — John Kearns, having demonstrably and repeatedly failed to get either ducks or socks within the appropriate buckets during the "get the most ducks and socks in the appropriate buckets" task in "Enormous Hugeness".
• Book Ends: Occasionally happens in some episodes:
  • In "Phoenix", the first pre-recorded task involves the contestants getting a ping pong ball out of a long tube, and the live task involves the contestants using the ball to play a game of verbal ping pong. In the same episode, Alex mentions at the beginning that he has been taking elocution lessons and that saying the word "salivate" will make one immediately salivate. Cut to the end of the episode when Greg suddenly says "Salivate!" and Alex immediately does so.
  • The first recorded task of "This is Trevor" was to find all the pink lady apples hidden underneath bowls at tables, but finding the green (chicken) egg meant that the contestant would be disqualified. The live task put the five contestants into teams, where they must determine the numerical answer to the Taskmaster's questions and pull that number within 30 seconds - pulling a correct answer resulted in a pink lady falling from above that number, but pulling an incorrect answer would result in a green (ostrich) egg falling down so that the opposing team would receive the full 5 points and the losing team 0 points.
• Boring, but Practical: This happens frequently, enough that it would overtake the Loophole Abuse entry by miles
  • For one task, the contestants had to get an egg as high as possible in 20 minutes. They were aided with a table, some pens, and a big stack of paper. Romesh's attempt saw him just place the pens on top of the paper, and put the egg on top of the pens. Greg was in disbelief that that was all Romesh could come up with in 20 minutes, and he was certain Romesh would come last. That is...until it transpired that Roisin, Tim, and Frank all had to be disqualified because they broke their eggs, meaning that Josh came in first place, and Romesh in second.
  • Kerry Godliman in Series 7 is repeatedly complimented by Greg as "the Bosh Queen" for her simple and blunt yet effective approaches to tasks. Need to find out where a bin is on the other side of a fence? Drill a hole in it, bosh.
  • In the "kick a goal from the furthest distance" task in "Rock and Roll Umlaut", while everyone sets up elaborate, long-distance kicks to try and get the ball in from as far as possible, to the point where some shots would give difficulty to professional soccer players, Sian Gibson elects to simply move the ball a short distance from the goal, reasoning that with her poor skills that she'd be better off just getting it in the goal and at least securing a point. Everyone else misses their shots and disqualifies, meaning Sian wins the task.
  • In "Stuck in a Mammal Grove", both Joe Thomas and Iain Stirling come up with the old "drop a Mentos into a bottle of Coca-Cola" trick when planning their volcano. Iain designs and builds an elaborate volcano out of pipes and dirt, pours multiple bottles of Coke into the pipes, creates a sack full of Mentos which he balances on a pulley, and tops it off by decorating the outside of the volcano with little figurines of previous Taskmaster champions and delivering a speech in which he confidently declares his hope to join their ranks. Joe, on the other hand, just get a bottle of Coke, gives it a little decoration with cardboard, and drops the Mentos in. Unfortunately for Iain, the reason this trick works is because the carbon dioxide within the drink reacts to the sugar of the sweet most dramatically when the drink is pressurised and the carbon is unable to escape, as when in the bottle; Iain pouring the drink into a larger container released the carbon dioxide, meaning there was less to react with the sugar and thus diluting the overall effect. Joe's volcano worked as intended, putting him in joint first place, but for all his hard work Iain's volcano only produced a pathetic amount of bubbles, leaving him joint last.
  • In general, if you look at a leaderboard of the contestants on the show, you will notice a recurring trend in that the ones who win the most points, episodes and championships often tend to be the ones who just buckle down and get on with what the task is asking them to do rather than spending their time trying to outwit Alex by coming up with clever little loopholes to abuse or trying to find exploits that let them game Exact Words or who try and do complete the task in the biggest and showiest. Because while the latter can be amazing when they work, there's a higher risk that they won't, and will just result in humiliating failure and low points; whereas just plodding away and doing it might not always win or make for the showiest moment on TV, but it usually guarantees a solid score which will eventually add up into a decent result. The podcast has often reiterated that even if you're convinced you're doing horribly at the task, you should at least consider plete it, because you could still end up with a good score if others are disqualified.
• Born Unlucky: In "Boing boing," a task requires contestants to don a blindfold, travel as far as they can, remove the blindfold, and try to find their way back to where they started. They are given a slice of bread to potentially leave breadcrumbs, a strategy employed by Mark Watson. He ends up losing the task, as a dog happened to come along and eat the breadcrumbs.
• Bowdlerise:
  • Pre-watershed versions of Series 1-9 were made so Dave could get more mileage out of repeats. For the most part this just amounted to bleeping out the swearing, although one task from the sixth series had to have so much cut out of it to make it broadcastable pre-watershed that an extra line was added explaining how much had been edited.
  • When The CW acquired the rights to broadcast and stream Series 8 and 9 in the US, they cut out a lot of the raunchier jokes, removed the ad break transitions, and inserted several "Don't Try This At Home" messages. This also ended up cutting out context for various sequences (for example, in the original broadcast of "Clumpey Swayey Clumsy Man," Greg orders Alex to shout loudly while recapping what happened before the ad break and who will be shown next - however, the CW edit just cuts to Alex shouting out "LOU SANDERS" for no apparent reason).
• Brain Bleach:
  • Everyone in the studio has a very justified reaction after discussing Bob's...unique toilet sitting position in "Spoony Neeson", as he apparently has "an anus that is a bit too high."
  • Alex putting his bare rear into a cake topped with profiteroles and custard. The below quote truly squicked out the audience however:
    Alex: There was one fewer profiteroles than when I'd started.
• Brains and Brawn: In series one:
  • Brain: Frank and Josh's attempts are often shown together, as they both tend to think their actions through first. To a lesser extent, Roisin as well when she's not using unusual techniques.
  • Brawn: Romesh and Tim take a much more brash, hands-on approach, which led to Greg calling them "the psychopaths". They also have a tendency to try and sabotage each others' efforts in the live task.
• Break the Cutie: Alex tries to do this to Mel in "Spatchcock It" by giving her several difficult tasks involving a large inflatable ball (see Butt-Monkey for details). He ends up failing; Mel, while undeniably frustrated, remains quite perky and bubbly throughout.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • Narrowly averted in "The Pie Whisperer": Tim Key claims he's doing a stunt for Sport Relief in order to get strangers to cooperate with his task, earning him immediate enmity from the rest of the cast and the audience. Greg rules that he'll lose points unless he gives £185 to the charity, whereupon he immediately asks how much he could give to win the task. Frank Skinner jumps in asking for the same deal. Greg ultimately decides to drop the deal and just dock Tim a point.
  • In Series 3, Al "Money Bags" Murray displays a tendency to complete tasks by throwing money around to the people around him to help him do them. He rented a gong to surprise Alex (we don't know the price, but there's a good chance it wasn't cheap), bought a fairly costly taxi cab ride so he could drive to Slough with a pea in a rolled-up red mat (£150), did the same thing to cover 4 corners of London with his clothes (price unknown, also likely not cheap), spent £60 for Alex's taxi, and paid a man to walk with a piece of clothing. His spending spree has reached over £380! This creates a minor controversy in one episode, when Al pays Alex to carry a bucket full of water up a race track to another bucket so he could transfer water from it quicker (the task had stated that the contestants themselves couldn't move the bucket, but technically said nothing about someone else doing so), which led to him winning the round. The problem was, when Sara Pascoe had had the same idea during her attempt and had asked Alex to move the bucket without offering him money, he had refused in a way that suggested that this was a violation of the rules. As this ended up severely disadvantaging Sara, Greg ruled that she would get an extra point but that it would be unfair to disqualify Al since he had no idea of any of this, so he instead punished Alex for his corruption by making him donate the money to charity and Rob (who is in dire financial straits) and by making him take off his right shoe and sock for the rest of the episode.
    Rob Beckett: You're going to be at a loss at the end of the series, on the amount of money you've spent on-
    Al Murray: What price glory?
    Alex: Currently £340.
  • The prize task for "Tony Three Pies" from Series 4 required the contestants to bring in the largest amount of cash. Lolly Adefope decided to bring in a blank cheque so she could top the highest amount by 1p. When Greg called her out, she brought out her backup plan: an envelope filled with £2000 of genuine currency.
  • Played with by Mark Watson, who also demonstrated a tendency to splash some cash around to try and win tasks. However, on several occasions, this backfired when he ended up not doing so well, leaving him significantly out-of-pocket with little to show for it. This most significantly occurred in the prize task where each contestant was required to bring in a special hat, as Greg instinctively found Mark's £400 light-up red "Taskmaster" hat insufficient. It finally worked out for Mark in "Boing Boing" when, after learning that (for unrelated reasons) Mark had once had to pay £18,000 to have a garden gate installed^note FWIW the gate would open into a private communal garden owned by a resident's association that he also had to pay a membership fee to in order to access, Greg made him the winner of the round out of pity.
    Greg: I've seen the hurt in Mark "£18,000 gate" Watson's eyes...
    Mark: Oh, I need this. I need this, yeah.
    Greg: ... So I have to give in to it.
  • In the "convince this child you're asleep" task in "Never Packed a Boot," Sam is revealed to have straight-up promised the child £100 if she claims to have believed he was asleep. She goes on a hilarious (and adorable) face journey between awe at the sum involved, moral wrestling about whether to accept, and skepticism that he'll actually deliver. She finally professes to have believed both him and Susan, and Greg allows it. (Alex later tweeted that she had indeed been paid, albeit in book tokens.)
• Brick Joke:
  • In the first episode of Series 3, Alex offers Greg some raisins during the banter segment at the beginning of the episode, then brings them out again after the final pre-recorded task, in which raisins played a significant role in one contestant's attempt.
  • In the task where the contestants had to spot the differences made in the scene in front of them as they blew up a balloon blindfolded, Alex had been switched with a body double and nobody but Aisling noticed when naming the differences. Later in the episode, the same man swapped with Alex and sat next to Greg ahead of one of the ad breaks, which nobody comments on.
  • In the first episode of Series 4, Mel puts on a black shoe to crush a lime in the final in-studio task. Not only does she return to her chair in mismatched shoes, but she continues to sport the black shoe in studio during the next three episodes.
  • In "I Can Hear It Gooping", the first bit of pre-recorded task footage is of the contestants receiving instructions for a task to be completed later when a siren sounds. The siren eventually sounds halfway through the episode's final pre-recorded task.
  • During the banter segment at the start of "Hello", Alex demonstrates a system he's devised so he can pull up his socks by pulling on a string that runs up through his clothes and loops around the back of his neck. At the end of the episode, Greg yanks on the string and apparently pulls Alex's socks right off and out through the collar of his shirt.
• Brief Accent Imitation:
  • During the prize task in "Shaqinahat", Greg imitates the way it sounds to him when Rose says "shed" in her New Zealand accent, and Rose retaliates by demonstrating how it sounds to her when Greg says "shed".
  • When discussing Sophie Willan's failed attempt at the "do the riskiest thing with an egg" task in "Grappling With My Life" and having prefaced that it may be offensive, Greg imitates the way she inflects the word "risky" (as something akin to "risk-eh"), to which Sophie complains that she isn't Johnny Vegas^note While Johnny Vegas and Sophie Willan are both from Lancashire, the former's accent is distinctly St Helens while the latter is distinctly Bolton.
• Briefcase Full of Money: In "Tony Three Pies", Mel's offering for the prize task is a briefcase full of banknotes. It turns out that only the top layer of banknotes is real, and the rest of it is Monopoly money.
• British Brevity: Played straight for the first few series, but the number of episodes has increased over time. Series one has 6 episodes, series two and three have 5 episodes, series four and five have 8 episodes, and all the series from series six onwards have 10 episodes.
• British Stuffiness: All the players had difficulty asking strangers for their ages in a Series One task, but Josh exhibits a reserved embarrassment throughout the task.
• British Teeth: In Series 2, after Katherine Ryan performs a children's song about dental hygiene, Alex draws attention to the wide gap in his own teeth and says that he can fit a coin through it.
• Broken Record: Literally. The video that precedes a task in "Rock 'n' Roll Umlaut" had the task-setting tune on a vinyl record, with it skipping near the end, then cutting off.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Josh (series one) appears in "A Pistachio Eclair" (series two) to help Richard and Jon in the team task. Unlike most of the other examples below, which appear to be spontaneously arranged on the part of the contestant, this one was arranged by the producers as part of the task itself, which required three people to complete.
  • Al (series three) appears twice in "Hollowing Out A Baguette" (series four). Al shows up as one of the people Joe Lycett contacted on Twitter to help him camouflage himself, which leads Greg and Alex to quip that Al just can't accept that he's no longer on the show anymore. Later on in the same episode, his short film from "The F.I.P." is played as an introduction to a task.
  • Tim Key (series one) shows up in "Tony Three Pies" (series four) to officiate Noel Fielding's marriage to a rubber duck.
  • Dave (series three) appears as the model for Aisling's Yorkshire pudding hat in "The Leprechaun or the Lesbian" (series five).
  • All five contestants in each of the Champion of Champions specials.
  • Richard (series two) appears in "Lotta Soup" (series seven) as part of James Acaster's attempt to deliver a task to Alex in the most spectacular way.
  • James Acaster appears in the Champions of Champions as Kerry's "Grape Gimp".
  • Romesh (series one) appears in "Stay Humble" (series eight)^note via video shot on the set of The Reluctant Landlord, the TV series he stars in alongside Series 8 competitor Sian Gibson.
  • Kerry (series seven) and Katherine (series two) replaced Katy in the studio segments while she was ill for "Another spoon" and "Bready Bready Bready" respectively (series nine). Alan (series twelve) did the same for Jonnie in "Basic Recipe 28" (NYT 2021-2022).
  • Fred the Swede appears (via videocall) in "You Tuper Super" (series thirteen) after appearing in one task per series in the first five series.
  • Ed (series nine) is heard via phone call in "Trapped in a Loveless Marriage" (series fifteen).
  • Mae Martin was unavailable for the filming of their Champion of Champions. Their series runner-up, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, will instead fight their corner in both the recorded tasks and in the studio.
• Busby Berkeley Number: In "Lotta Soup," the task is to deliver the task (envelope) to Alex in the most spectacular manner. Kerry decides to stage a Busby Berkeley-type number (which she initially misspeaks as "Bertie Bassett," the mascot for licorice allsorts) and accompanies it with dancing crew members and a tune. The results were so spectacularly and uncharacteristically poor that it allegedly overshadowed everyone else's attempts at the task.
• Butt-Monkey: This is done in a number of ways. At least once a series by giving a contestant a special task which nobody else has to do, or an additional rule in a task just for them (they are invariably unaware that nobody else had to do it until the footage is played). Oftentimes a contestant will be singled out for consistently struggling as well. To some extent the Taskmaster makes their struggle worse by punishing them, but often times one player is genuinely just very bad at the tasks.
  • Alex Horne is the show's ongoing Butt-Monkey. Greg constantly insults or mocks him, and in many of the later series the contestants join on. As the assistant around to observe the contestants as they undertake a challenge he also takes the brunt of their verbal abuse when they get frustrated with the task. In the spirit of the show, Alex typically goes along with whatever humiliating things are requested of him. Among other things, he has been made to eat several pies full of unusual fillings in "The Pie Whisperer", eat dog food in "The Last Supper", and put his bare arse into a cake in "He Was A Different Man". In series 7, Rhod repeatedly requires him to strip down to his underwear, or even further. For the team task in "The Last Supper", the teams had to make a blooper reel; and Josh, Romesh, and Roisin decided to shove Alex's face into a cake before making him fall into a paddling pool full of water. The blooper reel example ends up backfiring on the team, however; after watching the blooper back, Greg pointed out that the team was supposed to make one of themselves the victim of the misfortune rather than inflicting it on a third party.
  • Josh in "Down An Octave". He was made to count how many baked beans were in a can, then spaghetti hoops, and finally grains of rice in a bag. He was initially denied points by Greg, but Josh was eventually awarded a single point overall for doing these tasks, he might well have been thankful, as he won that series by 1 point.
  • Jon in "Welcome To Rico Face". The other contestants were asked to set a fun challenge that should take no longer than a minute to complete ... and then Jon carried out all four challenges, and had to guess who set which challenge to win a maximum of four points. He succeeds.
  • Richard in series 2 often gets called out for being a guest star/producer/tall man, as he's unusual in being the only contestant in series 2 to not be a comedian (even Doc Brown does comedy as one of his many side careers). Mel Giedroyc would later appear on the show in series 4, as well as Alice Levine in series 6, but these two being TV presenters in a show that features mostly comedians is seldom brought up by Alex (in Mel's case, most of the jokes are about her being a former co-host of Bake Off).
  • Rob in "Little Polythene Grief Cave". While all the contestants had to collect as much sweat as they could in 20 minutes to fill an eggcup, Rob was not allowed to speak in his natural accent during the task, despite the fact that he apparently can't imitate any other existing accents.
  • Paul Chowdhry in "A Very Nuanced Character". He was set the task of having the most fun on a bouncy castle for an hour, and clips from his attempt book-ended each advert break.
  • Joe Lycett in "Look at Me." All the contestants had to draw a painting of Greg from a distance, but Joe also had to do it while smiling with increasing enthusiasm every thirty seconds.
  • Mel in "Spatchcock It". As part of Alex's attempt to Break the Cutie, Mel was given five minutes to try and hide an enormous, multi-colored ball from Alex. Then it turned out that she had previously been given the task to inflate the ball inside the house, which took 45 minutes before she had to score a goal with it. The goal was outside, meaning Mel had to partially deflate the ball again just to get it out of the front door.
  • Mark becomes one twice in series five:
    • In "A Wind-Dried Puffin", he was given a mobile to send daily texts to Greg's real number for 5 months, or 150 texts, and then was awarded no points because he'd only sent 148.
    • In "Spoony Neeson", all the contestants had to guide a cupcake with a lit candle through the house to light a candle in the caravan, but Mark was not allowed to say any words that contained any of the letters in the word Taskmaster. He spends most of his time saying the words "fiddly" and "how?" in tones of increasing desperation.
  • Attempted in "Spoony Neeson", where Aisling is given a pineapple and has to have its photograph taken in "esteemed company" as many times as possible in six months. It rather backfires on the production team when, rather than carrying it around for six months, she decides to post it to her mother in Ireland. It also backfired on Aisling, however, since on receiving the pineapple her mother just took photos of it around town with her iPad, thus failing the task requirements.
  • "I've Sinned Again" opens with Josh being made to sing along to the Taskmaster theme tune.
  • In "The Bubble Brothers", Tim Vine was tasked with making an outfit using only material he'd purchased from a stationers, and according to Alex this task was originally going to be for all of the contestants other than Tim. The other contestants would win a bonus point if they could guess the Punny Name Tim gave his outfit. He had made a "track suit" (his outfit was train-themed), and nobody guessed it.
  • Phil Wang becomes this in Series 7. Unlike some of the other contestants however, who had either eagerly embraced their ineptitude at the tasks or were otherwise good-humouredly willing to play along with being the butt of the joke, one gets the sense that Phil is genuinely disappointed/irritated to find himself in this position. He later stated on Twitter that he felt the judging process had been unfair towards him, and Greg Davies did acknowledge that watching back he felt he'd judged Phil too harshly at times.
  • David Baddiel is openly mocked in series 9 as its worst contestant, particularly in "Don't Like Them Go Bang" despite winning that episode. Greg states outright that Ed having David on his team in a live task is a handicap.
  • Richard Herring 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".
  • In the first New Year Treat special, all the contestants were tasked with building the lightest tower that they could. Rylan was given the extra rule that he had to say that he had just come up with a great idea every time he heard Alex ring a bell.
  • In "Absolute Casserole", Mike was the only contestant who was given the task to fart.
  • As part of the "make mischief" task in Series 16, Susan Wokoma decides to set a sneaky special task for her fellow contestant Sam Campbell in which he is confined to the toilet and must stand or sit and shout "fish" or "mice" (an anagram of "mischief) for 20 minutes. He only finds out that the task was just for him when Susan's VT is shown.
    Sam: How deep does this go, Wokoma?

C

• Call-Back:
  • In "Hollowing Out a Baguette", one task is given as a film presentation. It opens with Al Murray's entry for the "do something that will look cool when sped up or slowed down" task from the previous series.
  • The Ad-Bumpers for "I've Sinned Again" features Alex recreating past tasks using miniature figurines of the champions on the model of a field. Those same figurines are then used by Iain Stirling for his best volcano in Series 8 episode "Stuck in a Mammal Groove" so that he can pay tribute to them.
  • Series 5 features a callback to a different show entirely. In "A Wind-Dried Puffin", Bob Mortimer breaks an apple with his bare hands as part of the "make a water-cooler moment with this water-cooler" task. Greg then points out that he'd previously done so on an episode of Would I Lie to You? that both men had appeared on (which had also become an actual water-cooler moment, having achieved over a million views on YouTube). While he admits it's still impressive, Greg thus docks Bob points because he was repeating himself.
  • The runway which is sometimes set up for live tasks has been dubbed as "The Knappett" ever since "The Perfect Stuff" where Series 7 contestant Jessica Knappett fell off said runway for her disastrous, magnificent walk. It even has a plaque to signify this.
  • The series 12 episode "Croissants Is Croissants" contains a few of these, not in the least because it is the hundredth episode:
    • The prize task is about the most elegant thing beginning with "G", which riffs off the prize task from series seven episode "The Perfect Stuff," which was the most exciting thing beginning with the letter "G."
    • The introduction clip for the first task was a montage of all the Taskmaster portraits in the living room. The music playing over it was the main theme tune, along with all the variations over the years.
    • The first task was to sit on a cake. This refers to the legendary final task in series six's "He Was A Different Man", when Liza Tarbuck made Alex sit bare-arsed on a cake. (The series 12 contestants were permitted to retain their modesty.)
  • In Series 14's "Enormous Hugeness", one task involves a laminator, and Greg and Alex introduce it with a re-enactment of the conversation about laminators in Series 7's "I Can Hear It Gooping".
  • In series 14's "Chip Biffington," John Kearns expresses fear that his luggage trolley bowls triumph will be snatched away from him with by footage showing him stepping over the line, noting that Greg and Alex have been known to do this sort of thing before — a not-so-veiled reference to Joe Wilkinson's tragic red green incident in series 2, and other similar "Wasn't that great? Let's watch it one more time" gags over the years. Alex winds him up a bit before showing a photo proving his attempt was perfectly legal.
  • In Series 11 episode "Absolute Casserole," Jamali Maddix stamps on his provided paint tubes in a task to paint a portrait of Greg on a door only using one's feet (and he ends up making a huge mess on the caravan, which is even captured in the opening title sequence). In the team task of Series 15 episode "A Show about Pedantry," the team members are confined to distant spots and they have to deliver paint to the teammate doing the painting either by squeezing the paint tubes a maximum of two times or stamping on the tubes a maximum of 10 times.
  • Unsurprisingly, the third "Champion of Champions" episode has several:
    • One of the attempts to make substitute contestant Kiell look more like Mae involves making him wear Mae's "hero's glasses" — the ones with their eyes on them — in promotional shots and the scoreboard.
    • For the "make the best chase sequence" task used in the introduction, Dara begins by trying to escape detection in disguise as the "no my baby" woman from his attempt at the "catch something spectacularly" task.
    • The same contestant's outfit is the same as in their series, with the addition of his accidental catchphrase "wait, what?" embroidered on the back.
    • One submission for the prize task (specifically, Kiell's) is a hand puppet made by Mae Martin's dad, like one of their own submissions in series 15.
    • In the "be the best waiter" task, how does Kiell justify serving the meal to a mannequin serving as a decoy Alex rather than the real deal? "Well, if a drawing of a pineapple can be a pineapple..."
    • One of the ways Alex imposes Sophie's selected handicap of being really mean throughout the "put the hat on Greg" task is to put up signs saying "Ramsey should have won".
    • At the beginning of the "do something stupid" task, Alex asks each contestant if they ever did anything stupid in their own series. This is immediately followed by a montage of stupid things each contestant did: Sarah hopping to the captain's hat with her legs tied together with clingfilm and duct tape, Morgana painted green and sitting in the bathtub as a mermaid to "propose" to Alex, Sophie dunking her head underwater in an attempt to show off, Dara participating in the "snort, whistle, raspberry" task, and Kiell proudly showing off his terrible fake hand made of cake. Several of the contestants are then shown saying that no, they never did anything stupid in their time on the show.
  • Patatas the stuffed toy cat is reintroduced in a task in Series 17's "Jumungo," eight years after it played a role in Series 2's "Rico Face." This time around the contestants yet again have to rescue Patatas, but instead of being up in a tree, Patatas is now in the geodesic dome hidden among scores of other plush toys and the contestants have to get it out through the top of the dome in the manner of a claw machine game.
• Calling Your Bathroom Breaks:
  • Jo Brand announces that she needs "a quick wee" in the team task in "Think About The Spirit." In the studio, Greg points out that she's the only contestant ever who has gone to the toilet mid-task while against the clock.
  • In "A Show About Pedantry," Jenny Eclair deploys a Fake Period Excuse to try to get to the bathroom and illegally Google the subject she has to give a presentation on.
• Calvinball:
  • A task in "Down An Octave" was one that sent the teams to a squash court, and had to score 11 points as fast as possible. When Frank asked Alex what the rules were, he simply replied "The Taskmaster Rules". They were given things to aid them such as cakes, a bucket, a portrait of the Taskmaster, and squash rackets and balls. Alex in the studio later clarified the points system: disrespecting the Taskmaster (such as by knocking the portrait over) deducts 2 points, shaking your head deducts a point, but to score a point, they had to touch their head.
  • For the "Play a minute of sport and then provide commentary for it" task in "A Couple of Ethels", Alan Davies and Victoria Coren Mitchell invent "MultiSport", which basically utilises every piece of equipment provided for them and allows Victoria to make up new rules on the fly to try and score a goal.
• The Cameo: Former contestants have at times popped up to help out in challenges in later series. See The Bus Came Back above for the full list.
• Camera Abuse:
  • In the credits of "Hollowing Out a Baguette," Joe Lycett tosses a chunk of cheese into the studio audience and accidentally strikes a camera.
  • In "Boing Boing", one task involves rolling coconuts down a ramp. During one attempt, a coconut veers off to the side and hits the action camera positioned at the bottom of the slope.
  • In "The old soft curved padlock", Tim's interpretation of a task involves the throwing of several tennis balls, one of which ricochets and knocks over an action camera positioned nearby.
  • James becomes so enraged by missing a par in "Twelve Blush Majesty Two," due to the inherent problems knocking a cricket ball into a golf hole that he takes it out on the hole's flag, which has a camera attached to it. Greg wasn't happy about the broken camera, but he understood why he was angry.
  • During the ball-throwing task in "The Perfect Stuff", James kicks a soccer ball that goes wildly off course and hits the cameraman.
  • During the beachball-rolling task in "Aquatic Sewing Machine", one contestant's attempt ends with the ball rolling down the slope of the driveway and colliding with an action camera.
  • Paul Sinha knocks into a camera in "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man" while trialing his route to take in a task that had him blindfolded and riding a scooter. Bear in mind, he knocked into the camera BEFORE he put the blindfold on. Greg does lampshade this.
    Greg: [while still laughing] I mean, absolute carnage before the blindfold has gone on!
  • Lou crashes into one of the camera operators during her attempt at the blindfolded obstacle course in "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man."
  • One task in Series 9 episode "Join Our Cult" has the contestants rearrange ice lollies by colour while wearing blindfold goggles. At one point, David asks where Alex is and throws an ice lolly in his direction, splattering a camera in the process.
  • In "Legit Glass," Mawaan, after having completed the task at hand, manages to cause a remote-controlled buggy (which has a camera attached to it) to crash into one of the camera operators.
• Captain Obvious:
  • Occasionally when one of the panellists is getting to grips with a task...
    Nish Kumar: [during a task where he has to paint a rainbow in a darkened room, with a tone of sudden realization] Oh... I can't see the colors!
  • Greg, Taskmaster of Taskmaster, understanding the rules of the show:
    Greg: How was Josh better than Frank, it looked like Frank-
    Alex: He was faster.
    [beat]
    Greg: Aaaah! That's how this works!
  • In the recorded tasks, Alex has a tendency to point out an obvious error or unfortunate circumstance that has arisen during a contestant's attempt to complete the task in a tone that seems helpful and innocent, yet is conveniently placed to frustrate and annoy the contestant.
• Career-Revealing Trait: In "A Very Nuanced Character", one task involved the contestants working out the previous occupation of Hugh, a retiree. Al utilised this trope to work out that Hugh wasn't a manual labourer, because he had soft hands without any calluses.
• Cat Up a Tree: In "Welcome to Rico Face", a task required the contestants to get a toy cat named Patatas down from a tree. The fastest to do so won. Jon, Joe and Doc Brown immediately head for the shed to get a ball to throw at Patatas, with the tactic backfiring a few moments later for both Jon and Doc Brown, as their balls also got stuck in the tree. Richard and Katherine opted to duct-tape sticks to form one big stick. Katherine came first, Doc Brown came second, as "cats like string!" apparently, Joe came third, Jon came fourth, with Richard being disqualified as he didn't rescue Patatas and gave up after 45 minutes.
• Character Catchphrase: Quite a few:
  • "Your time starts now" is one due to its frequent use in the show's task letters.
  • Greg often starts his episode wrap-ups with "What have we learned today?"
  • In later series, Greg develops a habit of quipping "Keep it light" whenever a contestant brings up a less than cheery topic of conversation.
  • When he is about to Pull the Thread regarding a contestant's terrible or shady performance in a task, Greg will also often begin by stating "I put it to you [that]..."
  • Roisin has "That's a lotta pie!", even when referring to a thing that are ostensibly not a pie.
  • Paul Chowdhry, innit?
  • Bob Mortimer has "do you know what I mean?"
  • James Acaster has a few, with "Suck it!" being his go-to catchphrase.
  • Kerry Godliman had "Bosh!" This led to her being dubbed the "Bosh Queen" by Greg.
  • Lou has "Mummy!"
  • David Baddiel frequently says "Bollocks" when he realises that he has messed up.
  • Mike Wozniak developed a habit of saying "Tick-tock, it's ____ o'clock", with the blank being filled by such gems as "bamboo" or "fart".
• Cheaters Never Prosper: While the Taskmaster will at times allow "creative" interpretations of task rules if the contestant is engaging in a good-faith attempt to complete the task and can convincingly argue that it's a valid interpretation of what the task is asking for, outright cheating is not tolerated and will be immediately smacked down with an automatic disqualification. Examples include:
  • Dave Gorman attempted to cheat and pass it off twice in Series 3, leading to disqualifications:
    • In the Pea Throwing task in "Pea in a Haystack", Dave claimed the pea was wedged in the tennis racket he was using. Greg attempted to get the truth out of him, twice, and when he maintained he was telling the truth, Alex brought in the slow-motion footage to reveal that the pea had left the racket when Dave threw it. Dave then tried to claim the pea must've gotten wedged when he used the racket for searching for the pea. Unsurprisingly, this led to a disqualification, and to add insult to injury, Paul, who failed to get the pea onto the rug, came in 4th for at least propelling the pea.
    • In "The F.I.P", Contestants had to get as much water from one bucket to another without him touching the bucket. They...didn't do very well, and when it came to compare buckets with other contestants, Dave's bucket looked suspiciously brown. He tried to claim it was his bile from siphoning the water, but footage revealed he had dumped extra coffee and tea into the bucket after the task had finished. This also led to a disqualification.
      Greg: (pointing at Alex's bare foot) Do you see what I'm capable of?!
  • In "Look at Me", A task required the contestants to get flour from a bandstand to a target located outside of the bandstand. This task had them grouped up (Mel and Hugh versus Noel, Joe, and Lolly). At one point Noel interfered with Alex's clock, and pressed pause on it. Alex did a reveal slow-motion montage after the video had rolled, and Greg disqualified the entire team for Noel's meddling.
  • Hugh Dennis frequently occupied a slightly sketchy area between this trope, Loophole Abuse and Too Clever by Half; on many occasions, he wasn't actually trying to outright cheat and was just trying to find loopholes, but in doing so he often stretched the rules to breaking point in ways that nevertheless clearly violated the spirit of the task. Most notably, in "Spatchcock It" his attempt at the "Figure out what's inside this sleeping bag without taking the items out or looking inside" sees him basically dump everything out by shaking the sleeping bag, before trying to argue that he neither looked inside nor, since he didn't actually touch the items, did he "take out" the items. Ultimately, though, Greg wasn't having it; since Hugh was nevertheless clearly responsible for the items leaving the bag, he was deemed to have "taken them out" regardless and disqualified.
  • In "Aquatic Sewing Machine", the teams had to catch balls of varying colors in varying containers, with certain balls being only to be allowed to be in each container (except green balls, which had to be ignored). Sian's entire team got disqualified as they had tried to discreetly add in red balls into one of their containers, and was embarrassed to be caught red handed by the camera.
    Greg: I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the back: of all the people!
  • In "The System of Endless Plates", the location task is to release a ball from behind a line then have it make contact with as many other balls as possible unaided before any ball hits a mannequin. Munya takes a while to set up the equivalent of a domino rally, complete with a prone Alex to guide the final ball to hit the mannequin. His attempt goes well, managing to involve all 15 balls, and Greg is full of praise for him... until the replay, in which Munya is clearly shown kicking the released ball to guide it into the main chain. Greg is so stunned that he has to remove his glasses and take a moment to recover from the revelation. He summarily disqualifies Munya.
    Munya: (after the task) What you don't know can't hurt you.
    Greg: (in the studio) I don't know what to believe any more.
• Chekhov's Gun: In "Residue Around the Hoof," a task was to blow up a balloon to the size of a cucumber (30 centimetres) while blindfolded, all the while a bunch of seemingly-unrelated props were at the other end of the garden. After doing the task, the contestants were given a second task, which was to remember as many of the now-very-relevant props as possible. Amazingly, nobody had noticed a hanging tarpaulin had changed colour from dark green to dark blue. Everyone but Aisling also failed to notice that Alex was replaced with a body double, but a few of them did notice his hat had changed.
• Chekhov's News: In "H.", Asim announces that he is now a vegan. In the following episode, "We met at mealtimes", it is revealed that one of the tasks involves making the biggest announcement, and that Asim's announcement had been his attempt for the task. He won that task.
• Clark Kenting: Discussed in "Little Polythene Grief Cave" when everyone is arguing whether Paul's flag meal resembles the Mexican flag.
  Paul: It did look like an eagle, you ate the beak.
  Greg: So if an eagle wanted to disguise itself— (covers his nose and mouth with his hands, through barely concealed laughter) NO EAGLES HERE!
  Paul: Clark Kent has got the glasses...
  Greg: Eagles have got the beaks.
• Cliffhanger: The team task in "A Coquettish Fascinator" was to create the best 1-minute soap opera cliffhanger.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Series one has Roisin; her... alternative views and methods are sometimes at odds with her successfully completing a task.
  • Joe Wilkinson in series two. He decided to impress a mayor by buying him 42 Callipos, a six-pack of beer, and also threw in £15. When he made a music video for a nursery rhyme, his attempt involved him standing in front of a green screen and mangling the lyrics to "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" while singing in a monotone.
  • Bob in series five. For instance, his idea of a special cuddle was to cuddle Alex in the boot of his car, and then he revealed that he'd been looking for an excuse to get into the boot anyway.
  • Liza Tarbuck in series six. She twice has been distracted by trees in the surroundings and for her "longest spin," she stuck a toy lizard onto a cordless drill.
    Greg: You buggered a toy lizard
  • Tim Vine in series six. Asim even lampshades this following the team task in "The Bubble Brothers". The teams had to perform a song for Taskmaster: The Musical, and Tim was the one who came up with a short and quirky tune about a task where a father and son found each other.
    Asim: So Tim Vine’s a lovely man, right? Wonderful man but he’s fucking weird!
  • James at times in Series 7, but most especially his submission for the "Draw The Biggest Circle" task. Not only did he inexplicably seem to interpret it as "Collect The Most Circles" for some reason, but even his attempt to do that saw him briefly ride around on a bike trying to spin a hula-hoop for some inadequately explained reason, before claiming the circles on the garden paving as being part of his attempt somehow. For the collective response to this madness, see What Were You Thinking? below.
  • David Baddiel is this in series 9, rivalling Roisin in his unusual methods of task completion. His idea of getting a lasso to gain leverage is to attach more spoons ("Another Spoon"). It’s revealed on the Taskmaster podcast that this task was originally meant to be a tiebreaker, but Alex and the producers found David’s method to be so strange that they absolutely had to share it.
  • Despite some stiff competition from fellow competitors, particularly Johnny Vegas and Mawaan Rizwan, Katherine Parkinson is Season 10's primary head-in-the-clouds contestant. Her big idea to get around a "do not walk on the grass" requirement in the first task is to tippy-toe run across it. She seem to genuinely believe that Mawaan Rizwan has suspended himself upside down in the "film the best thing upside down" task. Her attempt at completing the "fling the shoe into the bath with your foot task" simply defies explanation for how odd it gets (she at one point tries to use her own feet as a catapult). Her attempt to guess what Johnny Vegas is drawing in the "Pictionary on a spinning turntable" task sees her reduced to repeatedly yelling "BOX! BOX!" as Johnny desperately tries to get her to broaden the guess (it was actually a sandbox).
• Cluster F-Bomb: The series started off fairly G-rated, sprinkled with the occasional swear for emphasis. When frustration gets the best of some of the contestants they can come out with these.
  Paul: [whispering] He's a doctor.
  Alex: [whispering] What sort of doctor, Paul?
  Paul: [whispering] Oh for fuck's sake you fucking bastard.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: It isn't commented upon, but in live tasks and tasks where contestant attempts need to be clearly distinguished from each other (usually tasks where contestants may be competing using similar tools which need to be distinct so that Greg, Alex and the viewers can see and judge how everyone is doing — for example, the "get the toilet paper into the bowl" task in Season 14, which would quickly become hard to follow if all the contestants were using default white toilet paper or the same colour), each contestant will be given paints, tools, implements etc. in a distinct assigned colour, usually red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Precisely how consistent the colour assignments are can vary, but it usually follows the standard seating order in a ROYGBIV fashion (i.e. seat 1 is red, seat 2 is orange, and so forth); for example, in Series 14 Dara was generally given red items, Fern was given orange, John was given yellow, Munya green and Sarah blue.
• Comedic Sociopathy:
  • In Series 6, Liza stomped on a wind-up toy man on a pennyfarthing and forced Alex to look at its remains, and asked Alex to sit bare-arsed onto a cake (after which she ran away giggling like a madwoman).
  • In the same task to take the toy man on the incredible journey in "Tarpeters," Asim jokingly calls out the other contestants for how little regard they possessed for the toy man's well being, who was variously left to die alone in a bag (Alice), smashed to pieces (Liza), brainwashed into a cult (Russell) and lynched in a tree (Tim).
  • Demonstrated repeatedly by Rhod throughout Series 7, in which he took every opportunity to humiliate Alex as often as possible by stripping him naked, creating a "water feature" by squirting water between Alex's bare buttocks, force-feeding him warm mocha to get his heart rate up, and tying him up to a chair and placing a bucket over his head. In one (in)famous moment, he delivered a task to Alex by throwing a makeshift javelin into the caravan that Alex as also inside of.
    Jessica: (from an outtake of "The Pendulum Draws the Eye," referencing the javelin incident) Yes, but Rhod, we can't— you've got to stop doing this! You can't just nearly kill Alex every time you have to do a task!
  • Katy from Series 9 is a surprisingly mild-mannered one, such as when she uses a water torture egg timer on Alex and when she cruelly rebuffs his cry for help with bullying.
    Katy: Alex, you should tell people when you're being bullied.
    Alex: [mouthing] I'm being bullied.
    Katy: I don't care. Why are you telling me?
  • Fern from Series 14, while pelting a restrained Alex with bananas:
    Alex: I hadn't finished the first bit.
    Fern: Well, I didn't want to give you a chance to finish it, because that's not the task. The task is my pleasure.
    Alex: Are you finding it pleasurable?
    Fern: Yeah, it's really good fun!
    Alex: Is it.
• The Comically Serious:
  • In series 1, Romesh Ranganathan tends to approach his participation in the show as if he is in a prisoner-of-war camp being threatened with having his finger- and toenails sadistically removed. Given his overall comic persona it's unclear just how much he genuinely wasn't enjoying himself, but as a result his outbursts formed some of the funniest moments of the series.
  • Alex's persona as the Taskmaster's Assistant frequently crosses into this line, as it asks him to set, witness and comment upon rather ludicrous events in a matter-of-fact and deadpan fashion. One significant example, however, is the "Make the best thing to occupy a toddler" task, in which he frequently asks Nell the toddler — who is, of course, barely aware of what's going on beyond her entering a room and given various things to play with — to rate the toys she's been given as if he's conducting a job interview. In a similar series 12 task, he treats the dog who the contestants had to make a toy for like a contestant itself.
    [After Nell accidentally tips Paul's "ecosystem" diorama:]
    Nell: Oh no! Messy!
    Alex: It is a bit messy. The threshing shark has fallen out.
    Nell: Oh no, look.
    Alex: Yes, the ecosystem has deteriorated.
• Comically Inappropriate Funeral Urn:
  • In "Another Spoon", the prize task is 'best defunct object', and David's offering is the ashes of his pet cat — which he apparently keeps in a plastic screw-lid jar that originally contained laundry powder.
  • For the prize task in "Always Forks and Marbles," Julian brings in his friend's funeral urn: a yellow, spotted vase with the word "shit" written on it. He explains that he had bought it, by coincidence, a week before the friend had died, and that "shit" was the friend's favourite word. He brought the urn and ashes in as a prize because ''Taskmaster'' had been the friend's favourite show. ^note He won it back.
• Commercial Break Cliffhanger: Some episodes of Series 1 and 2, and some of series 3 leave the final contestants task until after the break. Series 4 onward changes this to have at least 2 people to go in any given adbreak.
• Competition Freak: The show came about because Alex Horne realized that comedians are naturally competitive and keen to one-up each other^note in fact, Alex organized the first stage versions of the show because he was jealous that Tim Key won a Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe while he didn't. Because of this trait, some contestants are very keen to win and this is reflected in how they approach the tasks and interact with others.
  • James Acaster (Series 7) and Iain Stirling (Series 8) could be particularly aggressive in completing tasks and trying to justify points from the Taskmaster.
  • Richard Herring (Series 10) would passive-aggressively try to set himself apart from his competitors by prefacing his attempts with comments about how he tried to follow the rules as they were presented.
• Complexity Addiction:
  • In general, a frequent source of failure: contestants unintentionally make things harder on themselves by tacitly assuming they must follow rules that are stated nowhere in the task.
  • Invoked as part of a task in "The Dong and the Gong", where Alex is tied up, but the solution for freeing him was simple. The task had the teams complete a multi-step puzzle to locate the key to free Alex from handcuffs, one big Red Herring that could've been avoided had both teams inspected Alex properly—he was holding the key.
  • A team task in "H." had instructions for each team to figure out the connection between a bunch of items on a wall connected by string and then do the thing 100 times. The link: "Hop". Every object and image spelled "hop" or was connected to "hop". Liza quickly figured out the link and began hopping, while Tim and Asim decided that was too simple and continued trying to figure out the puzzle, and the task was completed without them realizing it.
  • The team task in "Butter in the Microwave" is a recreation of a Choose Your Own Adventure where each team goes to various areas around the Taskmaster House property and complete a mini task. Choosing the wrong combination or accidentally breaking the rule meant the team would either be stuck in a loop or that the team would have to start all over again from the starting bench. The key to finishing the task was to say the word "demeaning", which could have been done at any point during the ordeal unprompted (several of the mini tasks were quite demeaning, like wearing a kitchen item for the duration of the entire task), or prompted by a different task ("whisper three words beginning with "d" and ending with "g"", "translate the Italian word umiliante", which can be translated as "demeaning" as well as "humiliating" or "humiliation", as the teams ended up rendering it) rather than being prompted by the task underneath the door mat.
• Confusing Multiple Negatives: One of the tasks in "A Couple of Ethels" is all about this. Victoria and Desiree incorrectly didn't ring the bell, while the other three correctly rang the bell.
  Make and wear a popcorn necklace with at least five pieces of popcorn then do the opposite of the following:
  You must under no circumstances not avoid not making the bell not ring.
• Continuity Cameo: Al Murray (series three) appears in a task for "Hollowing Out a Baguette" (series four). He had responded to a tweet Joe sent out asking for help with the task.
  Greg: He will not accept that he's not on the show anymore!
• Continuity Cavalcade:
  • Various ad spots and trailers the show has made over the years while on Dave showed off memorable props and the varying paintings that hang up in the Taskmaster house.
  • The ad bumpers for the Series 6 finale "He Was a Different Man" show Alex composited into scenes from earlier series.
  • The first channel 4 promo shows off pretty much every painting hung up in the house, as well as showing a golden pineapple statue (Series 5), painting a picture of a horse wile riding a horse (Series 1), collecting tears in an eggcup (Series 1), and destroying a cake beautifully (Series 4). The golden trophy and throne also make appearances.
  • The trailer for Series 11 makes reference in portrait form to past tasks such as eating a watermelon without touching it (Series 10, with Daisy in the portrait), determining the contents of a locked briefcase (Champion of Champions 1, with Bob in the portrait), and scoring a goal with a steamroller (Series 9, with Rose in the portrait).
  • "Croissants is Croissants" is the 100th episode of the programme to air, so the transition piece to the first recorded task contains a mashup of all the Taskmaster portraits and incidental music from over the course of 12 series.
  • The big living room portrait in series 15 is the style of a groovy 60s poster for "Taskonbury" (a reference to the final task of series 5, in "Their Water's So Delicious"), and features a panoply of references to that task and other musical and other tasks: Nell Diamond^note Nell, the toddler contestants had to engage in "The Barrel Dad", the Clump Stumps^note Clump Stump was James Acaster's band in "Mother Honks Her Horn", Rosalind^note the woman for whom the Taskonbury songs were written, the Diverse Stripes^note Mark and Nish's band in the Taskonbury task, The Ollies^note Ollie is the suit of armour in the garden, as revealed in "OLLIE", the Caravanimals^note apparently just a reference to the caravan, Bosh^note Kerry Godliman's catchphrase, and the Products of Conception^note Aisling, Sally, and Bob's band in the Taskonbury task.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Ad Bumpers often show Alex in a scene or with objects used in previous episodes' tasks:
    • One of the tasks in "One Warm Prawn" involves making something spin unaided for the longest time. Liza Tarbuck won the task by spinning a plastic lizard attached to a cordless drill, which kept on going for just over an hour and a half! The footage of the drill was then reused for the ad bumpers of the next episode, "BMXing!".
    • In "Quisps", the ad bumpers has Alex use the cement roller from the previous episode; "Five Miles Per Day", who uses it to squish food items in the shape of numbers.
    • In "A Cuddle", the ad bumpers had Alex serenade himself, while his "partner" in the window mimed the number of the ad break on his hands.
    • The ad bumpers in Series 10 finale "Dog Meat Trifle" is footage of Mawaan's spectacular lighthouse (with rotating light) made from beermats which he had constructed in the previous episode.
  • In series 4 episode "Hollowing Out a Baguette," the camouflage task is introduced with the same diorama on which the series 2 cast constructed their highest bridge for a potato in "There's Strength in Arches." The diorama additionally features a shopping trolley in the river^note which references the memorable instance when Richard Osman threw a shopping trolley into a small stream in "There's Strength in Arches" and a bag of rice^note referencing the trick task in which Josh Widdicombe counted the number of grains of rice in a bag in "Down an Octave".
  • "Did I Meet These Potatoes Before?" has a task where the contestants are locked into a caravan and must eat a grape, which are ostensibly outside. While rummaging around the caravan, Dara comes across a pair of grape scissors, which happen to be Frank Skinner's very first prize submission from all the way back in Series One.
  • The New Year Treat episode "That's a Swizz" has a task where the contestants have to keep their faces on a massage chair whil painting a specific scene. Meanwhile, Alex offers them an optional massage in which he also uses an Orgasmatron (a flexible claw-like device which is used on the head). This item was Roisin Conaty's prize entry for the most satisfying item from Series One.
  • In series 7, during the live task for "The Perfect Stuff", Jessica Knappett fell off the runway at the front of the stage. The runway has since been named The Knappett.
  • In Series 14, one of John Kearns's prize task submissions (for best thing to bring on a car journey) is a sailot's hat (with AHOY written on it), over which John launches into a lengthy and painstaking defence as to why it is a suitable prize. In the premiere of Series 15, the location task is on a canal and Alex asks each of the contestants to don a similar sailor's hat prior to beginning the task.
  • In the Series 17 premiere "Grappling With My Life," the team task is for the team members to paint an animal doing something surprising on their designated window blinds which will be laid out in a specified order to make the joint painting. Lee Mack and Mike Wozniak's drawing for their "British animal" from Series 11 episode "An Orderly Species" is used as a graphic to demonstrate how the team's paintings will be laid out.
• Convenience Store Gift Shopping: Unlike following series, where the contestants vie for a trophy shaped like the Taskmaster's head, the winner of Series 1 received a trophy for a karate competition.
  Josh: I'm not saying that this is a last minute purchase, but why is there a man doing karate on the top?
• Coordinated Clothes: Done a few times in finales:
  • All of the competitors in the Series Nine finale "Think About the Spirit" are dressed in matching formal tuxedos. Amusingly, Greg and Alex also sport "coordinated" fake tan sprays, which is explained away as the two of them lying in Greg's sunbed together over the weekend.
  • In the Series Fifteen finale "A Yardstick for Failure", the contestants dressed up like the Beatles on the cover of Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef:
  • Some of the cooking tasks like the final pre-recorded task of Series 1 (best meal using ingredients beginning with all the letters of the alphabet). Tim Key made ravioli with dog food filling.
  • Invoked with the exotic sandwich task from Series 4 episode "Tony Three Pies."
    • Mel used Turkish delight, a crunchy bar, a Kit Kat, double deckers, chocolate oranges, marshmallows, M&Ms, Nutella, Snickers, and Maltesers.
    • Hugh used halloumi, pesto, parma ham, sashimi, wasabi peas, banana, and kiwifruit in his sandwich.
    • Lolly used kiwifruit, chili jam, grapefruit, frankfurters, prawn, and pineapple in her sandwich.
    • Joe used kumquat, a sausage roll, smoked trout, yam, tequila, dark chocolate, spring roll, chorizo, pomegranate and an arctic roll in his "Mother's delight."
  • For her "delicious dust" in the episode "I've Been a Bit Ill," Lou uses a mixture of Fizz Wizz popping candy and the objectification of women (represented by burnt pornography magazines). Alex describes Lou's concoction as the worst thing he has eaten by far on Taskmaster at the time of the episode.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Played for laughs in "God's Haemorroid." After he finishes the "carry the drinks from the phone box to the caravan" task, Johnny shields the baby teddy bear from the papa and mama bear, which are both lying on the grass as mats.
  Johnny: That's what life'll do ta ya. Look away, child. Look away.
• Crazy-Prepared: Especially as they start getting used to the program, several contestants throughout the show's run start making preparations for what they think the task is going to be before reading out the task. This is especially as numerous tasks begin as soon as the contestant reads out the line "Your time starts now", and they often have little time to get on top of things. Perhaps the clearest example of this, however, is Richard Osman blowing up an airbed that is found among a collection of items just in case doing so will be useful, lampshading it with this reason. Ironically, it turns out he didn't have to; the task is simply to transfer all the items to a shopping trolley on the other side of a canal.
• Creator Killer: Discussed in-universe. While thankfully so far nothing on the show has managed to destroy any careers (and some contestants have benefited immensely from appearing on the show), it's a frequent joke that none of the contestants who appear will ever be able to work again due to the existence of copious amounts of video evidence proving how utterly inept and dire at completing tasks they are. Particularly, in Series 8 Paul Sinha's poor showing led to jokes that he would be fired from The Chase if the producers of that show ever watched it. Similarly, in Series 11 Charlotte Ritchie's consistently chipper and enthusiastic personality during the tasks was suggested to be destroying her career as a comedic / dramatic actress and reducing her to a children's television presenter.
• Creepy Circus Music: Series 14 is circus-themed, so the house theme music, which is already off-kilter, is reworked to be circus-based and comes off as disorientating. Other circus-based incidental music introduced in this series are equally creepy.
• Creepy Cleanliness: The lab room in the Taskmaster House has been noted by at least two contestants to be creepy and unnerving because of this trope (all-white room, plastic sheeting, etc.). Jo Brand, on the Taskmaster Podcast, compares the lab to an abattoir.
• Creepy Twins: Greg calls Sara and Rob the "sinister Aryan twins" in "The Dong and the Gong".
  Rob: [affecting a creepy voice] Mummy says we're good at puzzles.
• Cringe Comedy: The premise of the first prize task in "Champions of Champions" was to bring in the most genuinely cringe-worthy / embarrassing item. Noel brought in a picture of him and his family when he was 14 years old, Bob brought in a drawing his son did of "dog dirt", Rob brought in elephant-themed silk underpants that he had had to buy after soiling himself, Katherine brought in a video of her and her sister pretending to be Hitler, while Josh brought in a clip of him being an interviewee on an episode of "This Week" (a late-night British political discussion show). Noel came last, Bob came fourth, Rob came third, Katherine came second, and Josh came first.
• Crosses the Line Twice: invokedAlex's opening banter is a comedic version: it's so painfully unfunny that it has everyone (except Greg) in stitches at the sheer awkwardness.
• Crossover: With Celebrity Hunted. Contestants Ed Gamble and James Acaster chose to hide out at the Taskmaster House due to them having a Home Field Advantage. Upon realising that they had found a spot where the hunters couldn’t find them and they had no reason to leave, the duo decided to lure them to the house by calling the tip line and leaving a taunting “task” for them to find.
• Crying Wolf: During the first Champion of Champions, Katherine Ryan decided to put a personal spin on the "Create the Biggest Mess" and create an emotional mess within her family by spreading rumors of infidelity. Her father, knowing her too well, doesn't believe her for a second and just chuckles.
  Katherine's father: Heh heh heh...Hey, I didn't come over here on the last banana boat, you know.
• Cult:
  • In the task to take a wind-up toy man on the most incredible journey ("Tarpeters"), Russell takes him on a spiritual journey by asking Alex to read out spiritual proverbs and carrying the toy man with a litter picker up along the roof, dropping him, and having Alex catch him. In the studio, Asim jokes that Russell brainwashed the little man into a cult.
  • The first episode of Series 9 is called "Join Our Cult", which is the mantra said by Katy when the task was to make a dramatic entrance to Alex. She interpreted this as making balloon people and sticking them onto poles on her back.
• Cuteness Proximity: Pretty much the entire audience's reaction in "The Barrel Dad" when Nell the toddler entered the living room for a task.
• Cutting the Knot: A classic method to score highly in tasks, provided it doesn't creep over into outright cheating.
  • In "The Last Supper", a task required to get the least amount of points possible on a miniature golf course. They all had to use eggs, and the scores were calculated by how many eggs they used, as well as the shots taken, and also the minutes taken to complete the task. Tim, instead of shooting raw eggs with a golf club like other contestants, hard-boiled one of the eggs, grabbed a tennis ball, cut it open, and placed the egg inside of the ball, then taping the cut back up. Tim got 1,200 points and came third.
  • In the Series 2 episode "Pork Is a Sausage," task where the contestants have to order a pizza without using specific words, there is a bonus point for getting the person taking the order to say the word "bubbles" (which isn't one of the prohibited words). Richard Osman tries asking them if they remember the name of Michael Jackson's pet chimp, Jon Richardson tries asking about flat cola, Doc Brown pretends his name is "Bubbles"... whilst Joe Wilkinson just asks the guy if he can say the word "bubbles".
  • In "A Fat Bald White Man," one of the tasks required the contestants to paint a caricature of the person behind a curtain without being able to look at that person and only being allowed to ask yes/no questions. They also had the opportunity to earn a bonus point for obtaining that person's full name^note Jennifer Christine Wright. Most of the contestants went about it by guessing individual names or going through the alphabet. Hugh, however, hands that person a pen and paper and asks if they can write their name on that that paper.
  • In "No stars for naughty boys", a task required the contestants to deliver mini sandwiches to Alex while hopping, and had to eat one every time they put their foot on the ground, along with a 5 second penalty. Between them and Alex though was some bunting. While everyone else went under the bunting with various levels of success, Hugh outright hopped off to the kitchen, grabbed a pair of scissors, and cut the bunting, then delivered the food to Alex Hugh came second, only beaten by Noel, who had insane hopping skills.
  • In the first Champion of Champions, the contestants have to discover what's inside a padlocked armored briefcase, with various methods of discovering the passcode (science and maths formulas on a nearby whiteboard, counting the number of grains of rice in a nearby drawer, hunting for the number hidden around the Taskmaster house etc.). Rob and Noel take unconventional, yet simple, approaches. Rob shook the briefcase and guessed it was frozen peas, and Noel grabbed a hammer from the shed and struck the padlocks off (winning the task).
  • In "Tarpeters", a team challenge was to make Alex as waterproof as possible in 2 minutes, and after the allotted time, a shower above him will turn on. The driest Alex won the points. Asim, Liza, and Tim did the task as one would expect, covered Alex in mats (or "tarpeters" as the three called them, which got mocked by Greg in the studio, hence the episode name), a towel, a bowl on his head and bin bags. They did reasonably well, and actually only got the bottom half of Alex wet. Russell and Alice on the other hand used this trope to their advantage, by disconnecting the shower and let the water run on the ground (the task never said you had to cover Alex to keep him dry). To rub it in a bit, they made Alex as dry as possible, giving him a dry martini, with a towel around his neck, all the while drying him with a hairdryer. They won four points, while Asim's team won one point. Greg was suitably impressed.
  • In "BMXing!", a task required the contestants to get a £5 note from under a glass full of beer, all the while without touching the glass, and not spilling any beer. Alice and Russell grabbed a straw and started drinking the beer before Alice moved onto scooping the beer into a spit can with a dainty little cup, before sheepishly realizing she could use the task letter to move the glass and get the fiver. It was all for nought, as Alice got disqualified for dropping a tiny drop of beer onto the table while transferring it to the spit cup, and Russell won the full 5 points for his quick time of 1:19.
  • In "Roadkill Doused in Syrup", one task required the contestants to get the bales off a cricket set, which was at the end of a long red carpet. They were all given various ball types to help them, and couldn't move from the other end of the carpet. Tim's solution? Tie string to one of the stumps, cut a bit out from the carpet, thread it through, then pick up the other end of carpet, and shake until they fall over. Tim did succeed, but only got 4 points due to Russell having amazing cricket ball throwing skills, and hit the stump in 21 seconds! Liza got disqualified for not staying at the other end, while Asim and Alice failed to hit any of the bales.
  • In a task to tie themselves up as securely as possible for Alex to untie ("I Can Hear It Gooping"), Rhod tied Alex to a chair and then quickly bound his own wrists, making it impossible for Alex to untie him.
  • In "Hello", a task required the contestants to find a baby monitor, and they were given a Baby Monitor attached to some string, hanging from a stick, attached to a hat, they had to wear throughout the task. Immediately after Iain had read the task out, he took the Baby Monitor off of the string (the task never specified it had to stay there, he only had to wear the hat). Sian also realised this a little later on in her attempt, as did Paul.
  • In "Aquatic Sewing Machine", a task was to get a beach ball from one side of the garden to another by only using water, with a track laid out in front of them. Both Paul Sinha and Iain cut the proverbial knot, the former moved the finish line behind the starting line, and got the ball in that way, and the latter realised pretty quickly that the task never specified the ball had to remain on the track, and used a water hose to blast it in the direction of the finish line, while avoiding the track obstacles. Iain got 5 points, while Paul got 2 points.
  • In "Shaqinahat", the first task is to throw an object into a pedal bin from the furthest distance, with the caveat that the lid of the pedal bin must be closed when the object is thrown. Whilst all of the other contestants try varying methods of hitting the pedal after they've thrown their object, Ed Gamble knocks out the bottom of the bin and puts it upside-down, which Greg decides is valid as the lid of the bin is closed.
  • As part of the live task of "Absolute Casserole", the contestants have to open a padlocked toolbox, by using the difficult mathematical clues given to work out the numbercode. Jamali opts to just stamp on the toolbox until it buckles, though he figures this out too late to avoid coming last.
  • In "Moments of silence", the contestants are presented with coconuts and a table full of tools and tasked to drink a tablespoonful of coconut water, with the caveat of disqualification for using the same tool as another contestant. Four contestants use the tools to break the coconuts open; Katherine Parkinson goes to the kitchen, obtains a carton of coconut water, pours herself a spoonful, and wins the task.
  • In "A Yardstick for Failure", one task required opening a padlocked wooden chest as one of its steps. Four of the competitors opened it in the intended way, by solving a puzzle to obtain the padlock code, but Frankie simply smashed the chest open.
• Cycle of Hurting: In "Think About the Spirit", a task was to complete seven smaller tasks laid out in front of them: assemble a jigsaw puzzle, hide all the jigsaw pieces, put the wheelbarrow in the caravan, put 20 larger-than-tennis-ball items into the wheelbarrow, knock down bowling pins from the driveway from behind a velvet rope, assemble a tower 26 inches tall, and finally, put your hand on your hip for the rest of the task(s). Certain tasks had stipulations that had them redo the entire task again if they fail any mini-task. This happened to Ed Gamble, who got caught in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, with items falling out of his wheelbarrow, twice.

D

• Dagwood Sandwich: For the "make the most exotic sandwich" task in "Tony Three Pies", Mel opts for a multi-decker sandwich with ingredients including Nutella chocolate spread, chocolate orange slices, various chocolate bars, M&Ms, maltesers, and marshmallows. She describes the end result as a "Japanese pagoda" of a sandwich. Alex then hands her the instructions for part 2 of the task: "Eat your exotic sandwich, fastest wins"...
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Ollie, the small knight statue near the front door first seen in Series 7 had one, appropriately enough in the episode “OLLIE”, when it featured in most of the tasks in some way (except the stage task), and was also featured in the Ad Bumpers.
  • The third task in "Croissants Is Croissants" sees the contestants attempting to stop Alex from scoring a goal with a football. This is one of the rare instances where Alex is physically active during a task, as he has to work around the contestants' obstructions in order to score the goal.
• Deadpan Snarker: Joe Wilkinson can be one at times, like when he reads out the live task in "Pork Is A Sausage".
• Death Glare: James Acaster throughout series 7 gives Alex an angry look every time Alex greets him (rather than greet him back as contestants usually do), to the point the official taskmaster channel made a compilation reel of every time James did it.
  • Amusingly, James himself was subject to one of these by Greg when he impulsively called Greg a "pussy", making James immediately backtrack.
  • James evidently provoked Greg's latent teacher mode a lot, as he was subject to this again following his hilariously inept attempt that the "draw the biggest circle" task, which culminated in Greg spending the first few moments after the video playback just staring at James with a thunderous expression on his face before demanding an explanation.
• Decoy Protagonist: A lot of attention is on Greg Davies as the titular "Taskmaster". However, Alex Horne is the one actually in charge and he sometimes very clearly guides Greg on camera.
• Deliberately Monochrome: This will occur every now and then when there is a task which requires the competitors to compose a short film.
  • Roisin's backwards film Thirsty Wolf from "The Pie Whisperer" is filmed in this manner, accompanied by soft, calming piano music.
  • Bob and Nish's flick book films from "Boing Boing" are shot in this manner (How to Peel a Banana and A Cautionary Tale for Cats, respectively).
  • In the Limited Palette version, the task to arrange ice lollies in a rainbow in "Join Our Cult" is heavily de-saturated, but the ice lollies and the dodo statue retain their normal colours.
• Description Cut: A common gag is for Greg and Alex to discuss the task that's just been read out, emphasising how clearly worded it is and how you'd have to be a complete idiot to, say, start popping balloons right away without any preparation, when the time doesn't start until you pop the first one. After a Beat Alex will announce, as if at random, which contestants' attempts we're going to see first...
• Determined Defeatist: It is frequently noted on the companion podcast that no matter how badly one is doing in a task, it is always better to press on and complete the task rather than just give up, because you would at least earn the one point, and chances are one of the other competitors could have done the task much worse or has gotten themselves disqualified.
  • Nish Kumar from Series 5 is a zigzagged example. On the one hand, he gave up rather quickly on some tasks (such as getting the coconut as far away from the house as possible, in which he could have easily retrieved his coconut and given another go and when he gave up on sneezing after 10 minutes, which is 1 second less than when Bob, the winner of that task, managed to sneeze). On the other hand, he persisted in attempting to chip a basketball into a hoop for over 28 minutes (which took 52 tries) and in retrieving the ping pong ball from an upright drain pipe without moving it in just under 45 minutes. In the latter two examples, he did manage to earn two points each since Sally and Aisling were disqualified in those tasks, respectively.
    Nish: [after the nth attempt at chipping the basketball] I'm gonna do this if it kills me and everyone here!
  • In the aforementioned sneezing task, Mark was not able to produce a sneeze in the Taskmaster House after 40 minutes, but promised to send video evidence of him sneezing within the next 2-3 days. Within 48 hours, Alex received 7 videos of Mark and his distinctive sneeze. Mark ended up earning 4 points because Aisling, Nish and Sally were disqualified for either giving up on the spot or faking sneezes.
  • When he is a guest on the companion podcast, Iain Stirling professes his admiration of Paul Sinha for getting on with the task at hand despite doing it poorly or slowly and with a shoulder injury to boot. During the studio recordings, the latter would frequently shout "Yes, 4th place!" when it transpires that somebody else does worse than him or breaks a task rule.
    Paul Sinha: When you do the tasks, Alex says you don't know how the others have done.
    Joe Thomas: Quite right.
    Paul: So I'm thinking, as long as I get sand into the bucket, then, at least some fuckwit's gonna disqualify himself.
    Iain: Er...guilty!
  • In the "score a goal from the furthest distance" task in "Rock 'n' Roll Umlaut", Sian Gibson freely admits that she's terrible at football and so decides to move the ball only a short distance away from the starting point, reasoning that while she probably won't win it's at least better that she get the ball in the goal and earn a point. She actually does end up winning, since everyone else gets overconfident, moves the ball to points where a professional footballer would struggle to get it in, and misses entirely.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • The tiebreaker tasks are pre-recorded months in advance, just in case they're needed. (Although it's never yet come up on the show itself, Alex has confirmed on the podcast that there are special tiebreakers, which would be performed live in the studio, prepared for the event that an entire series ends in a tie.)
  • A task in series 9 episode "Quisps" has the contestants get asked to choose a letter, and then to put as many things from around the house beginning with that letter onto Alex's tray. David Baddiel picked Q, but didn't find any item in the house that actually began with the letter, instead claiming he had a speech impediment that made him start most words with a Q. At the end of the task, Alex revealed that he had the foresight to litter the house with appropriately named objects for each letter, and said that he had stocked up the fridge in particular with quail's eggs, quiche, Quavers and a quesadilla to cover the letter Q, just in case someone chose it.
    • At the start of the same task, Alex was holding a letter successfully predicting that Ed would respond to the instruction to say a letter of the alphabet by saying the words "A letter of the alphabet." Alex reveals this was prepared for Ed only.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: In Series 7, James Acaster impulsively calls Greg a "pussy" in the studio and immediately jerks back in shock when he realizes what he just said. James' reaction then shifts to Oh, Crap! when the much larger Greg stands up and beckons him over.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: Ironically, several contestants have scuttled what would otherwise have been winning, or at least very successful, attempts at completing the tasks because they pushed the rules a bit too far (or outright cheated) and ended up being docked points or otherwise disqualified. Some examples include:
  • Tim Key would have won, or at least drawn, the watermelon-eating contest in Series 1 had he not slipped a bit of watermelon into his mouth after the task was completed.
  • Similarly, Tim probably would have won the "empty the bath the quickest" task as well, or at least not been disqualified, had he not surreptitiously tried to put the plug back into the bath after realising it had came out. While the rules stated that the plug had to be in the bath at all times, it could have possibly been explained away as an accident had he not clearly tried to cover it up.
  • Dave Gorman got caught twice outright cheating in his series, first when he replaced his pea in the "propel the pea" task, then when he filled his bucket in the finale with his coffee instead of water. In both instances, Alex lampshades that Dave is filmed in all his attempts, so his cheating was easily caught.
  • Noel Fielding tried to tamper with the clock in the "hit the target with flour" team task in Series 4 to give his team extra time, which led to an automatic disqualification. However, it turned out when both attempts were played back in the studio that his team had utterly trounced the other team and hadn't needed the advantage anyway.
  • Sian sneakily collected more balls in her chute after the team task was over in "Aquatic Sewing Machine" and was caught out on camera. Had she not done so and gotten her entire team disqualified, they would have handily beaten the other team with a score of -8 to -27.
• Didn't Think This Through: Occasionally happens with some of the contestants:
  • Roisin didn't think to put down any sort of safety matting when throwing an egg up in the air for a task that requires the egg to be intact. No prizes for guessing what happens next...
  • Roisin... again, tried to get a courier to remove a boulder, but forgot to take into account the amount of time it would take the courier to arrive, resulting in her rolling it out of the house with very little time left.
  • Josh Widdicombe brought in a signed blank cheque for the prize task on "Little Denim Shorts". His eyes turned into saucers when he realized that his competitors could pull up to £20,000 out of his account^note Frank Skinner withdrew £19,000 from Josh's account and returned the money right afterwards.
  • Romesh Ranganathan admits to this in the watermelon eating challenge. He was so focused on getting the melon open as quickly as possible, he didn't think of what might happen if he smashed it onto the floor.
  • Aisling in Series 5's "Phoenix". When she reads out that she needs to eat one item placed before her, she grabs a Weetabix biscuit and stuffs it in her mouth, only to struggle to swallow and realize that she'd have had an easier time eating a much smaller twiglet.
• Did You Get a New Haircut?: In the second Champion of Champions special, Liza Tarbuck's look for the recorded tasks includes a disconcertingly realistic false beard. After the playback of the first recorded task Greg asks, "Have you done something with your hair?"
• Disqualification-Induced Victory:
  • A frequent occurrence. Several guests on the official podcast have noted the importance of simply finishing the task, even if you do horribly at it, because several disqualifications may just land you with a tidy score nonetheless.
  • Romesh achieves this in "The Poet And The Egg", which has a task where the contestants must get an egg as high as possible without breaking it. His attempt was considered too safe by Greg's standards (he just placed it on top of a stack of paper), but he manages to achieve second place because Frank, Roisin, and Tim all broke their eggs.
  • The live task for "Welcome To Rico Face" was to build a tower of potato-based foods. The tower had to be free-standing at the end of exactly 100 seconds, and the only contestant who wasn't holding their tower by then was Doc Brown.
  • In "The leprechaun or the lesbian", one of the tasks was to slice a loaf of bread with an item found in the caravan. Whilst neither Mark nor Nish do especially well (the former used a grill, the latter a front of a book), the other three were disqualified (Sally and Bob for using more than one item, and Aisling for not reading the task correctly and slicing the wrong loaf of bread), allowing Mark and Nish to take the top two places by default, much to their shared delight.
  • In "A wind-dried puffin," the first pre-recorded task asked each of the contestants to place the largest item inside a balloon and then blow it up. Bob and Sally failed to inflate and tie the balloon before the time was up, and Nish popped his balloon while inflating it. Both Greg and Alex expressed their annoyance that Aisling and Mark, the only people who did not blow up their balloons themselves (the former being unable to blow up balloons, the latter being afraid of balloons— their balloons were inflated and tied by the sound man) were the only ones to score points in this round.
  • In "Boing Boing", one task has a limited selection of helpful equipment available with the condition that if any piece of equipment is used by more than one contestant, all those contestants will be disqualified. Mark tries to invoke the trope by attempting the task with no additional equipment at all, noting that although the result is very poor it will put him ahead of anybody who is disqualified and may even lead to a victory by default. In the end, two other contestants are disqualified, and Mark comes in third.
  • The first recorded task in "The Pendulum Draws the Eye," is to fill a small metal bowl floating inside a fishbowl with coins from a swear jar, with the highest numerical value being awarded first and the caveat that nobody is allowed to touch the metal bowl or allow the bowl to sink. In the end, it didn't matter what the highest value was because James, Jess, Phil and Rhod all overloaded their bowls (although Jess and Rhod both made good effort in trying to fish the metal bowl back out). Kerry won this task merely by not overloading her bowl, despite some prompting from Alex.
  • "I Can Hear It Gooping" has a task where each contestant needs to find the boiled egg among 5 other eggs. They can touch two eggs max and can damage two eggs max, but the boiled egg could not be damaged. James was the only one to find the boiled egg without damaging it through process of elimination and received the 5 points.
  • This benefits Sian for the last recorded task of "Rock 'N' Roll Umlaut," in which the contestants must choose a distance from where to kick a goal in one attempt. There is also a potential bonus point at play that the Taskmaster may award for the best goal celebration that must be done (even if the contestant misses the goal). Sian selected the shortest distance from the goal to kick her football (from a measly 9 metres), but all of the other contestants missed the goal (including Iain, who replaced the original goal with a much wider professional one) and so were disqualified in this round. To add salt to the wound, Greg decides that nobody's celebration was worthy of a bonus point.
  • In "Bready, Bready, Bready," there is a task where the contestants need to push a watermelon up a slide into the caravan using breadsticks, with the provision that the slide cannot be adjusted from its position and that only breadsticks can touch the watermelon. David, Ed and Rose all dropped their watermelons on the ground, but Ed was the only one able to get the watermelon back on the slide with only breadsticks (Rose used her hands to get the watermelon back on the slide, and David struggled using breadsticks but eventually gives up). Jo and Katy attached breadsticks to gloves (with glue and gaffer tape, respectively) to push the watermelon into the caravan. In the end, Greg judges that only Ed successfully pushed the watermelon into the caravan using only breadsticks and would receive the full 5 points while everybody else is disqualified.
  • The final pre-recorded task of Series 9 is made up of seven intersecting mini-tasks, and failing in one of them meant you would have to start from the beginning again. This happens to Ed Gamble, who was the only one who has to restart, and took far longer to finish than any of the rest of the contestants... except all of the other contestants are disqualified, as the rest all fail because they should have restarted but didn't, and so the other contestants failed to complete one of the tasks (Jo took items out of her wheelbarrow; Rose's brick tower was 23 inches, not 26; David kept removing his hand from his hip; and Katy did not have enough items in her wheelbarrow), meaning that not only does Ed Gamble take first place by default but is the only one to score any points on that task at all.
  • In the first recorded task of Series 17 episode "Grappling With My Life," the task is to do something risky with an egg without cracking it. While Joanne's attempt (which involved wrapping the egg in several layers of bubble wrap, then throwing the egg against the fence and playing tennis with it) is relatively lacklustre and pathetic, but she manages to earn 4 points because Nick, Sophie, and Steve all crack their eggs (with John Robins winning the task).
• Distinction Without a Difference:
  • In "The Pie Whisperer", a task was to inspect the contents of a pie without "breaching it". Both Romesh and Josh "breached" some of their pies as their bottoms fell off, and Romesh in particular maintained throughout that he shouldn't be penalized for something that he had no control over. It got quite heated between Romesh and Greg, not helped when Roisin and Tim used Exact Words to their advantage, and had "breached" their pies by way of asking Alex to do it. In the end, nobody got disqualified (Alex likely realised they had a point and the breakages weren't their fault), but Romesh came third, and Josh came fourth.
  • In "Meat", Greg puts Lolly in last place for the 'incredible throw' task because her attempt was just sitting in a chair throwing M&Ms at Alex. Lolly says indignantly that they were Skittles, not M&Ms, and Greg says sarcastically that in that case it's worth first place.
  • In "Run Up a Tree to the Moon", after Charlotte gets disqualified from a task where she had to move luggage through a maze and restart if the luggage hit the barriers as a result of not thinking she had to restart due to the luggage only hitting the base of the pole, Greg says that she "absolutely fucked it", to which Alex says "I wouldn't have used those words, no, I would've said completely fucked it."
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The theme tune is performed by The Horne Section, and is rather catchy.
  • At the start of the first Champions of Champions Josh Widdicombe had to sing it at one point for a special task.
  • A Task in "Shaqinahat" was to provide lyrics for the Taskmaster theme tune. Ed thought the song sounded like crying, and dressed up as a baby and made lyrics asking for his mom, Rose made a Texan hoedown song (that got the audience clapping along!), Jo just insulted Alex and Greg in song form with accompanying backup dancers and saxophone musician, Katy attempted to rhyme to the tune, and David did a stilted piano piece of him making lyrics up on the spot. Jo gets one point (guess why), David gets 2 points, Katy gets 3 points, Ed gets 4 points, and Rose came first with 5 points.
• Double Take: The Taskmaster when it's revealed for a task that Rhod had made his mother wear a fez in the bath. He looks absolutely stunned.
• Do Not Try This at Home:
  • In "Down an Octave," this disclaimer appears when Romesh rubs hot chili sauce around his eyes in order to collect the most tears in an egg cup. He managed to capture 10 tears in the cup and placed second, while Frank leveraged the crew and won the task with 12 tears.
  • In "Pork Is a Sausage", the contestants mull over eating an egg raw. Alex had to loop in a warning to the people at home not to do this themselves. Katherine attempts to eat her egg raw but cannot bring herself to finish it after one tiny sip and is disqualified in this round. Richard chugs his egg in one gulp and takes first place.
  • For the "don't blink" task in "The Perfect Stuff," Rhod says this trope word for word after his VT. In his attempt, he held his eyelids up with his fingers, then asked Alex to gaffer his forehead to keep his eyelids peeled back, and continued to hold his eyelids apart. At one point, he had to crouch down to tip the tears out of his eyes. Rhod managed to keep his eyes open for 7 minutes and 10 seconds and took first place.
  • In "Hello", Sian had brought in perm lotion for the prize task, which was to bring in the most smelly thing. Greg inhales the perm lotion, and the on-screen text shows up to remind the audience to not do it, ever:
    NEVER EVER inhale perm lotion. Your time starts now.
  • This disclaimer pops up for the "build the best volcano" task in "Stuck in a Mammal Groove" when the VTs for Sian and Lou's attempts are shown (both used sparklers or fire).
  • The CW's broadcasting and streaming edit of Series 8 for the United States market added this disclaimer more frequently than in the original (e.g. Lou attempting to eat her eraser in "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man")
  • The horrible tongue task in "You Tuper Super" comes with this announcement from Alex: "Don't try this at home. Or at work. Don't try this."
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: On the odd occasion, Greg's attempt to award a pity point will get this reaction from that contestant, with mixed results:
  • Greg is about to award David an extra point in "Join Our Cult" for his dramatic entrance (David materialising in a phone box à la Doctor Who, but in which Greg noted David seemed to lose all conviction), but David promptly refuses the pity point, to which Greg acquiesces and David is only awarded the initial 1 point.
  • For the Mt. Rushmore task in "A Cuddle," Greg initially awards Jo 1 point, and then he offers a pity point that she indignantly refuses (for context, Greg awards all the other contestants either 4 or 5 points). Greg, just to be contrary, ups her total:

    Greg: I'm going to give her a pity point and take her up to two points.
    Jo: I don't want your fucking pity point!
    Greg: Well, you're fucking having it! I'll give you three points if you argue with me!
    Jo: Piss off!! (double V-signs)
    Greg: (enraged) Three points to Jo Brand!

  • In "Don't Like Them Go Bang", Jo gets disqualified from one task after overlooking a small detail. When this is revealed, the audience makes sympathetic noises, which Jo responds to by snapping at them to fuck off.
• Droste Image:
  • For the "most eggs held by the most people in a photo" task in "Tarpeters," Tim Vine attempts to use this trope by going to his local butcher and asking him to take a photo of Tim and the butcher holding eggs in front of hand mirrors (and therefore have "infinite Tims holding infinite eggs"). Unfortunately, Greg judges that he can only see 8 people holding 8 eggs, and Tim places last in the task.
  • In "Bready Bready Bready", one of the ad bumpers shows Greg opening a door to show Greg opening the door to show Greg... and so on.
• Drunk with Power: On the rare occasions when Alex is placed in a superior role — hiring a sub-assistant in "BMXing," portraying the hotel guest who must be satisfied in "Always Forks and Marbles" — he usually plays the role as abrasive and demanding as his normal self is meek and subservient.
• Dude, Not Funny!: For a show based around getting comedians to humiliate themselves on national television and then scathingly mocking them for it, the production puts a lot of effort into making sure everyone is having a good time, and so there have been only a very small number of occasions on which someone appeared genuinely offended by the position in which they found themselves, and haven't Played It For Laughs with a snappy clap-back. Of these:
  • Katherine Parkinson seemed really quite hurt by Greg's snarking about her ceramic masks. Greg visibly scrambled over the remainder of the episode to make it up to her, and apparently apologized off camera too.
  • Lee Mack, a vegan, didn't attempt to conceal his irritation with being led to bite into a breaded egg (not to mention a breaded leather wallet). Alex was plainly embarrassed by the gaffe (contestants' dietary needs had been accommodated in planning other food-based tasks).
• Dull Surprise:
  • For Mel's attempt at doing something surprising with a rubber duck, she calls a courier and hides the duck in his delivery box. When she reveals it to him, he rates the surprise as a 10 out of 10... whilst maintaining the same expression.
    Greg: You fried [the courier]'s brain! He was so shocked that his facial expression didn't change at all.
  • In "Their Water's So Delicious," Mark notes that although he and Nish gave their all in the song about a stranger, the stranger (Rosalind) never changed her expression and remain visibly unmoved.

E

• Early-Bird Cameo: Ed Gamble, who appeared in Series 9, played a key role in Mark Watson's prize task for Series 5's "A Wind-dried Puffin", stealing Greg's trousers at a gig so Mark could submit them as the episode's prize.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • For series one, Greg would give a short comical introduction for each contestant. He also opened and closed each episode standing up.
  • The golden bust of Greg only appears from series two onward; the winner of series one won a trophy designed for a karate competition. When the first Champion of Champions rolls around and the trophy is a life-size headless nude statue of Greg that the winner can fit their trophy head onto, sure enough, the winner is Series One champion Josh Widdicombe, and he gamely sticks his karate trophy onto it.
  • Alex Horne has said that the "high-five a 55-year-old" task from the Series One is "really awkward" and a "different sort of show". It's the only task where the contestants were told to get unaware members of the public involved (some later tasks have involved the contestants roping in members of the general public, but this has been on their own initiative and not part of the task requirements).
  • In Series 1, Alex used an iPad holder to keep his iPad upright. In later series, he holds it in his hands.
  • In the first few series, the prize task had the guests, more often than not, bring in genuinely valuable, or otherwise important possessions that they owned, which — given the competitiveness on display — got to the point of being dangerously valuable. To wit, in respective episodes, Romesh Raganathan brought in his wedding ring, another time Josh Widdicombe brought in a blank check, and Joe Wilkinson brought in his wedding certificate^note the more valuable/precious prizes were returned after the winners got to have fun at the losers' expense. Later series had the prize task revolve around more light-hearted challenges with prizes that emphasised novelty, implausibility or ludicrousness over actual monetary value or personal significance (unless intentionally specified), instead of the participants risking losing precious items on national television.
  • The prize tasks in the first few series are also far more general compared to the later series'. Ed Gamble and Alex lampshade this in a podcast retrospective of the first TV episode, comparing "bring in the most unusual object" to Series 9's task to bring in "the object you'd most want to find in a field".
  • Series 1 episodes would end with Greg delivering an absurd Ice-Cream Koan or parable to sum up the episode's "moral" (such as it may have been). Later episodes instead have him draw a humourous lesson via a Call-Back to something absurd a contestant had said or done in the episode, along with a reminder along the lines of "we've also learned that [X] is the winner of tonight's show!"
  • The first series has one or two tasks that take place live in the studio apart from the final task, such as the "grow the longest nail" one, or a tiebreaker where the two tied contestants had to guess Frank Skinner's age in minutes. The only examples of this after the first series was the "buy the Taskmaster a present with £20" task, which seemed to be a Once a Season thing as it survived into the third series, but was dropped after that, and one in-studio tiebreak in Series 7.
  • The scoreboard headshots used in Series 1 are quarter headshots of the contestants, made to look as if they had just finished reading a task. Subsequent seasons use headshots that are cropped closer to the contestants' faces.
  • In Series 1, Greg was less likely to outright disqualify contestants when they break task rules, instead knocking them down a place or awarding them last place.
  • In Series 1, winners of team tasks received 2 points each and the losers received none. Subsequently, a total of 5 points has usually been divided between the teams, with winners most often receiving 3 points and losers 2. Though there have been occasions in later series where Greg will vary from this as well, such as giving the winning team 5 points and the losers 3 points.
  • Series Two had a couple of experimentations that didn't last. One was the return of Josh Widdicombe to even out the numbers for a teams task. Afterwards, team tasks were devised so that the difference in team sizes wouldn't matter. Also, it featured a task that had someone other than Greg have an input in the judgement. This was also a one off, with all subsequent series making Greg the one and only arbiter for points.
  • Greg doesn't start calling Alex "Little Alex Horne" until Series Three, and it doesn't become a Once an Episode tradition until Series Six. He is also noticeably less abusive towards Alex in Series One, even getting the audience to applaud Alex after one clip.
  • On two occasions early on (Series Two episode "Fear of Failure" and Series Three episode "Little Polythene Grief Cave"), Greg and Alex have to get professional input from lexicographer Susie Dent of Countdown on the interpretation of task language and from the Van Tulleken brothers (doctors) of Operation Ouch! on whether urine and sweat were the same substance. On both occasions, those opinions had some bearing on how Greg judged the attempts. Later series has Greg relying solely on his own gut instinct.
  • The development of the Taskmaster House over time leads to some of this; the decoration in the living room in the early series, for example, is notably sparser and less colourful than it would become. The caravan, now an icon of the location, didn't appear at all until Series Four.
  • Early on, during video tasks the camera would occasionally cut back to the studio to show reaction shots from the contestants as they watched. Later episodes would always shows task attempts in their entirety before cutting back to the studio.
  • In the "Paint a Horse While Riding a Horse" task from the series' first episode, Greg is shown the five resulting paintings first, and judges them with no knowledge of the artists, and only then is the task actually shown. Later artistic tasks would show the task being completed before the final artwork is revealed, and Greg would judge them with full knowledge of who the artists were.
  • Two averted examples:
    • Despite the first series being filmed on location in a theatre and the subsequent series being filmed in a studio, they built the studio set to look quite similar to the original theatre, with its opulent design and colour scheme.
    • Many people think the Homoerotic Subtext, particularly of Greg and Alex's relationship, is a recent development, and it has become only stronger over time; but in the very first episode, Greg introduces Alex by saying "And as always, I am both aided and fluffed by my assistant, Alex Horne." Also, the widely circulated GIF of Greg saying, "Powerful homoeroticism. I really enjoyed it." is from series 1, episode 5, when all the male contestants' strategy to make Fred blush is to hit on him.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • In the Series 9 finale, Ed is the only contestant to follow the rules of the final pre-recorded task, by starting again from the beginning when he failed one of the series of mini-tasks. He is clearly frustrated and swears repeatedly at Alex, but this nets him the whole 5 points while disqualifying the rest of the team, and solidifies his series lead.
  • Mark Watson was put through the wringer in Series 5's "A Wind-Dried Puffin", as it features two of his most infamous downbeat moments on the show - the prize task where he reveals that he stole Greg's trousers in an impressive display of high-octane underhandedness that nonethless got him ranked in last place and the trick task where it was discovered that he was singled out to text Greg 150 days in a row only to be subsequently disqualified when it turned out he had only managed 148. Despite all of his suffering, Mark actually won that episode due to a skilled performance in most of the other tasks he was handed.
• Easter Egg:
  • In the series one online interviews, it was revealed that Alex had set a secret task to see which of the five contestants could go the longest without touching their nose.
  • A tangerine appears for some of Bob's tasks in series five, which may be a reference to his "tangents".
  • Alex's default attire is a two piece suit and a button-up shirt with no tie. However, eagle-eyed viewers will notice that he wore a tie for all of Mel Giedroyc's pre-recorded shoots in Series 4.
  • Instead of a whistle as per usual, in Series 9, Alex would use a bell to signal the end of the task for David Baddiel's pre-recorded solo tasks.
• Eat the Camera: In "The End of the Franchise," Desiree's thrilling boot-cam film, in which she is chased by vengeful rubber ducks and witnesses Linda the cow's death, ends with her being attacked by the head duck in this manner.
• The Eeyore:
  • Romesh's default setting is depressed, and only gets worse due to any slight, real or imaginary.
  • Joe Thomas at times seemed to be participating while suffering a mild depression. This came to a head in "A Novel about Russian Gulags" where, after completing the "travel as far as you can while making a continuous noise" task, he complained about it being "dehumanising", prompting Greg berate him:
    Greg: Again you confound me. Like... you know, you just looked like you were having a lovely time, just running in the wind shouting, but then you end it with a phrase that I'd expect to read in a novel about Russian gulags. It's not supposed to be dehumanising! It's just a bit of fun!
• Embarrassing Old Photo:
  • The Prize task for "Friendship is truth" was to bring in surprising photos of themselves. Joe brought in a photo of him topless wrapped in a hammock, Hugh brought in a facemask of himself, Mel brought in an edited version of the painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, with her behind a tree staring disapprovingly at the picnic. Noel got a photo of him as the Virgin Mary (taken during his The Mighty Boosh years). Lolly presented a photo of her hidden under heavy layers of makeup to look like Lady Diana, in large part poking fun at Blackface. Hugh comes last, Noel comes 4th, Mel places third, Joe comes second, with Lolly winning the round.
  • Rhod Gilbert weaponized one of Greg in Series 7, repeatedly bringing in a photo of Greg dressed in nothing but a pair of briefs for the prize task.
• Embarrassing Tattoo: Josh gets one in "The Poet and the Egg" as a present for Greg. It was Greg's name.
• Epic Fail: A few:
  • In "The Pie Whisperer", Frank claimed to know a lot about pies for a task that required him to guess what was in 5 pies without "breaching" the pastry. He got only one right, but this isn't the fail. The fail comes from after the task had ended, Alex told him to open the pies, and while others had correctly guessed Mint Toothpaste, he went from Milk, to Mint, to his final answer which was "Mint Tippex."
  • In "Meat", a task required to slide as far as possible, with the furthest winning. Lolly managed to make a setup that had a plastic slide covered in various lubricants, and some diluted water and dish soap plastered over concrete. She missed the slide and went 3.2 metres.
  • In "The Leprechaun or The Lesbian", contestants were told to slice a loaf of bread located in the lab. Aisling somehow missed the last bit and spent the entire time allotted trying to slice a loaf of bread located in the caravan. She also cut herself twice on the tin lid she was using and bled on her loaf.
    Greg: Can there be any sadder sight than a blood-covered loaf of bread in the wrong room?
  • In "Phoenix," Nish's go at the "complete three tasks with the three foodstuffs." He chose to eat his Twiglet, throw the Weetabix into the bucket, and balance the jelly on the pole (which had to remain balanced until all three tasks were complete). The Twiglet went smoothly, but he kept missing the bucket on his throws and it eventually broke into impractically small pieces (one of which he crushed in his hand). Finally, he tried to balance the jelly on the pole, which collapsed, pierced itself and fell onto the ground. Frustrated and having given up on the task, he successfully threw his spoiled jelly into the bucket in one go, and then he pushed the table over in frustration.
  • In "Spoony Neeson", a task was to get a cupcake with a lit birthday candle from the lab to the caravan. Aisling managed to fail in less than nine seconds as she moved too quickly, which blew out the candle.
  • In "The Pendulum Draws The Eye", a task required James and Phil to hula hoop for as long as possible, then improve on that attempt in the live show. Not only did neither of them improve, they both managed to do worse, with Phil in particular going from 57 seconds to 1 second. This was particularly galling for James, who had practiced the task for months in-between and visibly demonstrated how much he had improved, but still lost out on points due to choking in his first attempt.
  • James Acaster's attempt at "drawing" a circle in "My Eyes are Circles". He appears to have interpreted the (otherwise quite clear) task to mean that the person who collects the most circles wins, but even by those standards it's... well, a deeply unimpressed Greg sums it up better than anyone else could:
    Greg: Okay. Explain yourself.
    James: I thought...
    Greg: You thought, "I've been told I should draw the biggest circle, but what I'm gonna do is ride around aimlessly on a bike whilst badly spinning a hula-hoop. And then I'm gonna crash, accidentally notice there's another circle on the floor and try and claim that as part of my attempt." That's my reading of what I saw. Have you got anything different to add?
    James: [Hopefully]... My eyes are circles?
  • In "Stay Humble", a task required the contestants to move sand from one raised bucket to another bucket on the floor, with their finger being placed into a string loop connected to a cork. The most sand in the bucket on the floor won. Iain, not reading the task correctly, though he couldn't touch the bucket, when in fact it had said that he couldn't move the bucket, which he only learned after moving said bucket. This prompted him to break every other rule the task had set out, including leaving the room.
    Iain: "You may not touch the sand," done that. "You may not move the bucket," done that. "You may not leave the room," fuck it, let's do that as well! What a waste of everyone's time, you IDIOT!
  • In "Rock 'n' Roll Umlaut", a task had contestants shoot a ball into a goal from the furthest distance, with a possible bonus point for the best goal celebration, which they must perform, even if they miss. Iain got out a massive goal net from behind some trees, and places it at the other end of the field. He places the ball 35 metres away, and kicks the ball. He misses the goal completely, does a stilted conga dance to "celebrate" his goal, and got zero points for his endeavour. Nobody got a bonus point either.
  • The first episode of Series 10 featured the first example of everyone getting disqualified from a task. Twice.
  • The Series 10 line-up does it again in "Moments of Silence", when all five contestants are disqualified in the task to make the cup on a pole overflow. Greg says he has never felt contempt for an entire line-up before, and makes the studio take a few moments of silence so the contestants can think about what they've done while he stands and glowers at them like a teacher who's reached his limits with an unruly class.
  • In "An Imbalance in the Poppability", Desiree Burch's attempt at the balloon-popping task is declared by Greg to be the worst attempt at any task in the history of the show. Rather than resort to using the scissors to complete the task easily (stating later that her priority was to make sure the show wasn't boring), she tried everything else without success. This included an entire bucket full of forks, which cost her a time penalty of an hour compared to the scissors' cost of merely 8 minutes. In the end, she cracked and purchased the scissors... only for the cut rope to get stuck and still leave the balloon unpopped for a few more moments.
  • The paper aeroplane-throwing task at the end of "Chair in a Sweet". None of the contestants' aeroplanes land on any of the point-scoring targets, causing everyone to finish with a minus score.
  • Bridget Christie's attempt at the "Figure out which shoe Alex is thinking of" task, wherein the contestants have to identify one shoe out of many pairs using in the fewest number of "yes or no" questions. Alex notes in-studio that if the contestants were smart, they could, by eliminating sections of shoes at once, figure out the correct shoe in only seven question. Bridget ends up asking one hundred and sixty one questions. This turned out to be more questions than there were shoes, meaning it would've been more efficient for her to ask "Is this the shoe?" about each individual shoe. It's one of the only times in the show's run that Alex has been visibly irritated by a contestant's incompetence. Greg, who had known her for several years, stated that this was the first time that he had to question her intelligence.
  • Similarly, there's the live task in "The 75th Question," in which it takes the contestants no fewer than 75 questions to work out the guest's first name. The attempt went on so outrageously long that everyone was visibly exasperated by the end, and for the first time they had to resort to a Failure Montage to edit it down enough for broadcast.
  • Ivo's attempt at the bingo task in "How Heavy Is the Water?" (which requires him to complete a number of smaller tasks) goes wrong in nearly every possible way. At one point, he attempts to finish off on a poetic note by completing the task "Sit in the shed for three minutes and think about what you've done", but he even manages to get that wrong (by being so distracted that he sits in the caravan instead).
• Eskimos Aren't Real:
  • In Series 9, when Rose brings in her New Zealand fish poster, Greg immediately ridicules it and dismisses out of hand her account of its being a New Zealand cultural icon, assuming she's making this up. It genuinely is, though, and she seems rather taken aback by his skepticism.
  • In Series 10 episode "Toshwash", Daisy compares a task to circus shallow diving. Greg flat-out refuses to believe that such a sport exists.
  • In "Moments of Silence", when Daisy mentions that wasps are able to identify landmarks and make their way home, Greg also dismisses it until Alex looks it up.
• Establishing Series Moment:
  • Fans and creators of the show tend to agree that Romesh Ranganathan smashing open a watermelon on the floor and then gorging on it to nausea, in the first ever pre-recorded task, is what established Taskmaster's tone. Alex and Ed discuss in the original podcast that it might not have had as much impact if there hadn't been such contrasting attempts by Roisin and Josh before, highlighting the show's exploration of comedians' thought processes.
  • Richard Osman reinterpreting the "Put the exercise balls on the yoga mat on top of the hill" task to mean that he can bring the yoga mat down from the hill rather than struggling to get the exercise balls up it is widely seen to be the point where contestants start realising that they can employ Loophole Abuse to approach the tasks rather than relying solely on a straight literal interpretation, and that these attempts can be considered as valid so long as they don't outright break the rules.
  • You can tell what season 10 will be like after the first episode, where one task has everyone disqualified, and another task has everyone fail.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Joe Wilkinson has one in "There's Strength In Arches", when he realises he can bend the cards into arches to form a more stable bridge.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In Desiree Burch's "wellie-cam" video in "The End of the Franchise", when the evil Taskmaster House starts sending her threatening messages ordering her to "get out", it feels the need to also include one clarifying "not in a racist way, just in a murderous way".
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Zigzagged. Everyone calls Greg by his name in the studio, but in the pre-recorded challenges, Greg is called "The Taskmaster" instead.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Aisling Bea would make sex jokes and reference her sex life at the drop of a hat throughout her apearance in Series 5. But, she became visibly uncomfortable when Bob Mortimer began going into detail about his pooing habits (whereas everyone else was howling with laughter).
  • In Series 7, after the ladies' entry for the "soap opera cliffhanger task" ends with Kerry's character vomiting over the realisation that she accidentally had sex with her son, James Acaster makes a crack about how she actually vomited because she realised she'd had sex with Alex, who played Kerry's lover/son. Even Greg, no stranger to making biting put-downs towards Alex, is moved to point out how mean that joke is.
• Everything Is Racist:
  • "The Dong and the Gong" has a task where the contestants must create an upside-down self portrait using condiment bottles. Paul Chowdhry claims that he was at a disadvantage since "there was loads of white but not enough brown."
  • According to Alex, during the fifty-plus times he unsuccessfully attempted to kick a basketball through a hoop in "Dignity Intact" Nish Kumar twice accused the basketball of being racist.
    Nish: I was just seeing the facts as they were in front of me. I am brown; the ball was not going in; quid pro quo; racist ball!
• Everything's Better with Sparkles:
  • In "We Met at Mealtimes," Liza creates a snowglobe using a handheld butter churner, water, and glitter. After she finishes her snowglobe, she asks Alex to hold it and rubs some glitter into his beard. Liza received 4 points for her effort.
  • In Series 8, Greg posits that Sian has attempted to sneak glitter into every task (such as her attire in the "Fairy Sian" video for a toddler and an additive in her delicious dust). She admits that it is embarrassing for a woman of her age to be obsessed with glitter and princesses.
• Everything's Louder with Bagpipes: The prize task in "Butter In The Microwave" was to bring in the best bag. Katy Wix brought in a bagpipe without the pipes, specifically because of this trope (and Dreadful Musician). Katy gets 4 points.
• Evolving Credits:
  • Every new series updates the intro so that the music is set to a compilation of that respective set of contestants struggling to complete tasks provided to them.
  • Starting in Series 10, the intro's framing device of Greg using a typerwriter was altered. In the new version, he's shown sporting glasses and a beard (something he'd started permanently making his look on the show since Series 6) and he's also shown typing more maniacally than he was in the previous version.
• Exact Words: Contestants often interpret a task differently from the obvious reading, often in an attempt to score highly.
  • The most famous example is the task in the first episode of Series 2, which involved three large exercise balls, a steep hill, and a yoga mat at the top of the hill, with the challenge ending when the balls were arranged on top of the yoga mat. Whereas everyone else, to varying degrees of competency and efficiency, interpreted this as taking the balls up the hill to the yoga mat, Richard Osman instead left the balls at the bottom of the hill and brought the yoga mat down from the hill, arranging the balls on top of it there. He argued to Greg that the task was worded in a way that never directly said that the balls had to be taken to the top of the hill, and it got to the point where it was revealed that Alex had consulted Susie Dent, the official lexicographer of Countdown, for a ruling. Susie, while acknowledging the unusual interpretation of the task, concurred with Richard, who won the round. In episode 8 of the Taskmaster Podcast, Ed Gamble (talking to Richard Osman) suggested that this task was essentially where Exact Words became more popular to exploit, thanks to Richards success.
  • Mawaan in Series 10 used this in a challenge to transfer as much water from Barrel A to Barrel B as possible, after already losing most of Barrel A's water from a leak and spillage. He angled Barrel A above Barrel B and poured water from a hose so it would cascade through Barrel A into Barrel B. Alex noted that the original task never said that Mawaan could only use the water already in Barrel A, and Greg was suitably impressed.
  • This can also work against a contestant if they don't read the task carefully. For example, in Season 2 the contestants are tasked with rescuing a toy cat called Patatas out of a tree. Most of the contestants, seeing as it's a just toy, focus on brute force. In the studio, however, it's pointed out that the word "rescue" is significant: they were supposed to treat it as a real cat and show at least some concern for its welfare as well as for getting it out of the tree. Katherine Ryan ends up winning the task simply because she is the only one who arranges for Alex to catch Patatas.
  • Inversely, Greg and Alex have used this trope to give contestants' efforts a boost, such as Paul Chowdhry's flag meal^note Paul created a meal out of pasta, tomato sauce, peas and mustard that was a terrible representation of his intended Mexican flag, but much better resembled the Malian flag. Since Alex pointed out that the task didn't specify the meal had to look like the flag that a contestant chose, Greg decided to rank it second best and awarded Paul 4 points. or Phil packing 10 pairs of glasses^note The task was to pack 10 pairs of drinking glasses into as small a cardboard box as possible without cracking a pair of glasses. Phil was one of two people to fit all the glasses in their box, but one of the glasses cracked in the process. Still, in a rare moment of leniency (Phil had been struggling through the series to that point), Greg deemed that his effort would still hold since Phil had only broken a single glass and not a pair, and awarded Phil 5 points..
  • Calling upon this trope doesn't always work, however; a certain level of basic common sense is often assumed and required when interpreting the task even if it is not spelled out for the contestant, which the Taskmaster will point out when they try to protest that the task didn't actually specify they should do something that they clearly should have done. For example, in the "have an argument in only ten words at a time ending on a four-letter word" task in "The Lure of the Treacle Puppies", Jamali tries to defend his team's gradual degeneration into absolute gibberish by pointing out that the task didn't say that the argument had to make sense, only for Greg to shut him down by pointing out that an argument by nature implicitly has to have some level of coherence and logic it to it beyond simply blurting out random four-letter words like "town".
  • In "The Barrel Dad", in order to complete the "balance the most items on the hammock without anything falling off", Joe and Sian dismantle the hammock, thus ensuring that nothing will fall off. They argue in studio that the hammock was still a hammock even if it wasn't actually set up at the time. Greg concedes the argument, but he nevertheless docks them a point on the reasoning that the spirit of the task clearly intended for them to use a working hammock (namely, a fabric surface actually suspended off the ground between two points).
  • In "The 75th Question," Bridget successfully stretches Exact Words to its theoretical limits. Tasked with recording the highest number on a pedometer, and having gotten frustrated with her complete incompetence at doing it the usual way, she sits on the pedometer, gets her phone out, and records herself saying "Eleven trillion gazillion." Greg accepts it (although he disallows the word "gazillion"), and she wins the task.
• Executive Ball Clicker: In one episode, Kerry Godliman brings in one, which Alex Horne calls by the trope name. He then goes on to say "Executive Ball Clicker" is Greg's nickname for him.
• Expert Consultant: While it is used sparingly, Greg and Alex have to consult with professionals in a few areas where they lack expertise. On those handful occasions, the professionals' opinions do have bearing on the how Greg ultimately judges those specific tasks:
  • Susie Dent, the resident lexicographer on Countdown, has been consulted twice in Series 2 and once in Series 12 on the interpretation of the task language. She helps Richard win the exercise ball-yoga mat task, strengthens Alex's argument that the useful materials taped underneath the table for the bridge-building task are considered on the table, and determines that Confusing Multiple Negative ultimately meant that anyone who did ring the bell completed that task correctly.
  • The Van Tulleken brothers, the medical doctor hosts of Operation Ouch, help to advise in Series 3 on whether Al Murray's argument that sweat and piss are the same substance holds true (they are not the same thing).
  • A Series 15 task involves giving a one-minute history lecture of a year that is selected by the contestants. Historian Dan Jones is asked to verify the facts in each lecture, and Greg decides to award the points based on the number of verified facts in each lecture.
• Extreme Doormat: Co-star Alex Horne. He is often abused by the contestants, as well as the Taskmaster. Alex is often able to help out in tasks that don't specify that he can't do so, which contestants often abuse for their own ends, Alex's feelings, dignity and general exposure be damned.
• Eye Catch: Into each commercial break is a clip of Alex doing something weird and waving at the camera. Out of each commercial break is a clip of Alex doing something weird and making the number of the segment of the show we're about to watch (2, 3, or 4).
• Eye Scream: In "Stay Humble", one of the tasks involves making the most realistic injury out of food. Joe Thomas creates a public information film about a man who trips while holding a birthday cake and ends up stabbing his eye with candles.

F

• Face Doodling:
  • In Series 1, Roisin is introduced in one episode as being subject to several drawings of penises on her face while she was asleep during a house party.
  • Alex takes a nap in his chair ahead of one of the ad breaks in "Dog Meat Trifle." When the show returns from the ad break, Alex wakes up with the word "DOUCHE" written on his forehead, presumably by Greg.
• Facepalm: The full-faced humiliation version is on display quite often when a contestant knows that their spectacularly bad task attempt will be shown next. Roisin in the Series 1 does this very often.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • This occasionally happens before the actual task starts if the task envelope is not in a conventionally-located place and a contestant spends a good chunk of time looking for it. This includes the "camoflauge yourself" task, where the task is blended in with the diorama, and the "find all the ducks" task where the task is stuck just above the doorway to the lab.
  • A Running Gag in "The Poet and the Egg" is Romesh's complaint that a cardboard box was not provided for him while doing the "throwing a teabag into a mug from a distance" task, versus Greg, Alex and everyone else's insistence that there were boxes provided, he just didn't notice them. Romesh's complaint is weakened slightly by the fact that we visibly see other contestants either using boxes in their attempts or asking for tools which they might want/need, meaning that if he'd wanted one he could have gotten it.
  • In the first task in "There's Strength In Arches", Doc Brown only notices not one but two bridges that he could have used to cross a canal separating a shopping trolley and the items he was asked to put in the shopping trolley after he's completed the task by wading through the canal. He's still kicking himself over it weeks later in the studio recording. In the same task, both Doc and Jon neglected to check that they put all the groceries in the shopping cart (Jon left the area with some sponges in his coat pockets and Doc missed a can that had fallen into the canal) and were disqualified for not completing the task.
  • For the final task in "There's Strength In Arches", nobody notices the three separate clues that there was useful building materials attached to the underside of the table; one as mentioned above for Bilingual Bonus; a button that Jon presses which lights up a clue under the table; and a sign above the doorway that tells the contestant to look under the table.
  • "The Dong and the Gong" has a task where the contestants have to pop balloons clipped to a washing line in the fastest time. Al remarks that the balloons appear to have been arranged into a morse code message... and it turns out that, when translated from morse, all the contestants had to do to win the task was to pop just two balloons. But the real spot check fail for the task comes from Dave, who doesn't even notice the presence of the large collection of balloons until it's pointed out.
  • No one, not even the production staff, noticed that the Canadian flag superimposed next to Sara Pascoe's flag meal was wrong.^note The maple leaf on the Canadian flag is eleven-pointed, while the one they displayed was thirteen-pointed.
  • In "Hollowing Out a Baguette", one of the tasks has a rule that if you eat any of the chocolate that was provided for the task, you will be docked five points. However, this rule was printed on the reverse side of the task sheet and not a single contestant saw it.
  • In "The Leprechaun Or The Lesbian", one of the tasks is to paint a rainbow in a darkened room. Aisling, Sally, and Bob play this trope straight by painting without knowing what colors they were using. Subverted by Nish who realizes that the colors are infused with smells, e.g. the yellow paint smells of lemons, but Mark is the only contestant who notices the light switch (the task rules didn't specify that the painting had to actually be done in the dark).
  • Sally in "Their Water's So Delicious" was given the task of coming up with as many fish puns as she could in one minute. It then turns out that she had actually been in a secret, series-long race against Alex to see who could make the most puns. This went completely unnoticed by Sally, who thought that Alex just had trouble pronouncing his words.
  • Unintentionally happens in "The Bubble Brothers". One of the tasks involves the contestants making a plastic bag as heavy as possible without the bag breaking. The bag is hooked to some weighing scales. When Tim Vine attempts the task, he notices that the hook for the scales has disappeared, and he doesn't realise that the hook is attached to his shoulder loop (having managed to attach itself there and then come away from the scales when he briefly brushed against it earlier) until the task has finished.
  • During "My Eyes are Circles", everyone is tasked with writing a ten-word story whilst running to the finish line. Phil's eyes completely glaze over both the word 'write' and the clipboard and paper next to the task, and after eventually crossing the finish line delivers his story 'in the oral tradition'.
  • In the same episode, Kerry Godliman spends quite a bit of time moaning about how the materials she'd been given to draw "the biggest circle" are completely inadequate from the perspective of size... failing to notice the incredible amount of snow outside that would be the perfect canvas for such a circle, and that she's not limited to the tools she's been given. Ultimately subverted, in that she eventually does make the connection and goes on to win the task as a result, but the lengthy amount of complaining is still significant.
  • In "The Pendulum Draws The Eye", the contestants were tasked to find a satsuma hidden inside one of the 50 red socks hanging outside the caravan. Nobody noticed that a number had been painted on the caravan behind them, to tell them which sock the satsuma was in.
  • In "The Barrel Dad", one task is to get an object through a toilet seat suspended in the air. Two of the contestants completely failed to spot the suspended toilet seat and attempted to complete the task using the seat of the toilet inside the house. Greg ruled that both had acceptably completed the task as they understood it, and one of them, Iain, won the task based on his time.
  • In "Stay Humble", one task involved the contestants moving ping pong balls from one pen to another. Nobody realised that hidden amongst the balls was Greg's special ball. Anyone who moved Greg's ball would have their final score for the task halved. Though in complete fairness to the contestants, the only way the special ball was identifiable was with a tiny white sticker on the bottom of one of a hundred otherwise entirely identical white ping pong balls that they were hurriedly trying to move from one place to another, making it easy to fail this particular spot check.
  • In "Rock 'n' Roll Umlaut", a task is presented as being to memorise the sequence of a deck of playing cards; several of the contestants realise that the instructions don't rule out just writing down the sequence and reading it back, but none of them are able to find writing implements. None of the competitors discover the pen taped to the side of the table next to a neat label saying "PEN". In the studio, Alex notes that there were also several cameras in the room that contestants could have used to complete the task, had any of the contestants noticed them.
  • In "Butter In The Microwave", a task was to correctly guess which numbered bin Alex was hiding in. Rose managed to miss a sealed envelope from underneath a bin when it was staring at her in the face, which otherwise would have given a clue as to which bin Alex was hiding in.
    "Alex is odd."
  • In "Five Miles Per Day," there is a two part task where they all begin in the lab where various items are hanging from a board from the ceiling, Alex tells them a bunch of phrases and they need to head to the caravan to meet Alex in two minutes. In the caravan, Alex then hands them a second task where they need to tell him what was hanging from the board, what Alex told them in the lab, and what colour was the board. Ed, Jo and Rose all headed out of the lab without pausing to take everything in (placing 3rd, 5th and 4th, respectively), while David and Katy hung around to memorise each hanging item (and placed 2nd and 1st, respectively). None of the contestants noticed that the answers were on the back of the second task, which Alex demonstrates to the camera.
  • One task in Series 9's "A Cuddle" tasked each contestant to "release" an egg into a "metal thing" from on a single chair without manipulating either and score the highest amount of points - if an egg doesn't break after landing in a metal "thing," the score is doubled. Ed and Jo were the only ones who checked to see that each "metal thing" had numbers written on them that represented the scores. Rose put 9 whole eggs into the one metal thing within arm's reach of the chair, which had -5 written on it.
  • In "Don't Like Them Go Bang", the first thing David does during the balloon task is to go out looking for an air pump, overlooking the air pump that's already in the room. He does find it after a while, which puts him ahead of Jo, who never does spot the air pump and also overlooks one of her own balloons, leading to her disqualification.
  • In "Air Horn Andy", the final task involved the contestants guessing how many balls were inside a large basket. Johnny was the only person who found a matchbox full of ball bearings. Alex later revealed that the number of balls was written inside the matchbox. There were 1192 balls.
  • In "The Lure of the Treacle Puppies", Lee Mack fails to spot a bright red balloon which is bobbing around barely a foot above his head for about a minute.
  • In "Absolute Casserole", the third task involved the contestants working out what six objects had been deep-fried in batter. One of the objects was a leather wallet, but Jamali was the only person who found a receipt inside the wallet, which listed what all the objects were.
  • In "Enormous Hugeness", a task involved sorting ducks and socks into separate baskets after having them travel along treadmills. The ducks and socks were stored in the bathtub nearby, which Fern completely failed to spot for a good few minutes.
  • In "Did I Meet These Potatoes Before?", the contestants were presented with an escape room in the caravan, with the goal being to eat a grape. There was a clearly marked plinth with grapes (one real, and some false) not far away from the caravan, and several grapes hidden inside the caravan itself. John managed to cause a Sequence Break by cutting a string with some scissors that had been padlocked shut and released himself from the caravan very quickly, but spent an extremely long time not noticing the plinth to the point where he came last by nearly ten minutes.
  • Discussed a couple of times in the podcast, where some behind-the-scenes examples of this trope come up:
    • Mark Watson discusses an example related to his infamous solo task in Series 5. Despite the long-standing friendship between him and Alex Horne, the two respected the show's rules about not discussing tasks outside of filming, but on one occasion while Mark was staying at Alex's house Alex casually asked him whether he was keeping up with the task where he was asked to send the Taskmaster a cheeky text message every day for 150 days. While Mark didn't think much of it at the time, in hindsight after the big reveal he realised that this was actually a clue that he actually was the only person doing the task — not only because of the rule mentioned above, but because if the others were completing it as well there'd be no need to check up on him.
    • A similar example comes up in a conversation between Ed Gamble and Romesh Ranganathan about the "best blooper" task in Series 1. The blooper that Romesh, Roisin Conaty and Josh Widdicombe devised partly involves an argument with Alex over counting hundreds and thousands. As Josh was similarly subject to a solo task involving him laboriously counting numerous small objects (baked beans, grains of rice, etc.) and as Josh had suggested this part of the blooper, Ed and Romesh are amused to realise that he may have done so because he was under the impression that everyone else had completed the counting task, whereas Romesh and Roisin obviously had no idea about it. This makes it a potential two-fer; Romesh and Roisin didn't realise from the suggestion that Josh had done a solo task, and Josh didn't realise from their disinterested responses that he was the only one who had completed his solo task.
• Fake Period Excuse: Jenny deploys this in "A Show About Pedantry" so she can escape to the toilet and illicitly Google the subject she has to deliver a lecture on. (She was over 60 at the time.)
• Fall of the House of Cards:
  • One of the interstitials in "Stay Humble" shows Alex building a house of cards on the table in the caravan, until Greg comes along and deliberately rocks the caravan to make the house fall down.
  • A task in "Air Horn Andy" is to build an impressive house of cards while ringing the doorbell at timed intervals which decreased as the task progresses. This happens to almost everyone, but the most tragic attempt has to be Johnny's who at one point has a four-level structure which falls apart because of his frantic movement to the house entrance and back.
• Fan Disservice: Phil Wang and his yellow jumpsuit which leaves little to the imagination. Everyone groaned whenever they could see the clear outline of his genitals.
  Greg: It doesn't matter how ornate the grandfather clock is, the pendulum draws the eye.
• Fantastic Measurement System:
  • If a task involves measurements to determine the winner, Alex will sometimes give an alternative system such as the distance in Rolos, Fruit Pastilles, or children's shoes.
  • When tasked with guessing the length of a piece of string, Tim Vine used lobsters as a unit of measure, because he'd wrapped the string around a plastic lobster.
• Fartillery: Iain's prize for the Prize task in "Hello" was a large bottle of his own farts, which was apparently the result of going to his local food shops after he was hung over and him bottling it. Alex took a whiff of it from a sample he had taken, and his expression was that he really, really didn't like that smell. He comes fourth, though largely because he was the only contestant that didn't have Greg smell his smelly item.
• Fish out of Water:
  • Richard Osman from the second series (frequently lampshaded by Greg referring to the lineup as some variation on "four comedians and Richard Osman"); he is better known as a producer and television presenter for Pointless (though he is a regular on the panel show circuit). Unlike some of the others listed under this trope, however, he actually adapted to the show and the many curveballs it throws to contestants quite well, to the point where he is arguably the codifier for the many examples of Exact Words and Loophole Abuse that later contestants would employ^note His interpretation of the "put these exercise balls on the mat on top of the hill" task, which unlike the other contestants he interpreted as allowing him to bring the mat down from the hill to the balls rather than having to struggle to get the balls up the hill, is generally credited as the point where contestants realised they could creatively reinterpret the tasks rather than relying on a purely literal interpretation. In the podcast, he credits this to his experience with producing game shows and panel shows, as he's aware there's always a trick involved and so consequently was quite willing to look a bit harder for it.
  • From the sixth series is Alice Levine, a radio DJ and presenter also known for My Dad Wrote a Porno. She could appear very awkward and bemused in some of the situations the show placed her in.
  • A few contestants from series 8 also fall into this category:
    • Paul Sinha is more at home on quiz shows (like, say The Chase). His comedy performances explore general knowledge and the strange ways things are interconnected, so his entire body behaviour screams cluelessness when needing to fulfill strange tasks for a maniacal taskmaster^note not helped by the fact that he had a shoulder injury and was trying to keep his right arm as immobile as possible. He gets wiser to the show during studio segments, but is still awkward in the pre-recorded tasks.
    • Joe Thomas and Sian Gibson were fairly awkward as well. Unlike most other contestants, they're comedic actors rather than comedians and aren't as familiar with being put on the spot and expected to perform and be funny. Adding to the awkwardness was the fact that they were put together for team tasks and didn't really gel.
  • Katherine Parkinson from series ten is an accomplished actor, not a comedian, and Greg constantly lampshades her attempts going wrong as being not indicative of her acting performance. As with Paul Sinha, Katherine is very very clueless as to how the show works, but unlike Paul who realises when Exact Words are at play, Katherine often fails tasks because she takes things too literally, seems to be blind to the clues Alex gives her (some more explicit than anothers, to be fair), and she doesn't employ Loophole Abuse in a lot of her attempts. It didn't help either that for several tasks, she didn't realise that she could leave the room. Not surprisingly, she came last in her series.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Alex Horne loves doing this whenever he can get away with it, as it acts as a Visual Gag that becomes very obvious after being read out. For example; The wax seals in the first task of "A Novel About Russian Gulags" are moustache-shaped, with the TM circle in the middle. The task itself was to create and put on a moustache out of unexpected objects, with Greg in the studio having to guess what they were made up of from a distance away.
• Flanderization: Greg and Alex had a far more respectful relationship in series 1, with Greg asking the audience to give Alex a round of applause in episode 6 for eating a round of questionable food and for falling into a swimming pool, which was something he believed to being above and beyond the call of duty. Come series 2, the Kayfabe master/slave relationship that we all love was well on its way to being built.
• Food Slap:
  • In "This Is Trevor," Alex mistakenly interrupts Greg while the latter is welcoming the viewers back from the ad break. As retaliation, Greg throws a glass of water into Alex's face, which also causes water damage to Alex's iPad.
  • After realising that he has screwed up the "face-based geometry" task, Lee, still wearing the blindfold goggles, grabs a fistful of fallen jelly from the floor and throws it at Alex and one of the cameramen.
• Forbidden Fruit: The prize category for "The Mean Bean" is 'thing you most want to touch'; James and Jessica both offer objects chosen on the theory that the thing you most want to touch is the thing you've been instructed not to.
• Foreign-Looking Font: Series 8, to go along with the Japanese decor in the House, uses a special version of the Taskmaster seal with the TM rendered in a vaguely Oriental-looking font.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The painting that's hung up in the living room in Series 3 has a key role in a task of the second episode of that series; "The Dong and the Gong", where a task required two teams to free Alex. One of the key-codes was painted in UV Ink onto the painting.
  • The beginning bumper for the "herd ping pong balls into the pen" task in "Stay Humble" had the Taskmaster holding a ping pong ball and some paper. This is foreshadowing to Greg adding a sticker to a ball to halve their total score.
  • If Alex says "They told me to stop the clock" rather than "I've stopped the clock" at the end of a task, or "Do you think you've finished the task?", that usually means there's some kind of twist the contestant(s) didn't catch onto.
  • An unintentional variation happens in Series 9. During the live task of the premiere episode (to draw the second-longest snake at least half an inch in width), Rose Matafeo (who is from New Zealand) asks Alex and Greg if they could convert that to metric (her request is denied). In the series finale, she breezes through the last recorded tasks (to complete the 7 mini-tasks, which also sparks Ed Gamble's Rage Breaking Point about following the tasks to the letter) and initially appears poised to win. However, (potentially due to Rose's unfamiliarity with imperial units) it transpires that she did not build a brick tower that was tall enough (the tower had to be 26 inches tall), costing her this task and this episode.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Some of the photos in the hallway of the Taskmaster House are photoshopped themed photos of each series's cast (such as the Series 1 cast as a band or the Series 2 cast as a cricket team).
  • When Joe Thomas "apologises" for celebrating Alex's death in a music video, the camera briefly pans to Alex's view of his phone, which is placed on top of Alex's paper and clipboard. On Alex's clipboard, it reads JOE THOMAS (DO NOT READ THESE NOTES).
  • During the task to deliver a 5-word set of instructions to Alex as stealthily as possible ("Don't Like Them Go Bang"), Alex is reading a newspaper ("The Tasks") that contains some self-referential headlines ("Alex Horne Sports Dramatic New Look" and "Cliched Spy Newspaper Headlines Divide Opinions") as well as ones that reference two (in)famous sporting events from Taskmaster history ("Wilkinson's Potat-Woe" and "Pan Hoop History Made").
• Frying Pan of Doom: In one task in "The System of Endless Plates", the contestants are offered a range of items to be used as weapons, and three of them opt for the frying pan. It turns out to be a poor choice for the task, which calls for something with a sharp edge or point.
• Fun with Subtitles: In "An Orderly Species", the third task involved the contestants creating the most memorable aircraft safety announcement and demonstration. They had to either speak in a different accent to their own, or speak in a different language. Jamali spoke his in French, and a translation was provided in subtitles. When Jamali finished his attempt and spoke to Alex in English, the subtitles translated their conversation into French.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In the team task in "Their Water's So Delicious", while Aisling, Bob, and Sally are performing their song, Alex can be seen picking up various items in the background that had been blown over by some wind.
  • In 'This Is Trevor' (season 8, episode 7) Sian Gibson squeaks at a very high pitch when she disagrees with Greg's ruling on a task. When the camera goes back to Greg, Alex can be seen wincing and rubbing his ear; either the squeal itself hurt or he has an earpiece that picked it up.

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