Taskmaster / Tropes G to Q

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

This is a list of tropes from G to Q of the British TV programme Taskmaster.

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G

• The Gadfly:
  • Rhod Gilbert in series 7. As he and Greg have a long-standing friendship, Rhod took as many opportunities as he could (particularly with the prize rounds) to embarrass and taunt Greg as much as possible. It backfired on him, however; Rhod later admitted that because he hadn't really watched the show and didn't understand the format, he didn't realise that Greg actually was genuinely acting as a judge, and that by focusing more on winding Greg up he was sabotaging himself. He acknowledged that if he'd used his friendship with Greg more constructively, he could have probably done much better in terms of points. Although considering some people already complained about their friendship being an advantage, maybe it's better off the way it went.
  • Greg himself clearly enjoys winding up the contestants, especially those who are tantrum-prone and inclined to take the tasks more seriously than perhaps they should be taken. He also delights in picking on Alex and trolling him at every opportunity.
  • Alex also performs a subtle, low-key version of this during the recorded tasks. His tone is never anything less than mild, helpful and innocent, yet his contributions frequently tend to either state the obvious, irritatingly point out any shortcomings or errors in a contestant's attempt, giving unhelpful advice along the lines of a Mathematician's Answer or an unhelpful recitation of "everything is in the task", or comment on the contestant's attempt in a way that strongly hints they've made a mistake somewhere but he's neither willing nor able to point out what it is. One could be forgiven for thinking that he's doing so deliberately to wind them up and put them off-guard for entertainment purposes.
    Alex: All the information is on the task.
    Jo: You always say that! It's so annoying.
  • David Baddiel of all people demonstrates an unerring ability to get under Ed Gamble's skin throughout series 9.
  • Jamali Maddix in series 11 is this to Greg so much that eventually he gets Greg's grudging respect.
  • Ardal O'Hanlon in series 13 delights in poking holes in people's task attempts. While it's at least partly strategic — Alex notes at one point that he's doing so prior to his own (subpar) attempts being shown — there's plenty of occasions where it's also clearly done just to mess with everyone. For example, during the "best recreation of a historical event using two traffic cones" task, there's a lengthy discussion of the distinction between history and prehistory (essentially: the former is recorded, the latter is before recordings were made). Then, sometime later, after Sophie Duker's attempt at depicting the extinction of the dinosaurs, Ardal chimes in with this:
    Ardal: Sophie, I think that was an excellent recreation of an event... from prehistory.
• Gag Censor: The trophy for the Champion of Champions specials, to complement the usual golden head, is a golden headless body — naked, with a Taskmaster seal pasted over the groin region.
• Gag Echo: In "Mr. Octopus and Pottyhands", the second task is to build a tower to topple a yoghurt onto a scoreboard drawn on the ground. At the start of Sarah's attempt, Alex notes that she hasn't built anything yet.
  Alex: When do you think you might start building?
  Sarah: Look, mate, give me four hours to chop down a tree, and I'll spend three hours sharpening the blade.
  [later, during Lee's attempt]
  Lee: Abraham Lincoln said, "If I had four hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first three hours sharpening my axe."
• Gag Penis: Pops up on many an occasion:
  • Liza's dot-to-dot picture made with heels in "What Kind of Pictures?" is instantly recognisable as "cock and balls" even without the numbers being joined together. She received 4 points for this drawing.
  • Katy's offering for the prize task in "Five Miles Per Day" ("weirdest wooden thing") is a wooden phallus given to her by a friend's dad. She received 4 points for the prize round.
  • Ed's prize for "Quisps" ("best thing to celebrate with on a stage") is a "Confetti Cannon Party Pants" (a confetti cannon attached to the crotch of some pants). Cue jokes about ejaculation.
• Game Show Host: Greg Davies, the "Taskmaster".
• Gasshole: Sarah Kendall expressed some annoyance that the "first to fart" task in "Absolute Casserole" was a trick task only for Mike, since she's "always got one in the tank".
• Genius Bonus: In "Heg," Sophie doesn't just sculpt a vagina, she also likens it to Gustave Courbet's notorious 1866 painting L'Origine du monde.
• Genius Ditz:
  • Roisin in Series 1 comes off as one on occasion. Greg even calls her "uncharacteristically competent" in "Down an Octave".
  • Lolly tends to have amazing ideas, but her one flaw is that she tends to do them as fast as possible, often without thinking the action through. Greg lampshades this in "Spatchcock it" when she tries to fit a camel through a small gap.
  • Jess in Series 7. At one point she jokingly pretends she's going to fall off the stage during a live task, only to then ACTUALLY fall off the stage immediately after.
  • Mawaan in Series 10 establishes himself as this in his first episode. Using forced perspective for his vanishing trick: genuinely clever, and impressed Greg. Trying to inflate an egg with helium: an act of idiocy which Greg mocked as unsurpassable for the rest of the series.
• Genki Girl: Mel definitely counts. She approaches all the tasks with huge enthusiasm, and has a positive, cheerful attitude in general. It's for this reason that Alex tries to do a Break the Cutie on her; see that and Butt-Monkey above for details.
• Genre Mashup: The series combines the celebrity panel show, variety entertainment, reality television and even a hint of episodic soap opera and sitcoms, as a key part of the show's appeal is a group of celebrities engaged in unusual tasks, bantering about them and developing ongoing minor conflicts, rivalries, "plot-lines" and Running Gags.
• Genre Savvy:
  • Bob Mortimer shows his familiarity with the show in the first Champion of Champion special's task to find a briefcase combination. Rather than do the tricky methods on the blackboard in the room, he just looks for the number Alex hid elsewhere in the room in plain sight.
  • James Acaster was a fan before he appeared on the show, so he was familiar with its conventions. He'd know to go find tools in the kitchen and shed and regularly held off on reading out "Your time starts now" to give himself a few moments to think, to varying results. He got genuinely angry during team challenges when Rhod Gilbert, who wasn't familiar with the show, rushed through reading tasks and cost them precious seconds.
  • Morgana Robinson wordlessly reveals she's watched the show in "The End of the Franchise", and specifically has seen the episode in series 2 when the contestants have to build a bridge over a river on a model of the Taskmaster House only to discover in-studio that there were building supplies hidden in the room. When faced with a similar task in this episode, after being instructed to build a sand bridge, alone of the other contestants she immediately begins looking for hidden supplies (though Alex ends up having to nudge her in the right direction when she discovers a clue but fails to identify what it means).
  • By the end of each series, the contestants usually cotton onto the fact that if their attempt is being shown last, it's either genius or idiotic.
• Gentle Giant: Discussed, when Richard Osman defies this by throwing a trolley into a river.
  Greg: Speaking as an overly tall gentleman, we're often expected to be gentle and kind, so it's so nice to see one of us really letting loose.
• Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter:
  • The prize task for "Little Polythene Grief Cave" had the contestants bring in battery operated items. Cue a portion of the audience laughing in anticipation. Greg does lambaste the audience for their dirty minds:
    Greg: So, It's going to be that kind of crowd...
  • For the prize task of "Air Horn Andy" in Series 10, Mawaan brings in a travel pillow which sports a smaller hole. Richard Herring jokes that the hole serves a different purpose, to which Mawaan (and Greg) accuses all the "old perverts" in the room of ruining his favourite pillow forever.
• Gilligan Cut: A staple of the show's humour. When discussing a task, Greg or Alex will discuss how no one could possibly be stupid/insane/reckless/etc enough to [try and solve challenge with X impractical/illogical/outright stupid etc. solution], it always ends with Alex asking "Would you like to see [contestant] do the task?" Often times including a shot of said contestant cringing in embarrassment with a mortified look in the studio.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Illustrated quite effectively, if perhaps inadvertently, in Series 4's "Spatchcock It". The task required the contestants to fit a stuffed camel through the smallest gap as possible. The male contestants instantly took scissors or whatever sharp objects they could find (including a blender) to chop the camel up as small as possible to fit it through increasingly small gaps, while the female contestants managed to find a way to do complete the task in a way that kept the camel intact. At the end, it was revealed that the contestants were allowed to take their stuffed camels home with them, so while Mel and Lolly got to take home a nearly-brand-new stuffed animal, the male contestants were forced to take home some mangled abominations that had been restored as best they could.
• Girls with Moustaches: Lou and Sian in "A Novel About Russian Gulags". A task 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. Lou made hers out of fake flies, but real meal worms, while Sian got hair from a barbie doll and made a paper collage of Alex's face in the shape of a moustache, and stuck the hair onto it. Sian came last, on the grounds that hers was made of hair, which was hardly an unexpected thing for a moustache to be made from, and Lou came second as it truly squicked out Greg.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual:
  • Frank's gift to Greg in a task from "The Poet and the Egg" were a pair of sunglasses with rear view mirrors.
  • The live task from the Series 8 finale "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man" had the contestants attempt to retrieve a rubber duck while wearing goggles that turned everything upside down.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: For the Champion of Champions specials, the front door of the house is adorned with a golden arch. The wax seals that feature in the title sequence and the scoreboard are also gold instead of the usual red.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: In "How Heavy Is the Water?", Jenny's shopping list for a construction task includes "umpteen bras" and "baffer tape" (gaffer tape, but the task requires all ingredients to start with the same letter). After watching the playback, Ivo quips that Baffa Tape and Umpteen Bras is a "great band".
• Good Samaritan: In "Hollowing Out A Baguette," the task to transfer as much water from one fishbowl to another had a provision hidden on the back of the envelope that if any of the provided chocolate were eaten, then that contestant would be docked 5 points. Joe, who had moved the most water but had also eaten some of the chocolate, had a net score of 0 points. Mel, who moved the least amount of water and had also eaten chocolate (with a net score of -4 points) offers to take on Joe's 5 points for docking (which would have left her at a net score of -9 points for the task), but Greg quickly quashes that idea, referencing this trope.
• Goofy Suit:
  • A task that was filmed in Series 1 was one where the cast is wearing a giant parrot costume and need to persuade as many people in a shopping centre to sign a slip of paper. It was cut from the final show since Alex and the production decided that it felt tonally like a hidden camera prank show, which was not what they wanted for Taskmaster.
  • "Stuck in a Mammal Groove" contains a task where the cast need to guess what Alex (who is seated in the adjoining train compartment) is wearing. They are only allowed to ask yes or no questions, and Alex can only respond by honking a horn. He is wearing a parrot costume (actually, the same one from the cancelled task in series 1).
  • A task in "This Is Trevor" had contestants choose costumes for each other for a future task. The choices were: a Santa costume (with gloves and beard), a pirate costume (complete with hook-hand and eyepatch), a chef outfit (complete with oven gloves and hat), a convict (complete with cuffs), and a boxing outfit (with boxing gloves). The task in question was to wear the complete costume and taste test crisps. The common theme with all of these costumes, of course, was that their hands were obstructed by something, to make the task harder. Iain puts Joe in the boxing costume, leering that he's looking forward to seeing him bare-chested.
• Graceful Loser:
  • In "A Novel About Russian Gulags", a task was to move rice from a table in one room to a bottle in the living room, without touching the rice grains or moving the bottle from the living room, and only using items that were placed in a shopping basket. Paul Sinha gets disqualified from the task for not sticking to the "Do not move the bottle" part of the task. At the point tallying stage, the contestant acknowledges their error and dissuades Greg from giving them any points. While the contestant is in fact disqualified, Greg does award them a single bonus point due to their honesty and amiable acceptance of the situation.
  • Frankie Boyle similarly accepts a disqualification with equanimity and grace in "How Heavy is the Water?" due to an egg-boat malfunction which saw the egg almost instantly fall into the water. As Frankie himself acknowledges, considering the 'boat' was pretty much just a sheet of paper wrapped around the egg, it's not like he's got a lot of room for complaint.
• Gratuitous Latin: In the banter section at the beginning of "Five Miles Per Day", Alex says that he's adopted a new personal mantra in Latin. After resisting several attempts by Greg to get him to explain what it actually means, he admits it's the Latin translation of the slogan from a BMW ad.
• Grid Puzzle: In Series 5, the participants are tasked with recording the most incredible footage with a camera on their heads. Nish merely completes a Sudoku puzzle as quickly as possible. Unfortunately for him, he solves it the wrong way.
• Groin Attack:
  • In "Pea in a Haystack", the first task was to take as few steps as possible to get to a microwave in the middle of a running track. Dave tried to leap over a metal fence, and hit his groin area. The other contestants winced as much as he did.
  • Avoided in "Shaqinahat." For the peddle bin task, Katy asks Alex to prop up the bin and open it at her call as she throws her items, most of which strikes Alex's groin area. Katy's hardhat ends up being used as an impromptu guard.
  • Rhod Gilbert admits to targeting the groin area of the volunteers he pelts with tennis balls for his Space Invaders recreation.
• The Grotesque: Al Murray's snowman that he created in "Pea in a Haystack." Greg describes it as looking like a creature in pain.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop:
  • Invoked in the second part of the "Have Fun!" task in the episode "BMXing". The first part required the teams to have fun, and the second part required them to recreate what they did as accurately as possible. Russell and Alice played keepy-uppeys with a football and sat in a bathtub with some sherry respectively, while Tim, Liza and Asim did Hula hooping on roller skates, Asim used ukuleles to throw tennis balls in the air, and Liza did BMXing^note "What's the best fun you can ever have?, BMX-ing! - Greg and Alex after the challenge was shown off, there's the title! and immediately giving up, and they moved onto throwing hoops over themselves, then throwing balls into the hoops (or at least, trying to), then moving the picket fence off the ground, then messing up the cushions in the caravan while Asim put a cake tray over his head. Seven points were awarded to Russell and Alice overall (5 for the quality of their recreation, 2 for the quality of their fun), with the other three getting eight points overall (5 for the recreation, 3 for the fun).
  • The team task in "Butter in the Microwave" is a series of mini-tasks around the Taskmaster's House and garden in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure-game, with the key to ending the entire task being to say the word "demeaning". There was at least one "wrong turn" that forced the players back to the starting bench, and failing one part of a task would also send everyone back to the start (e.g. making a big mess in the living room or if a kitchen implement you are wearing falls down). David and Jo took their sweet time (over 36 minutes - David was under the impression that they were not in a race against the other team, while Jo did know but didn't give a fuck), but completed the task in 9 passes without having to repeat a mini-task more than once. Ed, Katy and Rose, however, rushed through the tasks, made some mistakes and wrong turns and had to restart twice. They completed the task in 24 passes, walked a total distance of over 600 metres, yet still won as it only took a little over 29 minutes in total.

H

• Hair-Trigger Temper: The live tasks in series 2 often brought this out in Joe Wilkinson and Doc Brown. Iain Stirling also demonstrated an extremely quick temper throughout Series 8. Nish Kumar plays with this a bit in Series 5, since he's mostly pretty light-hearted, but he does get pretty frustrated from time to time to the point where "Shit and piss!" almost becomes his catchphrase. Ed Gamble in Series 9 was also prone to Suddenly Shouting when he became frustrated and had his buttons pushed, but like Nish was also mostly light-hearted.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: The tendency of contestants to use Exact Words and Loophole Abuse frequently means that someone who completes an arduous task according to a close and/or literal interpretation of the rules faces losing out simply because someone else exploited an easy "cheat", which can at times seem rather unfair even if the second person is still technically within the rules. This was the subject of Joe Thomas's Rage Breaking Point in Series 8, when he exploded after his lengthy and exhaustive efforts to "erase an eraser" would end up being for naught after pretty much all the other contestants lazily flushed the intact eraser down the nearest toilet, despite the eraser technically still being functional and this just being a "wanky work-around" that required no effort or cleverness whatsoever to come up with. Although this particular example ended up being a subversion; while Joe technically did come last in the task, in recognition of his hard work (and the fact that he had a point about the unjust nature of the situation) Greg ended up giving him three bonus points.
• Hard-Work Montage: Pre-recorded tasks will sometimes feature montages of the contestants planning and preparing their solution. A notable example is Joe's construction of his 'tremendous legs' in "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man", which Greg compares to something out of The A-Team.
• Hates Being Touched:
  • Played with in one episode, when Greg mentioned that before the show he lightly touched Romesh's nose, which the latter didn't take kindly to. This then became a Running Gag for the episode, resulting in Romesh touching Greg's nose back.
  • According to Greg, Alex dislikes physical contact, despite approaching each contestant for a cuddle in "A Cuddle" to sneakily stick a ring on each contestant's back. The task was to retrieve as many golden rings in the room and put them on a drumstick. Jo and Katy both spotted a golden ring on Alex's finger and proceed to use their mouths to pull the ring off, whilst Alex smiled and looked incredibly uncomfortable.
• Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut: Parodied in "Rock'n'Roll Umlaut". The team task was to create a music album cover. Joe and Sian formed the band Shoe with the title track It's Too Big, and they used a total of three gratuitous umlauts, two of which went over consonants.
• Heel Realization: Iain Stirling tended to get rather over-competitive, single-minded and short-tempered in Series 8. While this was fair enough when he was completing tasks alone, as the only person really suffering from it was himself, during the team tasks his tunnel-vision obsession with winning tended to translate into him acting rather unpleasantly towards his teammates, with a particular tendency to stomp around rudely barking orders at them, act rather inconsiderately and dismissively towards their attempts to contribute, and generally being rather insufferable. From his reactions in the studio, he was clearly rather mortified and ashamed to have to watch his poor conduct rather bluntly exposed by the cameras and played back to the viewing public for their amusement.
• Height Angst:
  • Greg has marked down prize entries that he feels emphasizes how large he is compared to everyone else (e.g. Mel Giedroyc's best chair for the episode "No Stars For Naughty Boys" was taken from her childhood dollhouse and Katy Wix's best thing(s) from a shed were tools taken from a dollhouse shed).
  • On the other end of the spectrum, Sian Gibson (who is 5'-0") expresses her unhappiness with some of the tasks in "Stay Humble" for being heightist, namely the task where the competitors have their wrists through a loop that is attached to a bucket suspended in the air and they have to get as much sand from that bucket to a second bucket.
    Greg: Heightist? Funnily enough it didn't even occur to me.
• Heroic Sacrifice: "Hollowing Out a Baguette" has a task to transfer water from one fishbowl to another. Joe Lycett absolutely smashed the task (transferring 97% of the water and accidentally swallowing the remaining 3%) and apparently receives the full 5 points— until Alex reveals that there was a requirement sneakily written on the back of the task which stated if any of the provided chocolate were eaten, then that person would be docked 5 points. Both Joe and Mel ate the chocolate. Mel, who had transferred the least amount of water and had a net score of -4 points in that task, attempts to intervene this way on Joe's behalf by taking on Joe's 5 points for docking. However, Greg quickly shuts down this proposal. Had it been allowed, Mel would have been the first person to score negative points in an entire episode at -2— as of Series 10, her 3 points at the end of the episode is the lowest score of any contestant in a single episode.
  Greg: It doesn't work like that— this isn't the Good Samaritan. We make the rule, Sausage Gloves!"
• Hidden Depths:
  • Noel Fielding surprised everyone with his displays of athleticism during physical tasks (while wearing cowboy boots, no less) because he's better known for absurdist comedy that plays with the mind.
  • Greg and Alex have also said in interviews that Noel Fielding was taken aback when the latter realised how competitive he was in the show.
  • Nish and Mark's song for Rosalind in "Their Water's So Delicious" took everyone by surprise, both because they had struggled throughout the series, and because no one expected both of them to actually be quite competent musicians.
  • Alex and Greg have stated that it is a trend in the show for the well-educated comedians with relatively intellectual reputations (they cite David Baddiel and Mark Watson as examples) to do surprisingly badly. Greg hypothesised in a Radio Times interview it's because in the improvisational nature of Taskmaster these comedians cannot plan and maintain their comedia "persona".
• Hidden in Plain Sight:
  • Done on various tasks, hiding the solution, helpful materials or useful information in relatively obvious locations, but due to panic and time pressure, the contestants miss them. For example in "Strength in Arches," there are building supplies hidden under the table and multiple clues to lead the contestants to them. Jon Richardson both flips a switch that lights up a sign on the other side of the table, AND reads the boat with "debajo de la mesa" ("under the table" in Spanish, which he says during the live show) on the side. Despite this none of the contestants ever check under the table.
  • A common variant of the above is to hide additional information about the task on the task letter itself, often in very small font on the back. A surprising number of contestants don't actually bother simply looking on the other side of the page.
  • The Prize task for "Friendship is truth" had contestants bring in surprising photos of themselves. Hugh had brought in a facemask of himself, supposedly because it stops people from recognising him when he's out shopping (the logic being hiding yourself underneath a mask of yourself makes you looks weird enough for people to ignore you). He comes last.
• Hidden Purpose Test: Several tasks over the course of the series have had a second part that is only revealed after the first part is completed, and are usually set up so that doing well in the first part will be a handicap for the true task.
  • In "Tony Three Pies", a task begins with the contestants being instructed to make an exotic sandwich, but the real task turns out to be "Eat your exotic sandwich. Fastest wins." Between choosing bizarre ingredients and going for a more-is-more approach, not one contestant completes the eating task.
  • In "Roadkill Doused in Syrup", the team task begins with one team member being instructed to write a list of obscure animals, only to learn once it's complete that the real task is a game of charades in which the other team members have to guess the animals on the list. Both teams do surprisingly well, each getting over half their list — particularly impressive for Asim's team, as his list consists of made-up animals like "anorexic elephant" and "laser-beam turtle".
  • In "Butter in the Microwave", the team task involves following a complicated series of instructions spread out over multiple envelopes, each of which can only be opened after the previous instruction has been carried out. The final envelope eventually reveals that the win condition is simply to be the first team to say the word "demeaning". In retrospect, several of the subtasks were designed to nudge the teams in the direction of winning the task inadvertantly; in the event, however, neither team completed the task before reading the final envelope.
  • In "Enormous Hugeness", one task involved printing and laminating instructional signage, with the contestants given a free hand as to what the signs would read. Those who went with joking instructions like "Take off your underpants" or "Poo in your pants" found themselves at a disadvantage when it was revealed that the second half of the task was to follow all the instructions they'd written.
  • In "The System of Endless Plates", one task began with an instruction to choose a weapon (out of several offered objects, including a Frying Pan of Doom and a leather belt) and a room in the house. The second part of the task was to use the chosen object to pop a large number of balloons that had been released in the chosen room, to the benefit of those who chose small rooms and pointy objects.
• Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: Whenever the task results involve quantitative measurements, Alex will give the measurement in normal units first, then offer a completely obscure or nonsensical alternative .
  Alex: Lolly slid 3.2 metres, that's the same height as Kylie Minogue standing on a horse; Joe, 5.80, Vince Vaughan on Owen Wilson on Ben Stiller on an unlit barbeque.
• Hilarious Outtakes: This compilation reel for Series 10. Other series have clips on the official Taskmaster Youtube channel.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard:
  • Some of the tasks are written so that Alex will be directly involved in them. This can backfire on Alex, however, by becoming an awful experience:
    • "Butter in the Microwave" has a task where the contestants have to determine which wheelie bin Alex is located in among 5 bins. This task means that Alex has been confined in a wheelie bin on 5 separate occasions with variable weather and has to wait unaware for one of the contestants to strike his bin with a frying pan or to push his bin over.
    • "The House Queens" has a task where Alex rides a tricycle in a circle while the contestants fit rubber ducks in his basket, but his only opportunities for rest are when somebody says one of several single-use magic words and he pauses for 10 seconds. By the end of the task, he is visibly exhausted.
      Sophie Duker: [through heavy panting] You write the tasks. You don't have to make yourself do that.
  • In "Spoony Neeson", a task required the comedians to get a birthday candle in a muffin from the lab to the caravan. Nish shouting the phrase "You Bubbly Fuck!" towards Alex was perhaps not the best course of action...as that blew out the candle!
  • In "Slap and Tong", Alex's opening gag has him bring out a snack consisting of chocolate, biscuit, butter, salami, and ganache. Greg declines to try it and makes Alex eat the entire thing before he will start the show.
• Hollywood Board Games:
  • Katherine Parkinson's character is that of a cloudcuckoolander whose approach to her assigned task is rarely the logical option. She also displays wackiness in other ways such as when she claims a shrill "BOX!" as her Madness Mantra during a Pictionary-esque game.
  • Daisy and Richard's dynamic can get uncomfortable to watch at times. She's very outspoken and puts a perfectionist standard on everyone but herself. Meanwhile, he's a mild-mannered (mostly) Nice Guy. During the aforementioned "Turntable Pictionary" round, she ends up yelling at him for not recognizing her mediocre drawings.
• Hollywood Webcam: Averted in "Meat", as a task required contestants to look at Frederick the Swede as they get dressed into a swimsuit. The cameras used on the webcams are the ones that came with the laptops, and the footage shown in the studio are actual screen captures of the attempts.
• Homoerotic Subtext:
  • Greg and Alex's comments during studio segments not-so-subtly hint at a dom-sub relationship. Alex is the show's Butt-Monkey constantly insulted or mocked by Greg, Greg frequently puts his hand on Alex's, and both offhandedly mention things Alex is or isn't allowed to do by order of the Taskmaster.
  • Frederick the Swede seems to attract this.
    • Greg lampshades this in "Little Denim Shorts" after watching back the VTs of the contestants trying to make Fred blush.
    • Lampshaded again with Fred's second appearance, in "Fear of Failure". Doc Brown seems to have some chemistry with him.
    • In Fred's fourth appearance, in "Meat", Joe Lycett outright flirts with him, although that's more like actual text.
  • David Baddiel asks Alex to take off his shirt as part of the "most striking water feature" task and then takes his own shirt off "in solidarity." Greg opines that it appears to be two men telling their wives that they are building a water feature together to engage in an openly homoerotic relationship à la Brokeback Mountain.
• Hostile Weather: This trope is downplayed in Taskmaster — the contestants film based on their availability and are thus at the mercy of the weather. Some contestants are unlucky enough to be filming in bad weather that can affect their performance (or at the very least their demeanor):
  • In "The Poet and the Egg," Tim Key filmed his GPS drawing during a downpour. After attempting to draw a key poorly, he abandons his attempt and goes for a run in the heavy rain and wind.
  • In "The F.I.P.," freezing weather, compounded by lack of sleep due to taking care of his newborn, hampers Rob Beckett and causes him to break wind (hence the episode title - Farty Ice Pop).
  • Contributing to Nish Kumar's Rage Quit in "Phoenix" at the beach are blazing hot temperatures, his outfit (an all-black suit ensemble) being ill-suited to the location, and members of the public openly laughing as he continues to miss the bucket.
  • In the episode "It's Not Your Fault," despite being soaked to the bone in a heavy downpour in the middle of a large empty airfield, Mike Wozniak still maintains a pleasant, almost apologetic demeanor and remains friendly towards Alex and the production crew.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Sian Gibson from Series 8, who is 5'0", compared to Alex and Greg. At one point during the studio segment, she and the 6'8" tall Greg stand next to each other for a side hug, and the height difference is staggering. Sian names them as "the modern-day Krankies."
• Hypocrite:
  • In Series 1, Romesh Ranganathan objected in-studio to the "golfing with eggs" task by pointing out that as a vegan, he wasn't sure whether competing in such a task was ethical. It was immediately pointed out to him that this didn't stop him competing on the day, and indeed he went on to destroy more eggs than anyone else. Romesh criticises himself for this in the podcast and claims that if he'd felt a bit more confident in his career prospects at the time, he might have stuck with his principles and refused to do the task.
  • In Series 2, when Joe Wilkinson's impressive one-shot throw of a potato into a hole faces disqualification due to the fact that his feet were slightly over the boundary, he is sent out while the rest of the contestants debate whether or not to allow it. While Richard Osman and Katherine Ryan argue that he should be allowed to receive points for it, Doc Brown and Jon Richardson loudly insist that he broke the rules and should be penalized accordingly. When Joe returns, Greg informs him he has been disqualified for the round. Doc and Jon loudly declare how harsh and unfair this is. Greg looks incredibly unimpressed.
  • In Series 4, in the "Work Out What's In The Sleeping Bag Without Removing Any Objects" task, Noel Fielding objected to Joe Lycett receiving points after he guessed that one of the objects was a "carrot skipping rope" (one of the objects was a skipping rope, but Joe had mistaken what was forming the handles) on the grounds that there's clearly no such thing and he was just making things up. Greg rather snarkily pointed out that it was a bit rich for a member of The Mighty Boosh, whose comedy is largely if not exclusively focussed on whimsical flights of absurdity, to complain about someone being rewarded for just making up something absurd and unlikely.
    Greg: Right, and you don't like flights of fancy, Noel, do you?
  • In Series 7, episode "My Eyes Are Circles", Rhod's submission for the "draw the biggest circle" task is to get a map of Europe and trace a circle around as much of the continent as possible. This, naturally, creates some debate regarding whether it counts as the "biggest" circle (it's the largest when relative scale is taken into account, but clearly much smaller than the other attempts in practical terms). At one point James Acaster tries to chime in against Rhod... and considering his own failure to even accurately understand the task requirements led to a nonsensical effort wherein he tried to find as many circles as possible, he's quickly shut down by Greg.
    James: If-if-if I just said "Oh, I've just walked across the West Indies"—
    Greg: [interrupting] I mean, how dare you even speak.
  • In the Series 7 episode “The Mean Bean”, contestants are tasked with finding the circumference of the caravan in baked beans. When Greg makes fun of them for physically measuring the length of the caravan with the beans, Rhod challenges him to come up with a better idea. Greg sheepishly claims he’d use “a different way”, prompting immediate ridicule from Rhod.
    Greg: I’d work out the length of a bean, and then I’d use, uh, a different way of working out the circumference —
    Rhod: [sarcastically] Oh, the old different way method! Oh, didn’t think of that!
  • In Series 8, Iain Stirling was very easy to irritate whenever his attempt at a task was questioned on a technicality, or when it seemed like a judgement was going to go against him. However, when Joe Thomas challenged several contestants making an eraser "disappear" simply by flushing it down a toilet, Iain demanded to know "where the fuck this was coming from" in response.
  • In Series 10, Daisy and Richard have to convince a security guard to look in their bag instead of the one carried by the other. Daisy employs moralism as a tool, arguing that the contents of Richard's bag are scandalous and that, as a married man, he shouldn't look inside due to how perverted it would make him seem. Then, when they parted ways, Daisy kissed his hand and cheek. Greg immediately called her out on the naked hypocrisy of adopting a self-righteous tone regarding sexual manipulation to make her case only then to try and "get off" with the guy once she'd finished.
  • In the second Champion of Champions special, Kerry Godliman was shot down every time she tried to pick holes in another contestant's attempt at the "most wonderful seaside body-part artwork" task, considering her own fairly shambolic and disastrous attempt:
    [On Richard Herring's (admittedly also terrible) effort:]
    Kerry: Where's the wonderful bit?
    Ed Gamble: ... Kerry, come on mate.
    Greg: Come on. Ease down, mate. You might just have scraped above this pile of shit, but pipe down.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Greg often mocks the oldest contestant in any given series despite he himself often being very close to the same age. A particularly egregious example is how he calls Rhod "grandad" throughout series 7 even though Rhod is 5 months younger than Greg.
  • In "My Eyes Are Circles", James pads out an anecdote with plot points from Forrest Gump, and pretends innocence when Greg calls him out. When the next contestant, Kerry, describes one event in her own story as being "like Willy Wonka", James tells her sternly that plagiarism is not cool.

I

• I Can't Hear You: This happens to Rob and Sara when they interact before one of their tasks. They have to play a game of charades whilst stationed on opposite banks of the Thames (about 500 feet across) and whilst wearing giant foam hands in "The F.I.P." The Taskmaster House is also located underneath the Heathrow airport flight paths - at one point, Rob (who is doing the miming) shouts at a plane flying over, which Sara mistakes as another miming attempt.
  Sara: [spots Rob on the opposite shore and starts waving] It's Rob! Can he see me? [yells towards Rob] Hey!
  Rob: [yelling across the Thames] Hello!
  Sara: Hello!
  Rob: [to his film crew] Who's that? Who is it? I dunno— [addressing Sara] Who are you?!
  Sara: I'm alright, how are you?!
  [In the studio, Rob and Sara cringe through fits of laughter]
  Rob: What's your name?!
  Sara: [addressing Alex] "What's my name?" Why doesn't he know my name?
  Rob: [addressing his camera crew] Gone quiet, hasn't she?
• "I Can't Look!" Gesture: Occasionally done when contestants remember that a particularly embarrassing task is about to be shown, such as Rob Beckett's attempts at various accents.
• I Resemble That Remark!: During the ball-throwing task in "The Perfect Stuff", Alex and Rhod have an argument about whether Alex's umpire chair is included in the task description's prohibition on ladders, which mostly consists of Alex repeating that it is and Rhod repeating that it's not. In the studio afterward, Greg remarks that it's like every conversation he's ever had with Rhod. Rhod replies, "It's not."
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!:
  • When Joe Wilkinson has his "Eureka!" Moment in "There's Strength in Arches," Jon tells him that he would just adopt him with the look that Joe makes.
  • The task in "Rock 'N Roll Umlaut" is to completely conceal yourself inside a phone box. Paul Sinha fails spectacularly and is caught clearly looking into the camera. Greg describes Paul as a lost little boy whom he would like to scoop into his arms.
  • Greg notes, "I found Guz Khan absolutely adorable for one beat" during the introduction of the task of painting a portrait of The Taskmaster with the canvas set at either six inches or six feet away. "He became a 10-year-old boy and I wanted to hold him." Alex helpfully isolates the beat.
• I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine:
  • Several of the contestants are this to Greg:
    • Series one has Roisin, who co-starred with Greg in Man Down.
    • Rhod in series seven. Aside from being long-term friends, Greg also appeared as a team captain in Rhod's panel show Ask Rhod Gilbert.
    • Greg's former The Inbetweeners co-star Joe Thomas as a contestant in Series 8.
    • Ed Gamble (Series 9) is also a long-time friend of Greg's, and co-wrote his sitcom Man Down.
    • Mike Wozniak from series 11 also co-starred with Greg in Man Down.
  • Alex as well:
    • Alex used to co-host We Need Answers with Tim (series one) and Mark (series five). Mark and Alex's friendship is also touched on in several episodes.
    • The musicians who provided the music for the final task in "Hollowing Out A Baguette" are Joe Auckland and Mark Brown. They are both members of Alex's band The Horne Section.
    • Several members of the Horne Section appear in the "compose a solo" task from "Trapped in a Loveless Marriage".
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The episodes titles are unusual phrases spoken in the episode, taken out of context.
• Idiot Ball: Anytime Greg prefaces task attempt(s) with "Now these are intelligent people...", you know people have been a bit stupid. This in turn gets lampshaded quite a bit, like this exchange from "The Dong and the Gong":
  Greg: Now these are intelligent people, they're not just gonna steam in and just start popping balloons.
  Alex: No, because they can make a plan, they can get something.
  Greg: They're just gonna think about it.
  Alex: Yeah. So, do you want to start with Dave and Sara?
  • In "Pork Is a Sausage", the live task had the contestants put potatoes into a wicker basket, using only comically massive chopsticks (snooker cues with balls on the end). Everyone picked up the potatoes as you'd expect, with the ends of the chopsticks. Richard however, used his hands to place them onto the chopsticks, then transported them to the wicker basket, not realising the task specified that he couldn't use his hands at all during the process. He gets disqualified in this round.
  • In "A Novel About Russian Gulags", a task was to move rice from a table in one room to a bottle in the living room, without touching the rice grains or moving the bottle from the living room, and only using items that were placed in a shopping basket. Paul Sinha initially gets disqualified for moving the bottle, despite the task explicitly saying that you couldn't move it from the living room. Greg does give them a bonus point as they were a Graceful Loser, and admitted the wrongdoing.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: In "Toshwash", the team task involves the contestants each putting an item inside their bag without their teammates finding out, and then they have to convince a security guard to look inside their bag. Richard Herring tells the security guard that the content of his bag involves nudity, so Daisy argues that the guard would look like a pervert if he chose Richard's bag. She also makes a point that the guard is married, so his wife wouldn't be impressed. Then, as the team are leaving, Daisy kisses his hand and cheek, and says goodbye to him in an endearing manner. As Greg put it:
  Greg: Initially, [Daisy] suggested that Richard's disgusting for offering up lascivious goods [...] then you try and guilt Richard the security guard for going to his bubbling cauldron of filth that's Richard's bag, because he's got a wife. Daisy took a moral high ground, and then, let's say it as it is, tried to get off with him.
• The Immodest Orgasm: Sally Philips fakes one in "A Wind-Dried Puffin" by creating a water-cooler moment skit that suggests she is having sex with a water cooler inside the Taskmaster caravan. It also gave her the full five points.
• Inherently Funny Words: The prize task for "I Think I've Got This" has the contestant bring in the item that has the funniest name when said over and over. The submissions are a jar of pickles, a stopcock, some bubbles, a cookbook (said in Chris Ramsey's Geordie accent), and a pheasant plucker.
• In My Language, That Sounds Like...: Mel and Hugh's trailer for Taskmaster: the Movie is a Nordic Noir called Tugtemester, which prompted a few jokes in the studio.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Greg often calls Alex "little Alex Horne".
  • Asim twice addresses Greg as "Papa G," which Greg finds endearing.
• Initialism Title: The last episode of series three is called "The F.I.P". It stands for Farty Ice Pop, a nickname given to Rob as he broke wind when doing his take because he was cold.
• Instantly Proven Wrong:
  • For the prize task in "Hollowing Out a Baguette", Mel announces that she is offering up a subscription to a magazine called Moving On; a moment later, an issue of the magazine is shown on the big screen, revealing that its title is actually Moving Ahead. Greg notes dryly that she's clearly a big fan of the magazine.
  • In "Legit Glass", the stage task was to make noises of something written on the card and the Taskmaster had to guess what it was. Daisy May Cooper tried to do an elephant impression, which was mocked in the studio by everyone, and when Daisy asks Greg to do a better impression, he tries, and everyone immedietely starts laughing as it was only marginally better.
  • In "The pendulum draws the eye", for the Fez task, Jessica takes a picture on a cockpit with airline pilot Andy "Fez" Ferrington. Greg thinks she's making it up, proclaiming "No one has ever called that man Fez in his life." Jessica turns to the crowd and shouts, "Fez!". A voice off-screen replies, "Yep.".
• Insistent Terminology: During "Hippopotamus", Richard Herring at one point offhandedly refers to the "moving water from one butt to another" task as a "game". Alex seems to get slightly annoyed and immediately corrects him that what he's doing is a task, not a game. Greg approvingly notes this in the studio after watching the playback.
• Insubstantial Ingredients: 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).
• In-Universe Catharsis: Implied to be the reason for Mel's choice, after many years hosting The Great British Bake Off, to "destroy a cake beautifully" by unceremoniously flipping it over and squishing it onto the table.
• Ironic Echo Cut: A staple of the show's humour, as the editors like to show a couple of contestants' attempts at once, and then contrast them. This often leads to one of the cast dismissing an idea as ridiculous, then the program shows another contestant enthusiastically trying the idea. An example from series 1 happens in a challenge where the contestants need to throw a tea bag into a mug from the furthest distance:
  Frank: Someone'll take the first 45 minutes realizing the teabags are better wet.
  [cut to Romesh, with dry teabags by his feet]
  Romesh: Just realized I should probably wet them.
• Irony:
  • The Edinburgh TV Festival episode has TV executives, and a task had them try to name as many TV shows and films as possible, in alphabetical order. You'd think, being TV executives, they'd be able to name quite a few TV Shows. Apparently not.
  • In "Quisps", David Baddiel initially struggles to fully understand the nuances of the "Throw Your Thing Far — But Not Too Far" live task, leading Ed Gamble to confidently (and perhaps a wee bit patronisingly) explain it back to him. Ed is consequently the first contestant to take his go... and immediately screws it up and disqualifies himself on the first throw by bouncing a rubber egg off the stage. David is greatly amused by this, Ed much less so.
• It Makes Sense in Context:
  • The title sequence is made up of intentionally bizarre clips of random task attempts that will happen in a given series. Of course, as soon as you see an episode of the show, you will have some context for why, say, Doc Brown is catching a fish that was flung off-camera^*The task was to create a nursery rhyme video, and he made a nursery rap as part of the attempt, which involved fish and other objects being thrown at him.
  • Some of, though certainly not all, the episode titles. Generally, it's named after a memorable quote or joke said in the given episode. Unlike the US version, we can't list them here as there's so many of them!
  • Referenced by Greg in "Down an Octave", where both Frank and Josh were trying to melt ice as quickly as possible, and they use such techniques like putting ice in a bathtub and running hot water over it, and putting ice in the oven. Greg then points out that, when played in isolation, the clips would look like Frank and Josh were having a mental breakdown.
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: For all but the team tasks, the contestants film their tasks in isolation and are sworn to secrecy until the studio shows. They do not know how well they have completed a task in comparison to their competitors, so it is a common occurence for contestants who are self-assured of a victory to cringe at their own attempts while watching them back.
  Katherine Parkinson: [after watching back her team's karaoke music video in horror, with hands over her face]
  Mawaan: Katherine, you should be really proud of that.
  Katherine: It felt better when we were doing it—
  Johnny: On the day.
• It's Been Done: In "My Eyes Are Circles", one task involves writing a story exactly ten words long. In the studio, Greg invites the contestants to flesh out their stories with extra backstory and motivation, and James Acaster's attempt comes out remarkably similar to part of Forrest Gump, a fact he pretends to be surprised by when Greg points it out.

J

• Jaw Drop: The theme of Series 14's "The Chassis, the Wings" prize task is the most jaw-dropping thing. Dara takes the prize task category back to its roots in animation (likening it to Bugs Bunny, and his submission is a drawing of Greg as an Attractive Bent-Gender, with Alex doing a jaw drop and an Eye Pop in adoration.
• "Join Us" Drone: The "most dramatic entrance" task from the first episode of series 9 has Katy Wix build a series of balloon heads that she dresses in kerchiefs that she also wears. She then walks into the room in a haze with her four "sisters" and pressures Alex in an eerily mindless voice to "join our cult? join our cult? join our cult?"

K

• Keet: Mel, and to a lesser extent, Lolly in Series 4. They are constantly optimistic and seem to be on the show to have a good time, no matter what. Alex noticed this with Mel, and it got to the point where, in "Spatchcock it", Alex and Greg set 3 tasks for Mel to complete specifically to make her swear and be annoyed: blow up a massive inflatable ball, get it out of the house and score a goal with it (which required her to deflate it a bit), then finally, hide it from Alex in the middle of a football field. They end up failing; the worst Mel gets is mildly frustrated, leading the two to conclude that she really is just that nice.
• Klingon Promotion: In "The 75th Question," Sophie's "have a dramatic meeting with eight of yourself" scenario is that Alex is dead, Bridget killed him, and as a result, Greg promotes Bridget in Alex's place.
• Kneel Before Zod: Joe Wilkinson does this in front of Greg in "Fear of Failure". He does so after a task to get a hole in one when throwing a potato into a golf hole (the contestants weren't allowed to touch the red green). Not even he thought he could manage the feat in the clip. After replaying the footage in the studio to show off the shot, it suddenly zooms onto his foot, leaving Joe to be absolutely distraught that his toe was touching the red green. He spends what appears to be a minute pacing about looking really unhappy, and begs for Greg to not disqualify him, and kneels at Greg's feet, begging him to not take the achievement away from him. Greg felt so conflicted on what to do, the other contestants got to choose his fate The votes were tied at 2-2, and Greg, with much sorrow, disqualifies Joe.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: In the last episode of Series 1, Romesh, Josh and Roisin initially make a spirited effort to defend their submission for "make the best blooper video" task... until Greg thoroughly deconstructs exactly how bad it was, at which point Romesh and Josh see no point in holding back their true feelings (though Roisin seems determined to go down with the ship, perhaps because she was the one filming and so has the bulk of the blame for how it turned out):
  Romesh: See, you think the cake is the blooper, right, and you think "Oh God, that was bloody funny! That's probably the best thing I've ever seen — OH SHIT! PADDLING POOL! Out of nowhere! Oh my days, that's such a surprising and entertaining blooper! And if anything, they're almost too method in the way that they carried that out! I thought it was brilliant!" [does jazz hands] That's what I think about that.
  Roisin: That should be your reaction!
  Greg: I would have probably got to those layers, but I was too busy with "Oh, there's this really bad acting, oh, they're not doing it themselves, oh, they've missed the actual accident."
  Romesh: [deflated] ... It is a lot shitter than I thought it was gonna look, that is the honest truth. [Roisin reacts with betrayal] When I watched it, I thought "This must be some off-cuts version of the thing," and then I waited for the reveal. And then there was none, and we had to defend that dogshit. And I feel I gave an impassioned speech, but I didn't believe a word of it.
  Josh: I agree with Romesh.
• Kubrick Stare: During Jon Richardson's creepy music video of "Three Blind Mice" in "Pork Is a Sausage," he gives this look to the camera as the piano player (accompanied with a downward tilted camera angle) and as the winking farmer's wife at the end with a mouse tail in her mouth.
  Greg: I've written down "nightmareish, creepy" and then "strangely attractive."

L

• Lame Pun Reaction:
  • A fairly substantial amount of Alex's introductions, segues and attempts at banter involve some kind of hideously tortured pun, often reached by mangling the names of contestants together. This tends to exasperate Greg, who is clearly not fond of puns as a tool for getting laughs.
    Alex: Last up, I need to warn you that she might make the noise of a mourning dove and a happy cat at the same time — yes, Daisy may coo-purr!
    Greg: [wincing] God, I hate you.
  • Two instances from "The Poet and the Egg":
    • When tasked to bring in the "most meaningful" item for the prize task, Roisin chose a dictionary. The entire studio let out an anguished groan when realization set in.
    • Ahead of one of the Ad Bumpers, Greg reads one off of the teleprompters:
      Greg: I hate to be the guy to break it to you, but it is now time for a commercial break. [long pause without applause, then Greg shuts his eyes] I'm so sorry.
  • Paul Chowdhry made a couple of these in "The F.I.P." to the blank reactions of Greg, Alex, the cast and the audience ("He's gong mad" and "Rob Bucket").
  • During the prize task of "Spatchcock It" in which the cast must bring in the best "sheep-related item," Alex makes several sheep-related puns to Greg's dismay. ("It's up to ewe, Greg Davies, to decide who brought in the best sheep-related items, baa none. If you notice anyone being sheepish, feel free to lambaste them."
  • In "He Was a Different Man", Tim's pun about Sting gets an "oh, come on!" from Asim and a facepalm from Greg.
  • Also in "He Was a Different Man", Alex's introduction to Russell Howard's attempt at the candle task attempts to crowbar Russell's surname into a pun on the phrase "How hard can it be?". Notably, everybody groans — even the audience doesn't laugh.
  • Alex calls a task winner-to-be a "'Tache-master" in a segue to see who made the most unexpected moustache in the episode "A Novel About Russian Gulags". Cue audience groan, and Iain and Greg's very visible annoyed reaction to the pun.
  • When introducing the first batch of VTs for a task in "Five Miles Per Day", Alex wishes that everyone will learn something from the next video because it is "Ed-Jo-Katy"-nal. Greg promptly shouts at Alex to Get Out!.
  • In Champion of Champions 2, Greg physically thwaps Alex on the head with his notecards after Alex punningly refers to Richard Herring as "the stiff fish, Rigid Herring".
  • In "Grappling with My Life", Steve's joke about a sausage going to a music festival and listening to some bangers earns a facepalm from Greg.
• Late to the Realization: Jon, able to read Spanish, was the only contestant who realised the name of the model boat in the bridge building task translated in English to "Under the Table", but thought nothing of it at the time. It wasn't until sometime after he completed the challenge that he realised how strange a name for a boat "Under the Table" was, and correctly guessed that there had been items useful to the task hidden underneath the table. Of course, his reaction to this was less impressed by the brilliance and subtlety of the clue as the trope usually indicates and more frustrated by the fact that during the task, he hadn't even thought twice about the hint.
• Laugh Track: Averted; Taskmaster is filmed in front of a Studio Audience who provide genuine laughter and occasionally interact with the performers. When this was impossible due to COVID-19 during filming of Series 10 to 12, the producers still didn't use a laugh track; they screened the filmed episodes for a (smaller) audience and recorded and used their genuine reactions.
• Leet Lingo: In "Basic Recipe 28", the ad bumpers that play in-between the vinegar finding task shows "Taskm85ter". This doubles up as Foreshadowing, as it turns out that the vinegar is in the 85th shot glass (and the "Taskmaster" sign-off on the task was also formatted this way as a hint).
• Left It In: In "A Novel About Russian Gulags", while brainstorming solutions to a task, Lou comes out with an off-colour suggestion and immediately adds, "Please don't put that in the show."
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: After his Anti-Climax Coke-and-Mentos volcano, Iain's only response when asked what his thoughts were was that he genuinely didn't want to talk about it. Greg sympathetically agreed not to.
• Limited Wardrobe: Starting from series two, all the contestants wear only one set of clothes for the pre-recorded challenges. In the first series, the contestants altered between two sets of clothes for the pre-recorded challenges, although Tim kept his wardrobe consistent by wearing red sportswear and a white headband. In the studio, he wore the same suit for all six episodes.
• Literal Metaphor: In "Trapped in a Loveless Marriage", the team task requires teams to "go back to the drawing board" if anything touches the red green in their attempt. The "drawing board" is a blackboard with the words "The Drawing Board" written on it; reusing ideas is perfectly okay within the rules of the task.
• Literal-Minded:
  • In "The Leprechaun and the Lesbian," Sally's prize for the "hippest item of headwear" is a balaclava with a pair of hips attached to resemble wings and a beret. In his notes, Alex had called it a "Hip Hip Beret."
  • Aisling's water cooler moment in "A Wind-Dried Puffin" was a literal interpretation of the phrase "fishing for a moment." Sitting in a small boat on the Taskmaster House driveway with ice strewn around, she used a fishing rod to "fish" for "moments" (actually some Galaxy bars), but accidentally knocks over her water cooler and mug of tea in the process.
  • In "We Met At Mealtime", the contestants were tasked to make a big announcement. Tim Vine's approach was to write the word 'announcement' in big letters. However, the police came and stopped him because he made his attempt next to an airport.
  • A series 7 team task involved making the best soap opera cliffhanger. James, Phil, and Rhod make a segment that features a soapy bath (as well as common soap opera tropes). During the studio segment, Phil points this out as a reason why his team should win.
  • In "A Novel About Russian Gulags", Alex claims in the banter segment that he's never used any of the machines at the gym because they have signs saying you have to read the instructions first, which he's interpreted as hunting down and reading the machines' operating manuals. From cover to cover. Including the bits in other languages.
  • The task in "Don't Like Them Go Bang" is to deliver Alex a set of instructions as discreetly as possible - Ed's instructions to Alex prompt the latter to stand up and shout at the top of his voice "LOUD!". Ed's instructions? STAND UP AND SHOUT LOUD.
  • During the 2016 Edinburgh International Television Festival live show, while showing the contestants' attempts at one task, Alex notes that the next contestant has been singled out. Greg says that he doesn't know what that means (ie. whether it signifies that the attempt will be particularly good or particularly bad); Alex responds with the dictionary definition of "singled out".
  • In "Fagin at the Disco", the category for the prize task is "The bit of old crap that Greg likes the best". Lucy interprets 'old crap' literally, offering a collection of mouse droppings. (Greg does not like them the best.)
• Literalist Snarking: In "Stay Humble", the equipment for the herding task includes, for reasons that remain opaque to most of the contestants, a single basketball. Lou asks Alex if it's a red herring; Alex replies that, no, it's a basketball.
• The Load: James Acaster leaves us in no doubt as to what he thought of Rhod Gilbert (who rushes through reading tasks and generally interprets them in creative ways) by the end of the series.
• Loophole Abuse: Has its own page!
• Lovely Assistant:
  • '"...It's Lil' Alex Horne!"
  • In "BMXing!" only, Alex hires his own lovely assistant named Little Ian. After Little Ian is introduced, Greg orders Alex to get rid of him immediately.

M

• Mad Science Fair: A task in "Stuck in a Mammal Groove" has contestants build a science fair volcano. They had 10 minutes to plan what they'd use, and 20 minutes to build the volcano. Iain and Joe both used cola and Mentos to get their volcano to erupt, the former used lots of Mentos, the latter using about seven overall to both make their eruptions. Sian made a pre-erupted volcano, and added sparklers to the top of it to mimic it erupting, Paul basically attached a bicycle pump to a tube and added in a reactant to cola (we never find out exactly what it is) and forces the bubbly lava through a tiny hole at the top of his volcano. Lou made a clay volcano, set various sweets and pills on fire, and stood back. Sian and, despite his best efforts, Iain get 2 points, Paul gets 3 points, with Joe and Lou getting 5 points each.
• Madness Mantra: There have been at least three tasks (the titular "Shoe Who" from Series 13, the silent cocktails from Series 10's "Hippopotamus", and the metronome task from Series 11's "An Orderly Species") where the contestants need to repeat a phrase or noise while doing the task or restarting a task. This can make it appear as if the contestants are losing their minds the longer the task goes on.
  Ardal: I have to find the shoe... I have to find the shoe... I have to find the shoe...
• Making a Spectacle of Yourself: James Acaster in Series 7 has a pair of yellow shutter shades as part of his outfit for some of his pre-recorded challenges.
• The Man in Front of the Man: On a meta-level. Alex is the show's creator and develops the tasks, but on the show he takes the part of "assistant" and Greg takes on the ego trip of sitting in the big chair, the job of judging points for the tasks and determining whether a competitor's attempts at Loophole Abuse are valid, and the pleasure of bullying Alex.
• Maneki Neko: They appear in parts of series 8, as it had an Asiatic theme.
• Manipulative Editing: Is often joked about in the online outtakes, in which Greg will often make a comment along the lines of "That's not making it in [to the final broadcast edit of the show]". This is usually for entirely valid reasons (a lengthy tangent that would bump up the run-time without really adding anything, or some off-colour jokes that would probably create some difficulties regarding broadcast guidelines, etc.), but on one occasion Alex claimed he'd informed the contestants of a task penalty, only for Joe Lycett to claim he hadn't and start denouncing the show as "a scam!":
  Greg: Imagine that sentence. But now, imagine it on the editing room floor.
  Joe: These people know the truth!
• Meet Cute: The very awkward greeting and the subsequent interactions between Sian and Joe at the start of a team task in "A Novel About Russian Gulags".
• Mêlée à Trois: The bathtub task in "Meat" gave contestants separate instructions for what to do. It ended with Lolly trying fill the bathtub with as many things as possile, Joe trying to clingfilm the bathtub, and Noel trying to fill the bathtub with water - none of them helped eachother and while they all sabotaged eachother's attempts.
• Mercy Kill: In "Tarpeters," the contestants were tasked with taking a little man (a wind-up toy of a man on a bicycle) on a spectacular journey. Liza Tarbuck has her little man travel across a parking lot with moving cars and bikes. A car eventually runs over the toy, and despite the toy being relatively intact, she decides to put it out of its misery by stomping on it. She placed second.
• Metalhead: Ed Gamble is a proud one. In "Bready Bready Bready," he composes a metal anthem to serenade himself with, and later in "A Cuddle" he considers his love of metal important enough to include (in the form of Ozzy Osbourne's head) in his own version of Mount Rushmore.
• "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name: In "Mother Honks Her Horn", Alex claims that Detail is his middle name.
• Mind over Matter: Joked about in "Join Our Cult." David tries to conceal one aubergine by Sello taping it to the portrait of Greg in the living room (which depicts Greg composed of many vegetables). When Alex points to that aubergine, it immediately falls off the portrait. In the studio, he claims to have avoided pointing at anything else so as not to activate his magic powers.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: At least two studio tasks have had clauses in which any ball, balloon, or other projectile that touches the Taskmaster will result in a penalty or outright disqualification. Greg will play this up by faux-crying out in pain.
  [a balloon brushes his leg]
  Greg: ARGH!
  Fern: It didn't even hit you! He's pretending!
  Alex: He's not pretending. That is the cry of a wounded man.
• Misblamed: Discussed and lampshaded; at one point, Greg dryly notes that despite the fact that Alex is the creator and runner of the show and is responsible for writing and organising all the tasks, he has somehow managed to arrange things so that Greg is the one who gets blamed for them and subsequently has to put up with the frustration and ire of the contestants when they do things wrong.
• Missing Reflection: In series 17, Nick Mohammed dressed as a vampire for his filmed tasks. In an episode 1 task taking place next to a river, there are some shots where he has no reflection.
• Mobile Shrubbery: In "Don't Like Them Go Bang," the task is to deliver a 5-word set of instructions to Alex as discreetly as possible - Rose opts to hide in a fake rock and approaches Alex that way.
  Greg: You stopped and you moved forward, and you stopped, and you allowed eyes that might be surveying the scene to get used to a rock. And then, all of a sudden, you fully stood up. So, the rock has full lady's legs and was walking across open ground. Up until that point, it was pretty secretive.
• Mona Lisa Smile: Alice recreates The Mona Lisa with squirty cream in a task from the episode "BMXing!." Alice got second place.
• Monkey Morality Pose: A task in "A Pistachio Eclair" had two teams comprising Josh Widdicombe, Richard, and Jon, versus Doc Brown, Joe and Katherine. The task preface required one of each team member to wear a blindfold or a pair of headphones, or else they couldn't speak. The people wearing headphones and couldn't speak were not allowed to leave a bandstand. Their task was to get a vegetable from the blind contestant to the one who couldn't speak. Jon and Richard won.
• Monster Clown: Paul dresses up as one ("Brown Clown") to surprise Alex in the first task of "The Dong and the Gong". He sat in a box and jumped out of it, much like a windup jack-in-the-box.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Pops up occasionally with the more creative responses to a task.
  • In the first Champion of Champions Special, the contestants were required to "make a mess and then clean it up." The male contestants all interpreted it literally, throwing trash around and then physically tidying it up. Katherine Ryan, on the other hand, called up multiple family members and lied to them to stir up drama, then called back to say that it was a mistake.
  • In Series 8, in a task that required the contestants to be mean to Alex and then apologise, Lou signed Alex up to receive calls from a bunch of telemarketers and fraudsters with his real-life mobile number (as the apology, mind!), while Sian used his phone to text Greg a photoshopped nude photo of Alex. The other contestants picked things that were relatively nicer and easier to fix (like pieing him in the face).
• Multiple Choice Form Letter: Two of the physical task letters in Series 15 took this form.
  • In "Schrödinger's egg", each contestant was supposed to write down a number between 1 and 100, a length of time between 1 minute and 20 minutes, five ingredients, a country, a noun and an adjective. Their next task was to make a [adjective] [country adjectival] [noun] using all of the ingredients they specified, and to clap their chosen number of times before their chosen amount of time runs out. Kiell won the task, even when he only had 1 minute and 21 seconds to make a cowering Kenyan bench out of sausages, buns, ketchup, mustard, and grilled onions, and clap 7 times.
  • In the team task of "A yardstick for failure", each team had to write the name of a profession in the hole in the task before opening it... revealing that their main task is to write and perform an original lullaby for that profession. Jenny, Kiell and Mae won the task with their lullaby about an artist.
• Mundane Made Awesome: In the Series 8 episode "I've Been a Bit Ill," the team task jumps between Lou, Iain, and Paul's frantic dysfunction and Joe and Sian calmly preparing as they make polite chitchat about the dentist. Viewers have commented, in a show about comedians having breakdowns as they compete in absurd and arbitrary tasks, how soothing they find the sheer normality of Joe and Sian's conversation.
• Mundane Wish: In "Spider in My Pocket", the prize task is "Best thing you would wish for if you had one wish from a genie". Alex, introducing it, claims that that's actually happened to him, and he wished for an air fryer.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg:
  • In Series 2, Greg consistently refers to the competitors as "four comedians, and [some appellation appropriate to Richard Osman]", since the latter isn't a professional comedian.
  • Greg opens the penultimate episode of Series 9 by announcing that he is joined by a group of veteran competitors who have learned that failure is often followed by success — "and also David Baddiel". (David was the lowest scorer of the series and had never won an episode up to that point)
  • Because Series 15 Champion Mae Martin couldn't make it for the third Champion of Champions special, runner-up Kiell Smith-Bynoe had to fill in instead. This led to much of the promotional material for the special referring to the contestants as "four Champions (and Kiell)". Greg and Alex also took many opportunities both in the studio, and in Alex's case, the tasks, to point this out.
• Mysterious Cube of Rubik: The means by which Judi Love planned to baffle and intimidate aliens, as explained in the prize task in "Birdy Hand Finger." If the aliens challenged her to solve it instead, she would inform them that she is Queen Zafufu and participating in such a contest is beneath her.

N

• Nepotism:
  • In the penultimate episode of Series 7, James Acaster accuses Greg of scoring good old friend Rhod Gilbert much more generously than he does everyone else, when he's usually stricter about scoring creative interpretation and Biting-the-Hand Humor.
  • Played for laughs in the 2016 Edinburgh International Television Festival live show, in which the contestants were all commissioning executives for various TV networks. Introducing the line-up, Greg notes that they include two execs who passed on Taskmaster and the exec who commissioned his Channel 4 sitcom Man Down, before introducing "the Deputy Head of Comedy for Channel 4, and tonight's winner, Nerys Evans".
• No OSHA Compliance: Defied in "Friendship is Truth." In the task in which the contestants had to make the "biggest splash," Hugh climbed on the power line structure but was prohibited by the production team from climbing too high. In the studio, Hugh points out that while they were quick to prevent him from climbing too high, they allowed Mel to climb the structure and use the hose to spray water next to active power lines.
• No Sense of Direction: Done twice so far, though both times had the contestants be blindfolded:
  • In "Boing boing", a preface to a task was to be blindfolded, let Alex read out the task proper, and the task itself was to travel as far as possible in 3 minutes, then after that, take off the blindfold, and get back to your starting location in 3 minutes. Furthest travelled away from the starting point, along with the quickest to reach the starting point wins. They were also all given bread to help them. Bob came in first, as he got pretty far, and got back to his starting point, as did Aisling, who came second. Sally got 200 metres away, and was 74 metres away from her starting point, and came third, while Mark thought his starting point was in the wrong direction and came fourth despite using his bread as a guide - apparently a passing dog had eaten his bread. Nish literally went in circles, then when retracing his steps ended up being 87 metres away from his starting point.
  • In "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man", a task was to drive a scooter blindfolded and interact with certain objects, with a 10 minute trial period to get the layout of the course, after which the blindfold goes on. shortest distance to the finishing parking spot won. Hilarity Ensues. Here are the results, but the highlights include; Paul getting lost on foot, Sian using centimetres to measure distances, Lou getting lost for half an hour, Joe using Alex as a sound beacon to get to the finish, and Iain doing surprisingly well. Iain comes first, then Sian, then Joe, then Paul, with Lou coming stone dead last.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Every. Single. Episode. Title. We're not kidding. The title for each episode is a phrase or amusing word said in that episode.
  • "Little" Alex Horne is in fact 6'2, which is a couple of inches taller than the average male height in the UK^note 5'10. He just appears little next to the 6'8 Greg Davies. This forms a Running Gag throughout the show, wherein Alex will attempt to correct or assert his correct height only for Greg to bluntly steamroller him.
• Noodle Implements: While introducing the aubergine task in "Join Our Cult", Alex claims that three aubergines regularly feature in Greg's bedtime routine, without elaborating on how.
• Noodle Incident: Greg mentions that he once had a bad personal experience with Brut in "The Old Soft, Curved Padlock". When pressed for further (presumably embarrassing) details by Russell Howard, he bluntly shuts it down by pointing out that he's in charge and that's not going to be happening.
• Nordic Noir: The team task in "Hollowing Out a Baguette" required each team to create a trailer for Taskmaster. Mel and Hugh end up crafting a trailer (Tugtemester) in this style, complete with As Long as It Sounds Foreign dialogue.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • Greg often uses the word "genuinely" on the show, normally to enforce that he doesn't know the outcomes of the show, or what the contestants have done.
  • In the "Edinburgh does Taskmaster" special, an answer Jeff gave for a task that had him listing TV shows was Baretta, a lesser-known cop drama from the 1980's.
  • In "Clumpy Swayey Clumsy Man", Greg cut up Alex's trousers before the show started, apparently for no reason other than it felt good to do so. Alex was...not pleased.
  • While preparing for the task to drop a water balloon from the tallest height without it splattering ("Toshwash"), Daisy mentions shallow diving in the United States, and immediately upon seeing Alex's dismissive reaction, she has to defend its validity. Greg is equally dismissive in the studio.
  • When Katherine reveals a dead wasp as her prize entry in "Moments of Silence." Daisy notes that wasps are able to identify landmarks and find their way home if they were to travel on a train for a few stops. Greg initially dismisses it as a fantasy, but then Alex does a search and found studies confirming Daisy's statement.
• Not So Above It All: In the Series 7 outtakes, after the lengthy and genuinely heated argument over Rhod's "finding" a satsuma in a sock and the accusations of judicial corruption and collaboration that followed, James grudgingly admits that even he was nevertheless pretty impressed by Rhod's ingenuity.
• Nutritional Nightmare:
  • In Series 3 episode "Little Polythene Grief Cave," Sara's flag meal was made in the shape of the Canadian flag, which consisted of strawberries, red licorice, and frosting, and which she described as being only 15,000 calories.
  • In Series 4 episode "Tony Three Pies," Mel's "exotic sandwich" was a tower of bread with an assortment of sweets and chocolates as fillings.

O

• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Series 4 episode "Look at Me" has a task where the contestants must paint a portrait of the Taskmaster on a canvas on an easel in the middle of a red mat, and only the paint and paint brush could touch the mat, canvas and easel. Contrast this with the potato-in-the-hole task from Series 2 episode "Fear of Failure," which only specified that the contestants could not touch the "red green." Hugh from Series 4 ends up being disqualified in that round when he placed rugs on the red mat to reach the easel while Richard from Series 2 placed second when using the same method.
  • "Dignity Intact" has a task where the contestants must throw a basketball into a hoop without using their hands. The contestants are not allowed to wear gloves or "anything that could reasonably be construed as gloves". Earlier tasks with similar goals had contestants use things that could be reasonably construed as gloves.
  • "Their Water's So Delicious" has a 'get the item as far as possible' task where they're explicitly not allowed to use a car; similar previous tasks included people getting in a taxi or Alex's van.
  • "Long-Legged Lobster" features a task where the contestants must hold two milk bottles above a microwave after opening the task, reused from the New Zealand version. However, the UK version features a 30-minute timer which upon running out of time would result in disqualification, added after David Correos waited over an hour before opening the task.
• Odd Couple: Frankie Boyle and Ivo Graham as a team in series 15, whose dynamic gets them compared to "a 1970s sitcom about people from different classes" or "a father and son who haven't spent any time together". Despite this, they seem to get along rather well.
• Off the Rails: The studio task for "It's Not Your Fault", which required the contestants to stack buckets higher than themselves and place a beanbag on top, descended into this as just about everyone abandoned their own attempt in a bid to sabotage their opponents.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • How Joe Wilkinson reacts after realising he broke the rules by stepping into the red green for his potato throwing attempt in "Fear Of Failure".
  • How every contestant reacts in series six's "Tarpeters" when they realise that Alex is going to show the darts task.
  • In the series five "Give Alex a Special Cuddle" task, after reading the task, Sally asks if Alex will do anything she asks ("Yes") and if he has a change of clothes ("What do you want me to wear?"). She says nothing as she cheerily leaves the room, and the camera moves to Alex, who gives a wide-eyed Aside Glance.
  • Alex has this reaction in Series 7 when James Acaster calls Greg a "pussy" in the studio and Greg immediately stands up aggressively. James begins to cringe and stammer that he didn't know where that came from, and Alex can be seen trying to pull Greg back into his chair to try and prevent a public confrontation.
• Oh, Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us!: Greg and Alex have referred in the show to the fanfic shipping them. Greg jokingly accused Alex of writing most of it.
• Ominous Music Box Tune:
  • The sinister-sounding hurdy-gurdy music that links in between the games. slightly discordant and rather unsettling.
  • The main Taskmaster theme gets its own actual music / Jack-in-the-box variation in a studio task in "A Couple of Ethels." The music is made more sinister because the contestants have to "pop up" from their chairs before finger puppet-Greg pops up from the box.
• Once a Season:
  • So far, each series has at least one contestant carrying out tasks that nobody else does. See Butt-Monkey above for specific details.
  • The first three series each featured a task where the contestants buy a gift for Greg for £20. It stopped with series four.
  • Each series has at least one task which involves an outsider like the task to cheer up a former traffic warden in series seven ("Lotta Soup"), identify what a pensioner used to do for a living in series three ("A Very Nuanced Character"), and to write a song about a stranger in series five ("Their Water's So Delicious"). The only time it was not used was in Series 11, which was the middle of three series chronologically to be filmed in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, where social-distancing working conditions were in force.
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: One task in the episode "Stuck in a Mammal Groove" takes place in a train car and the competitors have to deduce what Alex, who is seated behind them in the adjacent compartment, is wearing. Alex is not allowed to speak and can only communicate with a toot horn. Most of the competitors ask him to toot once for yes and twice for no. Lou, for some reason, decides to use the inverse as her system (two toots for yes, one for no). Joe only devises a system for yes responses (one toot), but didn't have a system for "no" or "ambiguous" - Alex tooted the horn three times as a response to some questions. Alex is wearing a parrot costume.
• Once per Episode:
  • Starting from Series 2, Greg ending each episode with "So what have we learned today?", which recounts the episode's events.
  • Greg will, more often than not, call Alex "Lil' Alex Horne" at the start of each episode, or at some point during its runtime.
  • Each episode in series two has at least one task involving potatoes.
  • Coconuts feature in each episode of series five.
  • Phil Wang makes the same joke in Series 7 (except Episode 5 and 8) about haggling for a given item for the prize task. He haggles for a lower price, then the shopkeeper he buys it from stands his ground, he tries again, same price is said, then he reveals he bought it at the listed price.
• One Head Taller:
  • Josh Widdicombe (5'7") compared to Greg Davies (6'8").
  • The team tasks in series two has Richard Osman (6'6") compared to Jon Richardson (5'7") and Josh Widdicombe.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Zigzagged. There has never been multiple contestants in the same series with the exact same first or last name. However, overall there have been:
    • Three Joes (Wilkinson, Lycett, and Thomas), a Jo (Brand), and a Joanne (McNally)
    • Two Tims (Key and Vine)
    • Two Pauls (Chowdhry and Sinha)
    • Two Richards (Osman and Herring)
    • Two Katherines (Ryan and Parkinson) and a Katy (Wix)
    • Two Sarahs (Kendall and Millican) and a Sara (Pascoe)
    • Three Johns (Hannah, Kearns, and Robbins), a Jon (Richardson), a Johnny (Vegas), and a Jonnie (Peacock)
    • Two Sophies (Duker and Willan)
    • Two Steves (Backshall and Pemberton)
    • A Frank (Skinner) and a Frankie (Boyle)
    • A David (Baddiel) and a Dave (Gorman)
    • The third New Year's Treat features Greg James, the first contestant to share the same first name as the Taskmaster.
    • Series 16 finally properly Averts this, featuring both a Sue (Perkins) and a Susan (Wokoma).
  • There have also been two similar family names (albeit with different spellings) from two non-related contestants; (Paul) Chowdhry and (Asim) Chaudhry. Alan Davies, appearing in Series 12, shares a surname with the Taskmaster himself, although the two are unrelated.
  • There has also been two Jameses, with one as a forename (Acaster) and one as a family name (Greg).
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: "Moments of Silence" has a task where the cast members each have to learn at least two acting roles out of the five characters^note Richard Herring, meanwhile, is asked to learn all five roles in 10 minutes, with each role having a different background and accent^note Sam the lonely Australian fisherman, Nicky the excitable Scottish police officer with a cold, Boss the ruthless businessperson from South Wales, Dr. Buckley the mysterious and menacing Geordie doctor, and Parker the ex-American football player. The accents vary in range from "consistent" (Mawaan's Aussie and Johnny's Scottish) to "all over the place" to Not Even Bothering with the Accent (Katherine Parkinson for both her parts).
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope:
  • Paul Sinha's piggy bank ventriloquist dummy (Ham the Celebrity Pig himself) has two claims to fame — taking down both David Cameron^note who's been accused of putting his gentials in the mouth of a dead pig as part of an Oxford initiation ceremony and Ed Miliband^note who was photographed eating a bacon sandwich and received mockery from all side for the sheer awkwardness of the image... allegedly.
  • For her prize in "Join Our Cult," Rose brings in a cassette tape that has been unspooled and allegedly contains the identity of the murderer of US President John F. Kennedy. Jo suggests that Peter Andre may have murdered JFK, to which David suggested that Greg should add a disclaimer. Greg happily refuses, and repeats to the camera "Peter Andre murdered JFK." (For what it's worth, Peter Andre was born about ten years after Kennedy's assassination, so Greg's defiance is fairly understandable.)
  • On the podcast, Josh Widdicombe revealed that the producers made him sign a release saying they had done nothing to encourage him to get Greg's name tattooed on his foot.
  • Also on the podcast, in discussing the "make your team look like one person" task in "I've Been a Bit Ill," Ed speculates on the conniptions Paul must have sent the studio lawyers into by insisting on rolling around the ground on his recently operated-on shoulder. He wonders whether the makers of The Chase would have sued if the escapade had deprived them of Paul's services as Chaser.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: Deliberately invoked with the New Year Treats, which feature non-comedians (actors, presenters, journalists, athletes, musicians, and politicians) as contestants.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • Rhod Gilbert brought in the same photograph of Greg "looking fat" (and more to the point, posing sensuously in just sheer black briefs) for all but four of the prize task rounds of Series 7 (and even three of the exceptions were still calculated to cause maximum embarrassment for Greg). The audience naturally lapped it up, but while Greg himself was willing to grit his teeth and play along at first (albeit taking every opportunity to grade Rhod down for the prize rounds) the joke had clearly worn thin by the end of the series. This was lampshaded in episode 9 after it had happened again:
    Greg: Right, [Rhod] can have one point for a start.
    Rhod: [protesting] Oh come on —
    Greg: You've had your money's worth out of that picture, you prick.
  • The 'solve the riddle' task from "The Customised Inhaler", as undertaken by the team of three (Desiree, Guz and Morgana) ended up being the longest task filmed up to that point taking well over an hour. Guz frequently had 'revelations', most of which were unhelpful and only served to irritate his teammates and put Alex on the brink of hysterics.
    Guz: There's been another revelation in the lab.
  • As one might expect from the episode title, the contestants take an absurd amount of time to work out the guest's first name (Quentin) in "The 75th Question." The editors are, unusually for a studio task, forced to resort to a Time-Compression Failure Montage to show it.
• Overly Narrow Superlative:
  • In "Wiley Giraffe Blower", Alex's lead-in to one of Josh's tasks refers to him as "one of Devon's top 30 comedians".
  • In "A Novel About Russian Gulags", Alex refers to the two contestants whose attempt is about to be shown as "two of my top five contestants this year".
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Ed and his podcast guests who have previously competed in Taskmaster frequently note that while it never feels good to find out in the studio recordings that you have done very poorly against your fellow contestants, it is even worse when you come away from a task thinking that you have nailed it only to be upstaged by a better approach in the studio record. One such example is how Ed felt about his attempt at the abnormally long body part (with the three kneed left leg), which was upstaged by Rose's extended legs.

P

• Painful Body Waxing:
  • Ed Gamble's submission for the prize task ("smoothest and most desirable thing") in "Don't Like Them Go Bang" is a voucher for the winner to wax Ed's chest on stage after the show during the credits.
  • When tasked to do something unusual with £20 in Series 10 episode "I Hate Your Trainers," Johnny Vegas opts to have the letters TM waxed from his chest. For some reason, he also had his armpit hair waxed as well.
• Painful Rhyme: In "Tarpeters", remarking on the team task "Keep Alex dry. Driest Alex wins", Alex says, "I was only a little bit wet, quite upset", and Greg admonishes him for trying to get a "cheeky, slick little rhyme in". Alex follows up with another:
  Alex: Up next: they're Russell and Alice. They're cool kids, and this is what they did...s.
• Parental Favouritism: In "He Was a Different Man," Tim Vine shows his love for Greg by dressing up as his mother appearing on the red carpet and telling "reporters" how much she loves him. Greg's takeaway is that Tim's declaration of love confirmed his belief that he is his mother's favourite child and sticks it to his sister.
• Percussive Therapy: The first task in "A fat bald white man" was to destroy a cake in a beautiful way. Mel at the time had just left as a host on The Great British Bake Off (and was replaced by Sandi Toksvig). The other contestants used strategies like blowing it up with fireworks, using it as art materials, or spinning it in a washing machine. Mel simply turned the cake upside down and squashed it into the table. Elapsed time: eight seconds. Safe to say, it probably felt quite cathartic.
• Pet the Dog:
  • In the fourth series, Greg repeatedly put Hugh Dennis last or second last in all the prize tasks. The exception was when the prize category was "Best Chair", and Hugh showed a picture of his son as a child from many years ago, on what he called his "best chair" - sitting on his father's shoulders. Greg seemed legitimately moved and awarded him first place.
  • In the finale for Series Six, Greg is especially encouraging toward Asim and grades him leniently while avoiding disparaging remarks. Instead, he kept saying that this episode could be one where Asim finally wins. Asim did.
  • Throughout the eighth series, Greg treats Paul Sinha with a degree of respect, more than most other contestants, and largely does not make fun of him. In "Stay Humble", Paul mentions offhand in the prize task that he went from over 14 stone to 11 and a half stone, which prompted the audience to clap at his weight loss. Later in the same segment, Paul (indirectly) insults him by Greg's mother telling Paul's agent that Greg should get weight loss tips from Paul, which prompted Greg be a little annoyed, but nothing more. Paul then makes a Your Mom joke to his face (comparing him to a blobfish) a bit later on, and Greg doesn't seem fazed by it. It even extends to the other contestants. In the Live Task for "Stuck in a Mammal Groove", Paul had issues getting into his sleeping bag (he'd fractured his arm prior to coming onto the show, which made arm movements hard for him), which prompted his fellow contestants to help him get into it so he could finish the task.
  • Alex points out towards the end of Series 9 that David requests his help in most of his tasks, and Alex agrees because David needs it. It's shown right after Alex helps David inflate balloons for one task, while refusing to help a competitor do the same.
• Phrase Catcher: Of course, the Taskmaster's Assistant shall now and forevermore be known as...
  [High pitched squeak] "Li'l Alex Horne!"
• Pie in the Face:
  • The cake variant happens in the "best blooper" team task in "The Last Supper," in which the team of three use this as part of their humiliation of Alex. Romesh distracts Alex by arguing with him about how to count hundreds and thousands on a cake when Josh slaps Alex in the bum, pushing his face down into the cake, and when Roisin attempts to apologize, Alex slips and falls into a kiddie pool. Though this ends up backfiring on them when Greg points out that, in addition to the blooper being poorly filmed, the bulk of the "blooper" revolves around humiliating a third party rather than one of the team-members experiencing a misfortune, as the task specified.
  • Aisling's offering for the prize task in "A Wind-Dried Puffin" ("best high-octane item") is a rake with a custard pie attached to the end of the handle, with the implication of this trope happening.
  • Iain pies Alex for his "best apology for the worst action" task in "Stuck in a Mammal Groove" and apologizes with an impromptu guitar-based song.
• Plumber's Crack:
  • During Mel's choreography of a ringtone dance in "Friendship is Truth," this happens to Alex as he and Mel are depicted dancing in a back alley, and it is captured by the overhead camera. In the studio replay, Noel comments that he's imagining a miniature Mel and Alex also dancing in Alex's "back alley."
  • In the task to get Alex to shore while in a boat and not getting Alex wet, Nish's buttcrack pops out when he is reaching for the dock in "Dignity Intact." Alex shields him from the camera with his notepad.
    Nish: I can feel the wind on my buttcrack.
    Alex: I can see the wind on your buttcrack.
  • Downplayed with Mark. During the flick book task in "Boing Boing," Sally comments that his underwear always seems to get exposed in every task (because his trousers slide down), but otherwise no visible crack appears.
  • Richard Herring's butt pops out while reaching for exercise balls in a task where he was confined to a wheeled lifeboat and had to get the exercise balls into hoops in "A Documentary About Despots." In the studio, Greg compares the image of Richard's bum ("Old Fella") unfavorably to the iconic image of Michael Jordan's Jumpman pose.
• The Points Mean Nothing: Played with, but usually averted. Unlike most British panel shows, the contestants on Taskmaster actually do compete for prizes — the items brought in for the prize round at the beginning are taken home by the contestant who earns the most points in the episode^note or at least, they can be — according to Alex Horne, it is contractually stated that the winner of the episode is entitled to claim anything that is brought in as part of the prize round, but in practical terms the winner ultimately has the choice whether they claim it or not, meaning that they can decide to return it to the original owner or simply not bother taking it home with them, and the series winner receives the coveted Taskmaster Trophy (a golden likeness of Greg Davies). However, this trope is often still present in spirit; the prize rounds often ask the contestants to bring in unusual or trivial items, and contestants frequently interpret this as humourously or strangely as possible — so while the points mean something, the prizes those points win often don't. For example, one episode sees the contestants competing over who wins a collection of vegetables signed by various celebrities, while another sees them battle for the right to take home various shoeboxes filled with heavy items like concrete, paving stones, a biography of Hitler and Stalin, and watermelon. As summed up by Greg in the latter episode ("The Dong and the Gong"):
  Greg: Rob Beckett is the winner of five luxury shoeboxes, a prize that he told me in the break he thought was rubbish!
• Portmanteau: Nish comes up with the team name "Wumar" (Mark Watson and Nish Kumar) in "Residue Around The Hoof".
• P.O.V. Cam: A task in "Spoony Neeson" required contestants to attach a portable cameras to them, and had 10 minutes to think of something to do with the camera, and 10 minutes to actually do said thing. The most interesting footage won. Mark showed footage of an interesting bike ride (in actuality, he watched a YouTube video of someone on a dirt bike from their POV). Aisling made a Liam Neeson-esque Hostage Situation action thriller parody...with spoons and a missing child (which also birthed the episode title). Bob made a very odd video involving him making zombie noises, digging a face buried in cheesy puffs out, covering said face back up, lifting the box to reveal no face, and then leaving. Nish's is footage of him "completing" a sudoku page, of all things, which prompted Greg to privately talk to him about his seriousness of winning the competition. Sally made a very graphic birthing video, with Alex being the baby, organs and all, which prompted a standing ovation after the video had finished, while Greg was absolutely horrified at what he just saw. Sally came first with 5 points, Aisling, Mark and Bob came joint second with 4 points each, and Nish was last with 1 point.
• The Pratfall: In series 11, Lee makes a blindfolded Mike tumble head-over-heels in a golf bunker by giving him poorly worded instructions.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • Doc Brown does this for his version of the nursery rhyme One, Two, Three, Four, Five in "Pork is a Sausage."
  • Mel is noted as hardly ever swearing, with the worst thing she says in her ordeal of hiding a beach ball being "heck." However, during the live task of the finale "Tony Three Pies," after the task ("draw the median duck - the most median duck wins") is read out, she drops an F bomb:
    Mel: But I don't know what fucking size everybody else is going to draw!
  • Greg and Alex are in shock when they finally hear Tim Vine swear during the task to blow and pop the biggest bubble with his nose in "The Bubble Brothers." Tim's swearing? "Son of a bitch!" Prior to that, the worst thing he had said was "fiddlesticks!"
  • A silent version occurs in the second New Year's Treat episode after Alex, with a surprising reveal of his bitchy side, quips that Lady Leshurr's basketball portrait of Claudia Winkleman is at least accurate in one respect in that "it is orange." Claudia doesn't say it out loud, but she is visibly mouthing the words "Fuck you!" to Alex while giving him the middle finger.
• Pride: Two contestants display a certain amount of hubris throughout the eighth series — Lou Sanders performs her filmed challenges in a bright pink tracksuit with "Taskmaster Series 8 Champion" boldly emblazoned on the back, while Iain Stirling at several points confidently declares a hope to be appearing in a future Champion of Champions special. Works out for Lou, who eventually wins; less so for Iain, who comes second.
• Prisoner's Dilemma:
  • Two examples occur in "Boing Boing":
    • Mark Watson refers to the dilemma faced by the contestants in the "coconut bobsleigh" task by the trope name. The device titled "Coconut Harness" in the caravan is obviously perfect for the task - but if anyone uses the same item as another contestant then they're disqualified. Mark muses that because of this dilemma, everyone will be so wary of someone else using the Harness that ironically no one actually will. He's correct; nobody ends up using it. Furthermore, two other contestants are disqualified because they happen to use a curtain as a sack.
    • The very next task is also similar: the contestants must vote for who they want to win the task. They can vote for themselves, but if they do so and fail to win the most votes, they will lose points.
  • In "Look at me" the contestants had to get an egg into a eggcup using only implements found on the table. The catch being that if anyone else used the same objects as one another, they would later receive a 1 minute penalty. Noel and Joe get 3 minutes tacked onto their time using a bread slice, Hugh used the bread slice and a chopstick and had a 4 minute penalty, Lolly used sticky tack and was done in under 30 seconds, with a 1 minute penalty, and Mel touched all the items, before settling on what the first three used, and got a 5 minute penalty.
  • In "Stay Humble", a task required the contestants to stage an injury made out of food. However, a stipulation to the task was that if two or more people used tomato ketchup, they were disqualified. Paul Sinha challenged this double-bluff and made his injury include ketchup. He was also the only contestant to use ketchup.
  • "Moments of Silence" has a task that takes place in the lab with two coconuts and several implements on the table. The task is to drink a tablespoon of coconut water the quickest, with the caveat being that if two or more contestants choose the same "extraction" method, they would be disqualified. Daisy and Mawaan both used a hammer to smash a coconut open and collected some coconut water on a spoon and are both disqualified. Johnny and Richard both used screwdriver and hammer to open the coconut, but are able to successfully argue themselves out of disqualification in that their extractions were different (Johnny drunk straight from a coconut with a straw and Richard collected the coconut water in a spoon). Katherine, meanwhile, went to the refrigerator and grabbed a coconut water drink and took the longest to complete the task. Despite that, Katherine got the 5 points for her unique extraction method while Richard and Johnny received 4 and 3 points, respectively.
  • "A Yardstick for Failure" has a task about filling a glass, where if multiple contestants use the hose, they are all disqualified. Only Kiell uses the hose, but gets disqualified anyway for failing to fill the glass.
• Product Placement: The show had a Google ad-spot during its 100th episode starring recurring guest and former contestant Al Murray, as well as Series 12 contestant Desiree Burch. It had the two contestants trying to talk to a teacher to make a paper boat using Google Translate on a phone.
• Pun-Based Title: The stop-motion films that each team created in "There's Strength in Arches" (starring a potato) were called 28 Days Tater and Spectater. Other potato-based names were thrown around such as Night of the Living Spud, Mash in the Attic^note A pun on Cash in the Attic, a long-running daytime TV show where members of the public who need cash invite antique experts to their homes to see if they have any antiques that can be auctioned off, and Hateful Potato.
• Punctuation Changes the Meaning: In the final stage task in Series 2, the instructions went: "Put on a pair of food-handling gloves, eat a whole banana, correctly put on a tie, and clap as many times as possible." After Katherine Ryan, the only female contestant that series, objected to "correctly put on a tie", the comma was moved after "correctly" to make: "Put on a pair of food-handling gloves, eat a whole banana correctly, put on a tie, and clap as many times as possible" so she wouldn't be at a disadvantage.
• Pungeon Master: Tim Vine, so very much, to the point where a solo task in "The Bubble Brothers" had Tim Vine tasked with making an outfit using only materials he'd purchased from a stationery store. Both Greg and Alex knew Tim would make a pun at the end of the task. The other contestants would win a bonus point if they could guess the Punny Name Tim gave his outfit. His outfit was made up of pictures of trains, as well as paper and other stationery equipment. Sadly, no one got it right; Tim made a tracksuit.
• Punny Name:
  • Frank's meal in "The Last Supper" has pun-based names, from the meal as a whole to its individual courses. Examples include "Watercress Down" and "Beef au Van"^note zucchini slices were used as garnish on a steak to make it resemble a van
  • Richard and Jon form a team in series 2, on the basis that Jon is Richard's son.
  • Tim Vine in series six sometimes does this. In "BMXing!", his squirty cream art was a picture of the words ER written on the ground, and he titled it 'Her Majesty the Cream'. In "H", he named his snooker trick shot 'the lesser-potted giraffe', as the shot in question involves the ball hitting a squeaky toy giraffe. The other contestants were even able to win a bonus point if they correctly guessed what pun he'd come up with at the end of one task.
  • The spy task in "Don't Like Them Go Bang" features a surveillance post inside a van with "S. P. O'Nage Plumbing" on the side.

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