Romesh setting the tone of the show in the first episode, opening a watermelon by smashing it on the floor.
Josh's answer to receiving £20 to spend on a gift for Greg: getting the latter's name tattooed on his foot.
Series 2
Richard Osman outsmarting the wording of the first pre-recorded task, by bringing the mat down the hill to the three exercise balls. Alex has admired Richard's thinking in later interviews, saying that Richard absolutely nailed it.
Subverted with Joe's hole-in-one in potato golf. It certainly was an awesome throw, but he's disqualified for accidentally breaking the rules by stepping on the red green.
For the Series 2 "buy a gift for the Taskmaster" task, Katherine Ryan reveals that she bought Greg a small plot of land which legally (not really but it’s the thought that counts) qualifies him to the title of "Lord Greg Davies". It plays perfectly into Greg's persona, and he is very happy with the gift.
Series 3
Despite being among the group mocked as silly enough to just chuck a green pea onto a red carpet in the middle of a grassy and windy garden, Sara Pascoe managed to land her pea on the carpet every time at considerable distances (18 metres was her best).
Al Murray guesses in just over two minutes that the stranger opposite him (who can only answer yes or no) is an anaethesist (when his rivals took up to 45 minutes). Al worked out that it must have been a delicate job (as opposed to manual labour) as the stranger had soft hands without calluses.
When prompted to create a domino rally, Paul uses a long stretch of the garden to set up several objects - including the couch, a football on a truck, and himself wielding a hatchet - all to knock an egg out of a watering can and into a frying pan. It not only works perfectly, it cracks the egg on the side of the pan and drops the empty shell outside.
Series 4
Noel effortlessly hopping through an obstacle course of bunting to deliver a platter of sandwiches, without making a single mistake, while wearing cowboy boots. High-heeled cowboy boots.
Lolly successfully hiding from Alex for 23 minutes in the hide-and-seek task when everyone else topped out at 2 and a half minutes. She even trolls him by calling from her hiding place, and sending pictures of herself on vacation and as a baby.
Series 5
When Sally Phillips succeeds in throwing, eating, and balancing objects on her first try, including perfectly throwing jelly into a bucket. Greg is so impressed that he leaps up to hug her and bring her to the front of the stage to take a bow.
In the challenge to record a POV video, Sally's horrifying nature documentary of the birth of an adult Alex Horne. She rightly gets a standing ovation.
In an outtake, Mark's perfect kick of a pot of yogurt at a target.
Series 6
Alice and Russell disconnnecting the shower above Alex in a "Keep Alex Dry" task was clever, but showboating (a surprisingly rare occurence due to the pressure of tasks) by giving him a towel, blasting him with hairdryers and giving him a dry martini was what took their attempt to the next level. It's a rare occasion where Greg is clearly impressed in the studio.
Liza Tarbuck solving a team task in under a minute, then, ignored by Tim Vine and Asim Chaudhry, completes the task before they can even figure out the objective.
Series 7
James manages to win a task where the contestants had to create a portrait of Greg from items they had gathered for a separate task. James creates a recognisable likeness of Greg and Alex from 49 pebbles and a ukelele, easily beating his competitors, by tearing the ukelele apart into more usable parts.
The five contestants are asked to bring in "the creepiest thing" for the prize task. Rhod reveals a film of himself hiding in Greg's closet, watching Greg sleep. Greg had failed to see all his guests out after a party, and Rhod waited in the closet for hours until dawn, so he had enough light to film.
All five of the contestants' recreations of classic video games. Greg admits that they're all wonderful, and that for once his job is difficult because all of the attempts were genuinely good.
The contestants are challenged to tie themselves up as difficultly as possible; whoever Alex takes the longest to untie wins. Rhod sits for a moment to think, then ties Alex to the chair, puts a bucket on Alex's head and his shoes on his feet, and then casually ties a loose loop around his own wrists. Alex never manages to untie himself. Rhod expected his competitors to object to his unusual interpretation of the task, which has been a running theme through the series. The other four can only admire his imaginative approach.
Rhod gets a hole-in-one at Taskmaster golf by digging up the hole with a spade and moving it to surround the ball, completing the task in one stroke.
"People say my ADHD makes me shit at problem solving. No sir!”
The "scavenger hunt" task sends most of the contestants dashing around the house in confusion trying to find additional task envelopes and a mysterious blue book. James, however, calmly walks from room to room and heads straight to each envelope, winning the task handily. He wins admiration from both Greg and Alex.
Greg: I feel like that whole thing was in real time. That was the fastest ever—
Alex: It was, pretty much. He'd already spotted the blue book during an earlier task. He'd always been aware of his surroundings. [to James] I think you know the show better than I know the show.
James: I love it. I'm a big fan. That was a dream come true.
Series 8
The contestants are asked to move through a train yard to get as close to Alex as possible before he sees them. Alex is standing on a bridge in the distance and the constants have ten second windows to move about as Alex alternates between ducking below the bridge and popping back up. Joe makes a risky run between two stacks of wood, and hides with only milliseconds to spare.
Lou successfully throwing her frying pan into the hula-hoop from halfway across the stage. Even Greg is momentarily speechless.
Joe Thomas, who hasn't won any episodes by that point and has had inconsistently good and bad episode scores, wins "This Is Trevor" outright with 24 points (Lou and Paul were joint second at a distant 13 points) and nearly has a clean sweep. He won or joint-won every task in the episode except for the prize task, in which he was joint second.
Series 9
In "A Cuddle," the live task is to guess whether Greg has a card depicting a horse or a laminator, with each consecutive correct answer earning an entire Taskmaster point. The contestant is eliminated on their first wrong guess. Jo Brand, who is trailing at last place in the episode, manages to guess correctly 13 times in a row (a 1 in 8192 probability), and claw her way up the leaderboard to second place in the episode. At one point, all the other contestants jokingly attempt to block her "psychic powers" by covering Greg's head with their hands, and even that doesn't work.
In the finale, Ed being the only contestant to successfully complete the final pre-recorded task, after being forced to restart the mini-tasks. He is clearly the angriest he's been on the show, but his stubbornness basically secures his series victory.
Series 10
Katherine (in a rare success) demolished the competition in the marble run challenge, being the only contestant to think of creating a U-bend to make the run last longer. Greg was so impressed that he went from considering giving Mawaan a bonus point, for his creative but failed attempt, to threatening to give him negative marks.
Katherine winning the final pre-recorded task, using a clever interpretation of the wording of the task: she went out on a high and applauded by everyone, after struggling all series.
Daisy May Cooper being one of the hardest competitors in the series and being one spaghetti bridge away from winning the entire competition whilst visibly pregnant through the series is something to admire.
Series 11
In "The Lure of the Treacle Puppies," one task is to get a helium-filled balloon to hover between one's neck and waist. Two contestants are shown to have been disqualified because their balloons flew away. When Mike Wozniak's VT is shown, his balloon is also shown to have flown away... and then become caught in some low tree branches on the adjacent golf course. Mike then climbs over the fence, carefully extracts the balloon, and successfully complete the task inside the phone box. At the same time, he makes Taskmaster history as the first contestant to leap over the fence onto the golf course.
In "Premature Conker", the team task involves the teams moving a bag of salt from one table to another. As the bag was not allowed to touch the ground, both teams ended up throwing the bag to each other. During the team of three's attempt, Sarah swallowed some of the salt as she was catching the bag — and she quickly realised that they were throwing a bag of sugar, which was something that Mike and Lee had failed to notice. The moment is so awesome that the clip gets replayed in the studio.
Having been the weakest contestant for much of the series, Charlotte absolutely storms to victory in episode nine, winning three of the tasks and coming second in another; her only moment of failure is getting eliminated first from the stage task. She had already won one episode in the series, admittedly, but even then, winning two episodes is still impressive considering her less-than-stellar overall performance.
An episode later, she ends the series on a high by winning the final studio task.
Mike Wozniak continuing to be The Unfettered in the finale by shaving his hair into a mohawk for the prize task.
Series 12
Overall, the cast is among the strongest performing of all time in Taskmaster, with Guz and Morgana entering the top ten of highest-scoring TM contestantsnote a list maintained by journalist Jack Bernhardt, who arranges the list by calculating contestants' actual scores against their potential total scores to take the shorter early series into account.
Morgana ultimately wins the series with 168 points, placing fifth overall in the rankings. The top four ended up within 7 points of one another.
Victoria was the only contestant not to use the big scissors for the balloon popping task in "An Imbalance in the Poppability" and (after a few tries and using free ducks to help her aim) was able to pop it with a dart.
In "Oatmeal and Death", the spacehopper task requires more maths than usual to work out the scores, as it is judged on three factors rather than just one. Victoria Coren Mitchell manages to calculate all the scores correctly in her head before Greg can work them out using pen and paper.
The team task in "The Customised Inhaler" involves solving a riddle that is written in a code and needs to be deciphered first. The key to the code is on the back of a jigsaw that has been split up, with one half in the lab and the other in the living room. Victoria, who is in the lab, manages to decipher most of the riddle with only her half of the jigsaw; and by the time it occurs to her that Alan has the other half, she mainly checks with him that her deductions were correct.
Alex: I mean, I have to say, we didn’t think anyone could solve it with only half the jigsaw, but [Victoria] managed to do it.
Victoria finishes in second place in this episode, making this the first episode where she wasn't in last place.
Victoria comes fourth in the bike-riding task. This may not seem impressive at first glance, but considering that this was the first time she'd ever ridden a bike at all, it's a pretty solid accomplishment.
After a particularly bad day in "A Couple of Ethels" (which included a five-point deduction), Desiree claws her way back with a decisive performance in "Caring Uncle Minpict" to take joint third in the series overall with Alan.
Series 13
Both Chris and Sophie ace the maypole task in "Birdy Hand Finger". Chris hits the maypole with a ping-pong ball on his very first throw, and Sophie manages to strike the pole after a few throws. It then turns out that, on the day, Sophie said that she would give £20 to anybody who managed to complete the task faster than her — and a real time replay of the two attempts confirms that she won by seven seconds.
Bridget scoring 25 points in a single episode in "I Think I've Got This", scoring six points in two separate tasks, and winning the episode with a nine-point lead.
Ardal is set up as Series 13's bumbler, but then he wins two episodes in a row. The second victory is also decisive, as he wins by an eight-point margin.
Sophie's victory in "Heg" with a whopping 28-point total. At the time, this was the highest score for an episode using standard scoring and came second only to Katherine Ryan's contentious 30-point total in Series 2's "A Pistachio Eclair".
Sophie's truly spectacular tongue-stamina in "You Tuper Super", in a result reminiscent of Rhod's keep-your-eyes-open stunt. She outlasts an ice lolly and Alex almost seems to call the attempt finished as the last of the ice block melts.
Champion of Champions II
Ed sending his Taskmaster trophy into space via balloon.
Series 14
Dara becoming the first ever contestant to sweep an entire episode, winning every single task (including bonus points) in "Enormous Hugeness", and scoring a very impressive 30 points, winning with a 9 point lead.
What makes it particularly impressive is that he managed to get over the line despite the less-than-useful contributions of his teammates in the live task.
In "Crumbs in My Bralette", Sarah comes close to matching Dara's clean sweep by winning the prize task and every pre-recorded task. She only stumbles in the live task and still wins the episode.
Dara in "A New Business End", somehow managing to produce a Harold Pinter-esque dark drama of tension, isolation and abandonment out of Door(s), a script by John Kearns in which his character has exactly eight words of dialogue, all spoken into a telephone. Also Fern in the same task, who manages to do an unerringly accurate impression of Sarah Millican while performing her Alan Bennett-esque talking head.
From the same episode, Fern's amazingly accurate self-portrait, painted with the 'business end' of a sausage.
In the grand finale, "Did I Meet These Potatoes Before?":
In the eat-the-grape task:
Dara immediately spots The Grapes of Wrath which gets him to the key to the caravan door in just two steps, allowing him to bypass most of the puzzle and finish with a time of only 04:36.
John manages a small moment of victory by managing to force the locked scissors far enough apart that he could cut the string with them, to Alex's visible surprise.
In the live task, the contestants have to release balloons with the aim of getting them as close to Greg as possible without touching him. With the last shot of the game, and indeed in his last act of the whole series, Dara's balloon flies in between Greg's crossed legs and lands mere centimetres from him, winning him the five points and cementing his series victory.
Dara wins the series with more points than anyone has ever scored in a Taskmaster series before, beating Liza Tarbuck's record by three points with an astonishing 184.
Ivo's attempt at the "fake something" task, which at first appears to be another one of his regular Epic Fail attempts, as he apparently wraps himself in toilet paper to create a shambolic fake mummy that can barely move or talk. Then, as Alex blows the whistle on his attempt, he pops his head round the door asking how it went, revealing the mummy wasn't him at all, much to Alex's and (in the studio) Greg's shock.
In "Schrodinger's Egg", Ivo takes a moment to do some lateral thinking in the first task, and completely surpasses his competitors' efforts in a tricky task by coming up with a way to look inside the pulper without cheating.
While debating whether or not to use the hose in the cup-filling task from "A Yardstick for Failure", Mae and Kiell both independently do impersonations of the other making their decision - and both of them are absolutely correct. Kiell then takes it a step further by successfully predicting that all of his fellow contestants will not use the hose, complete with impressively accurate impersonations of all of them.note Slightly tempered by Kiell then failing to use the hose properly, but it's the correct predictions and impersonations that count.
Series 16
Tasked with recreating a famous piece of art out of 100 memo cards, and only being able to look at one card at a time, Sam manages to construct a stunningly impressive version of Edvard Munch's The Scream, where other contestants were far messier or otherwise chose abstract artworks to make it easy for themselves.
Sue Perkins manages to do a recreation of the Mona Lisa which isn't too shabby either, albeit one possessing "ET-hands".
In the live task of Episode 8, a particularly tricky version of charades, Susan and Sue managed to steal victory in the final two seconds.
Tasked to "Make Mischief", Susan Wokoma sets up a fake task for Sam Campbell. He follows the directions, not noticing that the seal on the task has Susan's initials instead of the usual "TM", and spends 20 minutes shut in the toilet of the Taskmaster house, yelling "Mice!" and whispering "Fish!" as the crew shove appropriate images under the door. He doesn't find out it wasn't a real task until back in the studio... at which point it was also pointed out that "mice" and "fish" together are an anagram of "mischief".
Sam: How deep does this go, Wokoma?
Champion of Champions 3
In a nail-biting contest, Dara Ó Briain wins by one point, bringing his cumulative total up to 206 points, continuing his run as the highest-scoring contestant and the first to break the 200-point mark.
Series 17
When tasked with creating tension, Steve Pemberton sets up a recreation of the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter, with himself and Alex playing two simultaneous games of Hangman. Alex takes an early lead, but Steve catches up and guesses Alex's word - 'nightclub' - leaving Alex to eat the forfeit (a concoction containing yoghurt and hot sauce.) Steve fills in his own word - 'adjutant' - and then turns to Alex, says 'It means 'assistant'', drops his pen, and walks out.
Extra Features
As a treat to mark a million subscribers to the Taskmaster YouTube channel, they released a compilation of the beer mat flip tie-break task, which was filmed for Series 11, 12, and 13, when it was finally used. Astoundingly, the otherwise comically inept Victoria Coren Mitchell romps to victory, defeating all fourteen other contestants from all three series.
International Taskmasters
Taskmaster Norway (aka Kongen Befaler)
The Don’t Blink task in Episode 4. 3rd place used her fingers to hold her eyes open 21 minutes and 42 seconds, she stopped because she got bored. 2nd place, using the same technique, lasted 37 minutes, he stopped because he had to leave for his son’s hip hop performance. The winner did not use his fingers, just willpower, he arranged so he could stay longer than planned, and when he had to leave he got a camera placed in the car, kept his eyes open the whole drive home, and through a drive-through, he stopped when he got home, by choice, he lasted 2 hours and 47 minutes.
