Characters / Taskmaster Series Fourteen

Taskmaster "characters" index
British series:
Series: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen
Specials: New Year Treat | New Year Treat II | New Year Treat III | New Year Treat IV
New Zealand series:
Seasons: One | Two | Three | Four
Australian Series:
Seasons: One

"We were hoping for one of the teams to be stupid enough to put their hands on each others' hips, but we weren't expecting everyone..."

— Alex Horne

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Dara Ó Briain

"Wait, what? What? Wait. Wait, what?"

^{Click to see Dara in “Spider in My Pocket” Spoilers!} 

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An Irish comedian and TV presenter who is best known for presenting Mock the Week,^note which unfortunately ended its run as this Taskmaster series was being aired on TV several Edutainment Shows, and the 2016 reboot of Robot Wars.

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• The Ace:
  • Dara wins "Enormous Hugeness" with 30 points, which makes him the first ever contestant in Taskmaster history to win an episode by coming first or joint-first in all the tasks.
  • Dara ends up winning the series, breaking the long-standing "First Chair Curse", and topping the table with the highest-ever points total for the UK competition.
  • He goes on to win Champion of Champions III, becoming the first and (at the time) only contestant in any version of the show to exceed 200 points in the process.
• Actor Allusion: Greg makes multiple references to Dara's science background and mockingly talks about how that should put Dara at an advantage.
• The Big Guy: The largest member of Series 14's panel by far. John Kearns notes that Dara is very strong and easily manhandled him during the sand-moving team task.
• Big "SHUT UP!": By the time the team task shown in the final episode comes around, Dara's patience with John — never vast — has clearly run out to the point where he's in no mood to be asked whether his eye colour is "Sinatra blue".
  Dara: Oh, shut up.
• Call-Back: His appearance on Champion of Champions 3 has several of these:
  • He wears the same task outfit as before, but with several changes. The back of his jumpsuit has his catchphrase "Wait, what?" spelled out in stick-on gems. There are also patches depicting his team tasks sewn onto his jumpsuit: a sandcastle and a shopping trolley, when John sabotages their team in "Dafty In The Middle"; mountains and a helicopter, in reference to the live task in "Enormous Hugeness"; and a patch showing the bird that Dara insists he could see in the "create the best picture of a bird" task.
  • In the opening titles, there is a shot of Dara dressed up as the lady who throws her baby, from his attempt for the "catch something" task in "Dafty In The Middle".
• Catchphrase: In "Long-Legged Lobster", Dara ends up with the catchphrase, "Wait, what?"
• Competition Freak: He is intent on earning every point he can whether it be through good task attempts or passionate arguments in the studio. He's also driven to frustration during team tasks as he takes them seriously while Fern and John goof around. On the podcast, he explains that his competitiveness was because he enjoyed Taskmaster so much and the only way he could get just one day more was to win and compete in Champion of Champions.
• Evil Laugh: Greg compares his laughter during the 5 grapes task to that of a supervillain undergoing their Start of Darkness.
• Face Palm: When reviewing team tasks in the studio and during studio-based team tasks, he alternates between burying his head in his hands and a Thousand-Yard Stare because he's driven beyond frustration by Fern and John and their antics.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • In the grape task in "Enormous Hugeness", Dara is the only person to leave the garage before his time is over. As he opens the door, he fails to notice the grapes hidden inside the door, which at one point are approximately at his eye level.
  • During the bubble machine task in "Crumbs in my Bralette", he fails to notice the power cable to the machine when looking under the table, despite telling himself out loud to look under the table.
• Genre Savvy: He says that his wife reminded him to check under tables when shooting tasks.
• Hidden Depths: Puts on a surprisingly dramatic performance with the sparse script "Door(s)" John wrote for him.
• Only Sane Man: John and particularly Fern derail the team live task in "Enormous Hugeness" so badly that Dara is almost in physical pain, while he just about salvages their attempts.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Sort of. He is the only one to figure out that in the grape-flour task in the second episode, the "five grapes" that need to be collected don't need to be the ones that are hidden in the flour... but fails to realise that this is because grapes have been concealed in the garage door for the contestants to use. Instead, he ends up rushing to the kitchen to find some.

Fern Brady

"♫ It is me, Fern Brady, me, Fern Brady, I'm the rightful queen! ♫"

Fern: I remember thinking I’d come up with quite a good system with the, the system of endless plates and that kept us going actually.

Alex: It wasn’t a system of endless plates. It was 12 plates.

A Scottish stand-up comedian and writer.

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• Catchphrase: At least once an episode, Fern lets out a despondent "Oh no".
• Cloud Cuckoolander: When instructed to "catch" something for a task, Fern assumes she has to catch an animal (rather than, say, a ball.) When told she can request any three items for a later task with a £50 budget, she asks for a taxidermied animal.
• Did Not Think This Through: In an episode 4 task, Fern has to tidy up any mess she makes in the course of the task. She promptly tips a suitcase full of cutlery onto the floor, causing Alex to audibly laugh off-screen.
• Hidden Depths: Painted a shockingly good self-portrait with a sausage on a loo-seat in "A New Business End", when the other contestants managed at best cartoonish caricatures of themselves with their tools.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: Her task outfit is a blueish-green catsuit with a metallic one-piece, collar, and cuffs worn on top — all made for her by a fetish-gear manufacturer — while stamped lettering on the bust and collar declare her to be the "Taskmistress". She's mentioned that she wanted to rival Phil Wang's infamous jumpsuit from Series 7.
• Innocently Insensitive: Fern casually remarks that she's surprised Greg would want to try her Chinese breakfast, because he's from Shrewsbury and seems to be the sort of person who only eats roast meat.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Following her magnificent "I Want" Song-cum-Diss Track in "Crumbs in my Bralette," Fern has told the podcast that Greg came up behind her before every single studio record from then on to tease her by singing "It is me, Fern Brady, me, Fern Brady..."
• Oop North: For the one-act play task, Fern puts on a pitch-perfect Geordie accent when performing Sarah's script. Fern even throws in a "Howay, man!"^note a regionalism that can mean: go away, good luck, come on, hurry up, OK for good measure, even though Sarah didn't include that in the monologue.
• Sleepyhead: She often complains of being tired during even quite short tasks. On the podcast, she reveals that she was so excited to be on the show that she couldn't sleep at night.

John Kearns

"I die every week."

Greg: John, anything you want to say in your defence.

John: My brain doesn’t work that way.

Fern: Your brain doesn’t work.

A stand-up comedian whose 2014 show, Shtick, won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Comedy Show.

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• Beware the Silly Ones: Despite being one of the lowest scoring contestants ever in episodes 1 and 2, he wins episode 3, partly by successfully sabotaging his teammates in a secret task.
  • John's also shockingly good at the more athletic tasks, running away with the airport trolley bowling and yoga ball snooker tasks and coming in second in the milk jug task to Sarah (who had found a more creative way to win). The audience audibly reacts to the force with which he throws an item over the caravan in the final pre-recorded task.
• Book Ends: He wears the same jumper for the studio portions of both the first and last episodes of his series.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • After what is statistically one of the worst starts to any series of Taskmaster ever, Greg has clearly decided by episode 2 that this is to be his role going forward whether he wants to be or not.
    Greg: John, I put it to you, that you are not in this for the win.
  • Once it's revealed he was tasked with sabotaging his team, Dara and Fern proceed to tear into him, with Dara even semi-threatening to kill him.
    Dara: [Having just learned of the ruse] Can I say it's kind of a relief because at the time, I thought he was an IDIOT!
    Fern: I just thought John was an idiot!
  • Even Alex, normally a Nice Guy, starts piling on John.
    Greg: So far so strong! But, great news...
    Alex: John next.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: During "Enormous Hugeness" he gets sidetracked by an argument over whether or not small rubber ducks are commercially available and claims to have tried to buy one off a pharmacist.
  • The Cuckoolander Was Right: John later tweeted a photo of his local pharmacist's rubber duck display, emphasized by several rather self-righteous arrows.
• Failed a Spot Check: Discussed in the podcast. John reveals that before filming the team task in "Dafty In The Middle", he was told by the crew that they needed to do a pick-up shot of him leaving the caravan. John didn't think much of it at the time, so he was genuinely shocked when Alex gave him the secret sabotage task. It was only later that John realised that this was a clue that something was afoot, his reasoning being that the crew should know by now how to film the show so that pick-up shots would be unnecessary.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Within the team of three, it's made abundantly clear that Dara was fed up with him and that Fern had had her fill as well^note Fern's opinion of John was made worse when she learned of the sabotage task in the studio. She'd thought that it was a genuine mistake at the house and worked hard to calm Dara down by pointing out to Dara that John had a newborn baby at home and must be exhausted. She became outraged when the subterfuge was revealed and realised she'd defended deliberate treachery.
• Heroic BSoD: After he fails in the last part of the gauging extensions live task in episode 8 due to a trick vacuum cleaner, John just stands, stunned motionless, and stares agape at it for several seconds as the other contestants are clearing the stage.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: For the airport sign-making task, he decides to be creative and use wingdings as his font. This comes to bite him as he has to then do what the signs say but he can't remember what he typed.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: Inverted. He's known for wearing wacky outfits when performing on stage. For Taskmaster, he wears a downright sedate shirt-and-tie combo.
• Informed Flaw: Greg paints John as being one of the most hopeless contestants in Taskmaster history. Points-wise, however, there was never a wide gap between himself, Fern, and Munya and he won two episodes before either Fern or Munya won one.^note Though it should be kept in mind that all three spent the entire series languishing in the bottom three places and kept swapping last place with him ending the series in joint last with Fern which was the first time this has happened so Greg isn't entirely far off.
• The Mole: John was tasked with sabotaging his team for one task. This infuriated Dara on the day and made him angrier when he learned about the subterfuge in the studio. Fern was also enraged in the studio because she'd come to John's defense and worked hard to calm Dara down after the incident.
• The Load: Dara and Fern — but especially Dara — view him as a liability during team tasks. Not wholly unfairly, it must be said.
• Running Gag: On the walk over to each task, he'll usually throw his jacket on the ground quite stylishly.

Munya Chawawa

"So in Zimbabwe..."

"Munya, you are the most confident person we’ve had on this show, because whatever the task is, Munya always goes ‘I’m gonna be amazing at this.’"

— The Taskmaster

A comedian and actor and the man behind parody posh drill rapper Unknown P.

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• Blatant Lies: If he comes up with a solution that he thinks will run afoul of Greg's reading of the rules, he'll say he's doing the Zimbabwean way of doing things.
  Greg: Munya is alive with energy. Keen. Like a newt! Solving problems! And, you know, if he doesn't manage to solve them through logic, he'll make something up, like "Zimbabwean Darts". Obviously, absolute horseshit... Sometimes, I don't know whether he's the best ambassador for Zimbabwe.
• Boisterous Weakling: As noted by Greg, he has a tendency to throw himself into the tasks with nothing less than absolute self-confidence in his own abilities. Unfortunately, this confidence is frequently unmatched by his actual abilities, since he languished in the bottom half of the leaderboard throughout the series and came last in the most episodes out of all the contestants.
• Cloudcuckoolander: When tasked with putting a large tarpaulin in a container, he picks a bread bin (the smallest available) out of the belief that the crew had dug a concealed hole in the concrete beneath it.
• The Gadfly: Munya forces Alex to throw tennis balls over the house for him to catch, while Munya sits still. As Munya repeatedly criticises Alex and yells at him to throw harder, Alex mutters "fuck's sake" under his breath, making Munya the first contestant to make Alex swear.
• Hypocritical Humor: He mocks the older members of the cast as being Technologically Blind Elders but then demonstrates that he has no idea how to use a laminator.
• Running Gag: Munya constantly talks about growing up in Zimbabwe, to the point where Alex preemptively announces that it will happen at least once in every task attempt.

Sarah Millican

"I didn't ask for an opinion, I asked for the time."

A comedian and TV presenter who has made many guest appearances on panel shows. She also hosted her own show, The Sarah Millican Television Programme.

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• Achievements in Ignorance: Sarah aces a difficult task in episode 8, where the contestants were told to find a photo of their hand among hundreds of photos of the backs of strangers' hands. Sarah managed it in a single guess, because unlike the other contestants (and the strangers) she posed her hand in a grip rather than flat, mainly because she thought the masturbation pose would look funnier.
• Boring, but Practical: For the episode 7 prize task, The Thing You Would Most Like To Have With You On A Car Journey. While the other contestants bring weird out-of-the-box prizes for consideration, Millican's prize is...an Emergency Escape Hammer in case the car gets in an accident. She winds up winning the task.
• Genre Savvy: She often checks under desks and tables to see if there are any hidden clues or tools. To the extent that during one task, the production actually put an extra task under the table that just said "Hello Sarah".
• Not So Above It All: As lampshaded by Alex, Sarah became willing to nitpick Dara's attempt in the final pre-recorded task, as they were vying neck and neck.
• Oop North: Her distinct Geordie accent is on full display. In fact, she's from the same town as Series 13's Chris Ramsey.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Because Sarah is savvy about clues and tools being hidden beneath tables, the crew created a special task envelope for her to find. When she opened it, it read only: "Hello, Sarah..."
• Team Mom: She mentions feeling maternal towards Munya during team tasks and said that her going along with some of his zanier ideas was like a tired mother indulging an energetic child.
• Trash the Set: Downplayed. In "Long-Legged Lobster", the first task is set in the lab, and requires the contestants to hold two cartons of milk above two microwaves for as long as possible. Sarah realises that the cartons don't have to be full of milk, and she pours the milk all over the floor. Alex then reveals that the crew didn't manage to fully clean up all the milk and that some got beneath the floorboards and spoiled, meaning that Munya filmed all his lab tasks while complaining about the bad odour.
  • In the next episode, we get to see the two of them do a team task in the lab. Munya complains about the smell, and when Sarah realizes why the lab smells so bad, she silently mouths the word "Sorry" to Alex.