Taskmaster, series 10, review: so much fun, you could almost forget the pandemic

If you are a fan of Taskmaster - and there are many, which accounts for the show’s new berth on Channel 4 - then I have a confession to make: I had never seen Taskmaster before this week. That’s partly because it was previously on a channel called Dave, which is aimed squarely at men called Dave (and Gary and Geoff, at a push). I also have a fear of comedy panel shows, populated as they are by comedians treating every appearance as if it were a hustings for presidency of the student union.

How pleasant, then, to discover that Taskmaster is neither blokey nor political. It is just a very silly light entertainment show, which I mean as a compliment, in which most of the enjoyment is derived from seeing how much the people on it are enjoying themselves.

The format, in case you don’t know, involves Greg Davies setting pointless tasks for the contestants and then judging them in a fairly arbitrary manner. Show creator Alex Horne joins in as a sort of Teller to his Penn. The comedians taking part in this opening show were Daisy May Cooper, Katherine Parkinson, Mawaan Rizwan, Richard Herring and Johnny Vegas. None of them was annoying, which was another turn-up for the books. And none of them attempted to be political, unless you count Vegas smashing a cardboard Parliament with a giant chicken while chuntering about Jeremy Corbyn.

Written down, the tasks sound really weird, so I’ll just say they included pretending to make a cow disappear and attaching some balloons to an egg. The solutions were pretty inventive. It all seemed a bit awkward at first - five comedians sitting in socially distanced formation in a studio the size of an Amazon warehouse. But the longer I watched, the more I surrendered. And the longer I thought about it afterwards, the more it made sense.

For one hour a week, you can take yourself away from the awfulness of lockdowns and the tanking economy and every public utterance by Matt Hancock, and instead watch a show in which a bunch of comedians try to cross someone’s back garden with a giant teddy, without touching the ground or spilling a tray of drinks. It’s fun, and nothing else is at the moment. Taskmaster is the show we need right now.