My Personal Favourite Taskmaster Episode
Content Warning: This post features fake gore made out of food. If you have any aversion to that sort of stuff please take that into consideration if you're going into this post. Thank you.
I shared in my Weekly Update from a few days ago that I've been really into Taskmaster recently. I started watching the series around 2 months ago and I've been doing so almost every day since. As of writing I just finished Series 12, but after writing about it a bit I started to reminisce on some previous series, and I got the idea to share what is my favourite episode and why!
I don't really follow the Taskmaster community super closely or anything, so I don't have a concrete idea as to what series and episodes are most popular, but I know that Series 8 isn't very popular. I get, but even if it's not my favourite I find it rather underrated, and it happens to contain my favourite episode I've watched so far of the entire programme: Stay Humble. (S8 E5)
Spoiler Warning: If you haven't watched this episode and don't wish to get spoiled, you can return to this post once you've watched it. You can watch the episode for free on YouTube.
This was Episode 5 of Series 8, marking the halfway point of the series. What makes a Taskmaster episode especially good is entirely subjective, and I think that my personal way of thinking is probably quite rare, but what I like the most in an episode is that the tasks themselves are fun and lead to fun moments/outcomes. Plus, the way I personally know if I really like a task is if I'd have fun trying it for myself.
In the case of this episode, with the exception of the live task at the very end, every single task looks extremely fun and led to interesting moments in some way or another. Even if they aren't all my favourite tasks or moments overall, I feel like they make an incredibly strong episode altogether.
The prize task was a fairly simple one, it was just to bring the "Best face". I had a pretty good laugh at all of the entries, I appreciated Sian Gibson bringing in a picture of Faceman, and Lou Sanders bringing in a picture of a hypothetical baby between her and Taskmaster (Lord) Greg Davies was wild. However, Iain Sterling absolutely deserved the win by bringing an entire outfit filled with Greg's face.
Prize tasks for me are usually not the strongest parts of episodes, including this one, but it still gave me a very good laugh to start the episode off!
The first traditional task was one where there was a bucket of sand attached to the ceiling in the lab, and they had to divert as much sand into another bucket without moving either of them, and not being able to touch the sand or leave the lab. They only had some pretty inconvenient items to use, and Alex tied one of their hands to a string which started to release the sand in the bucket when they moved it.
This was a pretty standard task, with most contestants having pretty simple solutions. They all either used some small egg cups, or a colander which was much larger but covered in holes (obviously). Ultimately Lou won by using the colander and covering the bottom holes with some toilet paper.
However, the most notable moment came from Iain again, who misread the task and moved one of the buckets and touched a lot of sand, and after realizing his mistake he completely threw the task by exiting the lab. This was one of my favourite moments from Series 8, and one that still stands out across the whole show for me.
The third task was a creative task where the contestants had to create the most realistic-looking injury using food, with the caveat that if two or more people used ketchup they'd be disqualified (which fortunately didn't happen, ketchup makes pretty bad fake blood anyways).
With the exception of Paul Sinha (who was the only one who used ketchup), I really liked all of them! Iain's was probably the weakest for me, as I didn't fully get what it was supposed to be until they explained it, but it was still fun. Sian and Lou made some very good fake chunks of gore, though their videos were more on the comical side for me, and even though he didn't win it Joe Thomas absolutely smashed it in my opinion, not just creating a pretty gnarly fake injury of a birthday candle going through his eye, but also a genuinely unnerving film with it.
You know it's a good creative task when Greg puts three people in joint second place. This one remains one of my favourite creative tasks ever, though that may just be the practical effects nerd in me speaking.
Next up is a rare long-term / "homework" task, which is a task that the contestants get to work on past the principal recording of the show. This time it was also a team task, having the contestants film a video of themselves throwing a big beach ball out of shot, and then have the next person catch it in a new location and throw it out of shot again, and so on.
This one was just pretty fun to watch, with the team of three (Iain, Lou, and Paul) creating the shorter video but still a pretty fun one, with Paul catching a ball in one of his gigs, and Iain passing it around in a room full of people. The other team of Joe and Sian had a longer video, with most of Sian's shots also featuring Series 1 contestant Romesh Ranganathan, in places that are obviously not where they claim they are.
Because all of Sian's shots with Romesh were actually in London her team ended up with the lowest score, though they only got one less than Iain and Lou, with Paul getting a bonus point for covering the furthest distance by himself!
The last of the main tasks took place inside the train station, which was the secondary filming location of this series and one of my favourites of the whole show. For the task there were a hundred ping-pong balls inside a small pen in a dock, and they had to herd as many of them as possible over to another pen at the other side of the dock just using a basketball, some string.
This is a task that involves both actual strategy, and some physicality as well, as the other pen was 36 metres away. Both Joe and Lou did very well, herding 51 balls with the exact same technique, slicing the basketball to create a bowl to bring over a lot of them at once. The other three used the balls of string to hold or push the ping-pong balls to varying results, with Iain getting 27, Sian getting 8, and Paul only getting a single one in.
However, it was revealed that one special ping-pong ball had a sticker that said that if someone herded it their total score would be halved. Both Joe and Lou herded it, lowering both their scores to 25.5, giving Iain the win.
It isn't the most fair moment, but that's just how Taskmaster is, and honestly the occasional unfair moment like this is something that really spices up the show, so I don't really mind it! Plus this one was relatively minor.
And then the live task was kinda whatever, not that notable, just a standard memory task where nobody did exceptionally well. In the end Iain Sterling won the episode with 21 points, being just one point ahead of both Joe and Lou!
And that's the episode! It's a pretty underrated episode of a pretty underrated series. I understand why though, as there are other episodes with moments that are more memorable, but when that happens I usually just remember that specific bit of the episode and struggle to really remember the rest.
For me this episode still has a lot of fun moments, but they don't completely overshadow each other, so I pretty much recall every bit of it very fondly! And that is why it's my favourite episode of the entire show I've watched yet.
