Yuletide telly is often credited with providing “festive cheer”, but if you’re lucky enough to be able to do Christmas properly, that’s not the time when you need a screen to pep up your outlook. New Year cheer is what we want – something to brighten the days in early January when the needles have fallen off the tree, the whisky cream has crusted and the darkness outside is forbidding. Step forward Taskmaster’s New Year Treat, an annual bonus from a show that reliably lightens one’s mood.
These one-offs are meant to give non-comedians a chance to play, the theory being that people who aren’t funny professionally wouldn’t be able to sustain a season. The new year roster does, however, have a couple of cheats up its sleeve. Lenny Rush of Am I Being Unreasonable? and Dodger fame, for example, is a comic actor and therefore is funny professionally: a whole season would only be a big ask because he is 14.
Rush is on it straight away in the preliminary show-and-tell round, where the theme is objects that would cause a stir if brought into a room full of strangers. His reaction to rapper Kojey Radical’s offering of six robot puppies, implying that he might respond with seven, shows his improv game is on point. Host Greg Davies, who has heard hundreds of quality comebacks in his time as Taskmaster, twinkles with recognition – and then Rush nails the prepared lines as well. “I’m the only kid here, and I wanted to fit in somehow, so I brought … beer and cigarettes.”
An almost as blatant comedian in disguise is someone who has already flexed her flawless comic timing on Murder in Successville and Mandy: Deborah Meaden from Dragons’ Den is ideal casting for a Taskmaster one-off. The first proper task involves eating an unreasonable amount of poppadoms. “I’m a serious businesswoman,” Meaden tells the show’s creator Alex Horne in between monster chewing sessions. “I do deals every day. People take me seriously.” The half-second gap between that sentence ending and another pile of crunchy appetisers surging from fist to mouth is as precisely judged as it would be coming from a veteran sitcom actor.
A singular edition of Taskmaster is too short to establish the quasi-sitcom rat-a-tat of a proper season, where seven comedians bounce off each other as tasks are reviewed and points awarded. But if the show’s best comedian lineups create some sort of family unit as they develop, this special instantly has the feel of a clan getting together to play parlour games. Taskmaster always strikes a miraculous balance, managing to be sharp and rude without straying into mean-spiritedness, and that’s in abundance here.
A round where the contestants have to draw a self-portrait on an iPad without using their hands – most of them paint with their noses, although Radical and Rush find loopholes, using a banana and Alex Horne’s forefinger, respectively, as makeshift styluses – is essentially a game of Pictionary where everyone guffaws generously at how bad all the artworks are. It is the simplest fun, although the task is complicated by the stipulation that the artists must become increasingly angry as they draw. That gives the comedy pros another chance to shine: Meaden is particularly good, drawing on a lifetime of addressing people with extreme curtness when business conditions demand it. The acting brief also fits with the gameplan Radical has turned up with, which is to set up an imagined beef with Horne, mirroring the endlessly funny dynamic between Davies and his punchbag sidekick.
Horne’s willingness to be the butt of jokes comes into play in the poppadom round too, in which the frantic eating must be interspersed with insults aimed at the co-host. The unexpected star there is friendly TV naturalist Steve Backshall, whose quite specific barbs – “I’ve never liked the Horne Section” – are as pleasantly spicy as the way Radio 2 stalwart Zoe Ball leans into the enunciation of the word “wankflap”, when encouraged to do so by Davies later on.
The episode’s showreel moment comes during the best task of the week, which presents the participants with a desk covered in items that can in some way “pop” – bubblegum, a balloon, a cat feeder, a toaster – and asks the players to make them go off simultaneously. Spotting that Meaden is not a regular user of a standard toaster, Horne tells her it’s voice-activated and she momentarily believes him, creating a clip where Meaden looms over a £30 appliance, sternly instructing the two slices of white bread inside to “go down”.
Back in the studio, Meaden laughs harder than anyone, delighted to have played a part in another nugget of curious Taskmaster magic. This show is indeed a treat.
• Taskmaster’s New Year Treat is on Channel 4.
