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But the good news for me, after holding this secret in since December last year (when I filmed my first couple of days) is that finally the show and the guests were revealed this morning.
I am part of the line-up for series 10 of Taskmaster. I don’t know how they knew I’d be up for being in the series, but I guess they just had a wish list and took a punt and after some tough negotiation I agreed to help them out.
Ha ha, I am funny. Obviously this is a dream come true for me. It’s the most consistently brilliant show on TV and I couldn’t wait to humiliate myself and then have Greg Davies humiliate me further.
You can see the trailer here. This is, by the way, just footage from one of the tasks, quite a long way into the process. I was just that happy to be doing it. I don’t think I stopped smiling. Well, maybe on the ones I totally fucked up.
I finished my last day of task filming just before lockdown and we’ve been doing the studios since Saturday. Today was the last day and it continued to be the most joyous, if increasingly slightly tense, job of my life.
I’ve been taking on Johnny Vegas, Daisy May Cooper, Katherine Parkinson and Mawaan Rizwan and it’s been a fierce though very friendly competition. And in spite of lockdown restrictions and no audience, I think it’s worked as a very funny show, not least because of the incomparable hosts Greg Davies and Alex Horne.
Who wins and loses is not important in the least and you know me, I’m not competitive, so taking part was all that mattered, but even so it’s been a total rollercoaster. But mainly one fuelled by tears of laughter. It’s a shame we’ve had to keep apart from each other outside of the show, though we had a little drink to toast the end of the series outside the studio tonight.
Of course the joy of letting out the secret of the fact I am doing this, is now replaced with the secret of what happened in the series. And it will be mid-December before you find out everything (the show starts in October on Channel 4). And I am not saying a fucking word.
All you need to know is that if I won I’ll be unbearable and if I lost I’ll be unbearable, so just enjoy these months where I am not allowed to say, and so will be slightly bearable.
It was lovely to see so many delighted tweets about the news. Many of you have been on this journey with me and I am glad that some of you see it as a personal triumph for you that I am BACK ON THE PROPER TELLY. I just want to be on the telly. But as much as I will jest otherwise I am not going to stop all the batshit stuff that I have been doing online.
Imagine me at the beginning of this year- I knew that Taskmaster was coming, I had just about finished writing six episodes of Relativity, I’d secured Michael Palin for RHLSTP and was doing a gig at the O2 (and had a book deal on the horizon too). This was going to be a great year.
Plans got a little bent out of shape, but most of the stuff I had planned has happened and without the pandemic we’d only have 2 players in self-playing snooker, stone clearing would be audio only, I I wouldn’t have got self-playing snooker on TV, Twitch would probably have been used mainly for streaming live shows and Ally and Herring would never have existed.
So what I am saying is that I am delighted that Covid happened.
Ha ha. Once again. Hilarious.
What a ridiculous level of variety to my work this year - a daytime Radio 4 sitcom, a book about a stupid thing I did, with some serious content, craziness at home and a big Channel 4 show and it’s not even August.
So it’s still been an OK year, you know if you can ignore absolutely everything else that has happened.
But for now I get a family holiday and a chance to relax (after Thursday’s episode of
Twitch of Fun - Ally is going to be so jealous).
Remote RHLSTP with the inspirational and charming (and very funny) Lauren Pattison is up. Her positivity is disarming and infectious. I am sure she has a very bright future.
