What we thought of 'Taskmaster: The Live Experience' - Mark Muldoon's Comedy Diary

Written by: Mark Muldoon
Published: Thursday 3rd October 2024

Immersive brand experiences are all the rage nowadays. It was presumably only a matter of time before Channel 4's Taskmaster got in on the act.

It's easy to get the impression that the company behind the show, Avalon, are keen to extract all the financial value possible out of prized-assets like this show, though, in fairness it also feels likely that Little Alex Horne and Co. care deeply about the brand, and don't want it tarnished with some easy knock-off immersive offering. You imagine the unspoken mantra to be: if there's to be a cash-in, let it not be a lazy one.

Fans need only remember (if they can) the failure of 2021's Doctor Who: Time Fracture, to be reminded that commercial success is not guaranteed in the immersive entertainment market, even when the intellectual property involved must've made a financial windfall sound like a foregone conclusion. It's also been confirmed that we'll soon get an immersive version of The Traitors, with one exec telling The Guardian in the last few days "aesthetics are quite important [in our] show" and so producers are keen that it "doesn't just feel like a warehouse somewhere".

Which brings us to Taskmaster: The Live Experience, which is, erm, set in a warehouse in South East London. Hey, maybe it wasn't intended as a deliberately-timed attack to coincide with the huge launch week of this show.

If the warehouse setting feels a little manufactured, plenty of thought has clearly gone into its contents. There's fun, playful, inconsequential little comic moments dotted throughout the production. The tech behind the scenes is quite impressive, handling our group of 12 well. There's two experiences available, we did Absolute Casserole, with the other being Melon Buffet. I actually expected the pre-filmed contributions from Greg Davies and Little Alex Horne to be a little funnier, though this was balanced by genuinely great, genuinely improvised humour from our charming IRL host, one of a cast of 76 that go by the name 'Little Little Alex Horne'. Plus there's a very funny rug-pull halfway through, teasing what the nature of the following task might be.

Said tasks are enjoyably varied, challenging a good mix of skills. If anything, after the quality that has gone before it, the simplistic, largely luck-based grand-finale therefore makes for an anticlimax (and I'm not only saying that because I was leading on points going into that round, only to then be defeated at the last hurdle by the comedy critic from The Times). At about 50-55 minutes it's over a little too soon, but whilst it lasts it's hard to escape the feeling that it's a well-realised example of a format that was always pretty ideal for converting into an immersive entertainment experience.

Much has been made of the fact that the top price point for the experience is £100 - and fair enough, although West End theatres have long priced a fair proportion of their tickets at more than their show is actually worth, so it's not as if Taskmaster are taking a wildly unusual approach here. Booking weeknight tickets for £50 might be your more sensible approach, or you can try the £25 ticket lottery. Or I suppose you could try lowballing an offer to somebody desperately trying to offload theirs on Twickets.

They'll probably do a roaring trade in a couple of months' time, as it's pretty ideal for work Christmas parties. But it's a show that has been created with considerable care and attention: fans are well-served by Taskmaster: The Live Experience, and people who don't know the show will also be in safe hands, although they'll be at a moderate disadvantage, as it's definitely true that - as in the TV show - there's more than one way to win a task. A couple of years down the line they could presumably refit the place with an entirely new set of tasks as well, which would be a fun direction for them to take all this in.

It maybe even breathes new life into the brand, seen as the TV show maybe isn't on the finest form nowadays. It's too idiosyncratically cast; too often missing better talent that's out there in the current comedy scene, such as Olga Koch, Sara Barron, Dan Tiernan, Suzi Ruffell, London Hughes, Patti Harrison, Reuben Kaye, Helen Bauer, Jordan Gray or Vittorio Angelone, To name a couple of examples. And, whilst it's early days, here's somebody else it'd be fantastic to see on the show in a few years: Rob Copland.

Rob Copland had quite the Edinburgh Fringe this summer, gradually building up word-of-mouth excitement here and there, before culminating right at the end of the month, when he won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards' Victoria Wood prize.

So, is it easy to see what all the excitement is about? He's certainly a screwball presence on-stage - as if Lee Evans has been crossed with Sam Campbell, but also - this being 2024 - with a large dose of existential dread thrown into the mix. As he explains himself: "I was sent out of class a lot at school".

He tells us he's currently working a needs-must job in a bakery, a situation one reviewer imagined to be "like dropping an Animaniac into an accountancy firm". In amongst all that modern-world dread, Copland has decided to just live in the moment. To celebrate what's only possible in a live comedy room. That culminates in a gear-change final ten minutes that is undeniably audacious, if a little less essential than everything that comes before it. The resolutions it contains don't quite fulfil the potential that, by that stage, this dazzling show seems capable of. It's not a remotely bad end to a show, it just leaves you missing the preceding madcap energy a little bit.

Otherwise, this feels like a thrillingly fresh alternative comedy performance that would unquestionably also go down very well on, say, Live At The Apollo. Which is why you leave with that rare feeling that you've definitely witnessed future stardom. He won't be in that bakery job for much longer.

Read previous editions of this column (featuring Nish Kumar, Olga Koch, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Milton Jones and Faulty Towers The Dining Experience).

Mark Muldoon is also available on Instagram and Twitter. Of those names, his dream Taskmaster line-up would be Dan Tiernan, Helen Bauer, London Hughes, Reuben Kaye and Sara Barron.