Alex Horne's Taskmaster fears for contestants' "cancellation"
Alex Horne says he fears for Taskmaster if a contestant were to be "cancelled" or became seriously ill.
The hit Channel 4 show is currently shooting episodes to air in June next year. And Horne says he frets about the lengthy gap between recording and the series being broadcast.
"My two worries are - someone's gonna get cancelled, someone's gonna have a health problem" he told rapper-turned-actor Scroobius Pip on his Distraction Pieces podcast.
"I worry more about people's health, obviously. Or, we talk about someone in the show [who subsequently falls from grace]."
Katy Wix missed two episodes of Taskmaster's Series 9 in 2019 because she needed an operation to have her gall bladder removed, with Kerry Godliman and Katherine Ryan stepping in for her during studio segments. Paul Sinha was unaware that he had Parkinson's Disease when he appeared in the series before.
Horne reflected on two other comedy shows that ran into trouble over suddenly contentious material.
One was the current series of Dave Gorman: Modern Life Is Goodish on U&Dave, which British Comedy Guide revealed last month was forced to drop an episode because of allegations of inappropriate behaviour against Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace.
The other was 2022 panel show The Island on the same channel, in which Tom Allen invited guest comedians to invent their own island.
Horne said that he had heard one episode originally featured the panel talking "about the [late] Queen a lot and then channel got worried that she was going to be near the end of her life.
"So you worry about that sort of thing," he told Pip. "You want to futureproof yourself.
"But counter to that, what I think is good about Taskmaster is that it's kind of timeless, in that it's not political. It's not about anything ... it's just physical things. So hopefully you can watch an episode from eight years ago and it doesn't matter, we don't pin ourselves to a time.
"So it's rare we talk about a living person. We talk about [David] Attenborough occasionally and that's a worry."
Taskmaster has been commissioned to continue for at least three more series. And in a discussion about the diversity of the show's booking policy, Horne revealed that one of the upcoming series features a contestant in their 20s, another in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.
What's more, Horne, who created Taskmaster, originally as a live show at the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe, said he could imagine appearing on the programme as a contestant himself.
"We're always trying to find a twist each series" he told Pip. "Greg [Davies] would never do it. He's is so comfortable in his role of judging ... he would never do an escape room. I mean, I could. The one thing that crossed my mind is I could be a contestant in New Zealand. Which could be fun, especially if [the UK version] ever came to an end and that carried on ... we share tasks and things [between the two versions]".
Currently touring with his band in The Horne Section's Hit Show, he also reflected upon his first children's novel, The Last Pebble, "which took me six years to write and it's probably the hardest thing I've ever done, which sounds so pathetic.
"It's about a boy who finds a pebble, and his dad, his granddad, is a beachcomber. And my grandad was a geologist. So it's sort of about my grandad, and it's really serious and old fashioned. It's not serious but it's sweet."
Aimed at 9-12-year-olds and published by Walker Books on 3rd July. Pre-order via Amazon