Taskmaster

Bruce Dessau's top TV comedy for 2016

It's been a bad year in all sorts of ways, but not in terms of TV comedy. I sat down today to come up with a top ten of the year and had difficulty narrowing it down to ten. Of course there were disappointments and programmes that didn't quite live up to expectations, such as Sky's Andrew Lawrence documentary, but there was still plenty to laugh at here. And if you are quick some of them are still available on various catch-up services. And in case you are wondering, I decided not to include Black Mirror - it was brilliant but just too painfully real to be funny.

Joke's over: how the TV panel show fell from grace

In their day, there was something intoxicating about the no-holds-barred panel show back-and-forth. But there seems to be little room for it in a society that has begun to appreciate empathy - and neither, conversely, in a more brutal political climate that is not particularly suitable for dissecting for cheap laughs. Perhaps, when the world lightens up again, they'll be back.

The thing with Taskmaster is that the tasks happen over several days spread across various months. I'd spend a day at the house doing various tasks by myself alone (well, with a camera crew and Alex) and the others would all do the same. And when that's happening, they don't know which tasks will sit together in which episodes. And so the easiest thing is for everyone to have a particular outfit that they wear for all of those filming days. And because the tasks are sometimes messy - for example, one of them involved some people rolling in goose poo - it's essential to have more than one outfit so that you can change into something less goose-poo-y. So I had more than one of those shirts.