Taskmaster's Alex Horne: "Our policy is we'll only do it if it's good"

And despite appearances, Taskmaster – the Channel 4 panel show-cum-game show, now entering its 10th year of production – is as much of an international franchise as anything else currently filming on the lot.

"I’m glad you didn’t end up saying the word universe," laughs Alex Horne, creator and star of the format. "The Taskmaster Cinematic Universe! Franchise is much better."

If you don’t know the format of Taskmaster by now, it’s simple – five contestants (usually comedians) film at an oddly decorated house in Chiswick (usually individually), where they’re handed wax-sealed envelopes outlining bizarre, time-limited missions all set by Horne.

Think, "throw this potato into a golf hole", or "fill this egg cup with your own tears". Horne supervises filming on site, and later in the studio all five contestants reunite under the stern eye of taskmaster Greg Davies, where their often woeful attempts are played back to them. Davies awards them points for effort, ingenuity and luck.

Now in its 18th season, the show is odd and distinctly British – which is why it might surprise you to learn that Taskmaster is also a successful export. Like many before it – Pointless, The Chase, Strictly Come Dancing – versions of the series have popped up across the globe.

"The first spin-off was in Belgium, and I wasn’t sure if it could work," Horne says. "We watched it in Flemish, didn’t understand a word of it, but found it funny all the way through. Suddenly I thought, 'This could work anywhere!'"

Now, there are ongoing spin-offs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Croatia, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Portugal. Each have different taskmasters and assistants, with the tasks created by the local teams. Around 900 episodes of foreign Taskmaster episodes have now been made overseas – more than triple the number of episodes created on home soil.

"The different versions definitely have different flavours," Horne explains. "The Portuguese version is two hours long and a bit brasher, whereas Finland’s is quite dark and moody." Taskmaster Sweden – aka Bäst i test (Best in Test) – is a particular outlier, becoming (arguably) more influential within the Scandinavian nation’s borders than the UK one is here.

"Sweden has been a weird one," agrees Horne. "I think it’s on Saturday night. It’s more like an X Factor scale. It’s mad that it’s so big there. They got it straight away. The guy who is my character, I suppose – although they always put their own spin on it – is all over it and comes up with tasks himself."

In fact, Taskmaster Sweden is now big enough to be seen in the UK – alongside Taskmaster NZ [New Zealand], it’s available on the Channel 4 streaming website. But does it feed back into the main show? Does Horne ever glance at the tasks made by his international counterparts, wondering if he could nab them for his own celebs?

"I don’t think we’ve ever just copied one!" he says. "Over 90 per cent of the tasks are still me, and most of the remaining 10 per cent are friends or people on our team.

"But we definitely do use versions like Taskmaster NZ for inspiration. Instead of reusing them, we think, 'OK, they’ve done that, we want to do something similar but different.' Sweden come up with really good ones. But they’ve got a very different attitude to health and safety!"

Spin-offs haven’t worked in every country. The Spanish and the Belgian versions only managed a season apiece, and creating an American version of the show hit quite a few snags – it included Horne as the assistant, but with a new taskmaster in musician Reggie Watts – and also only lasted one series.

"We made a few mistakes," Horne says now. "We sort of did everything the channel told us to do, so we halved the length of the show. It was 22 minutes in total. And all the tasks were tasks we’d already done, because we thought we’d play it safe.

"We made a few compromises, which we regret. Greg and I would jump at the chance at doing it in America again, but on our own terms."

Though for now, Horne might be a little busy with a spin-off a little closer to home. With the current season of Taskmaster soon reaching its conclusion, Junior Taskmaster is beginning in a few weeks on Channel 4. The show already has UK spin-offs of a kind, including a Champion of Champions where previous winners take each other on.

However, the UK junior version will feature new hosts – Rose Matafeo and Mike Wozniak – sitting in the Taskmaster thrones.

"I’m trying to hone a specific way to terrorise children that is charming, and they’ll look back on with a sort of gleeful nostalgia," says Matafeo. A former contestant herself, the Starstruck star is now assuming Greg Davies’s role for the kids’ version, which sees pre-teens taking on their own wacky challenges before uniting back in the studio.

"Greg casts a very long shadow amongst taskmasters worldwide," she muses. "He is the archetype. He is the original figure in Plato’s cave. We are all shadows of him. Though I’m one of only two female ones – the other is in Sweden."

But can Taskmaster really work with kids? Well, the show began when Horne’s first child was born (the 46-year-old now has three). "I was at home – because he was nought, so I didn’t go to the Edinburgh Festival that year. And I came up with this idea of setting challenges – tasks – to comedians, because I knew lots of comedians, and I had an instinct that it would be a fun thing to do.

"So in August 2009, I sent a load of emails out to 20 comics, and then the following year, I harvested what they’d done for the year, and did a one-off late-night show."

The inspiration for the junior version then came when Horne was once again grounded at home during the pandemic, when he realised just how many families were doing tasks together to pass the time. Plus, Horne’s experience taking the tasks into schools had shown him just how inventive younger minds could be.

"I’ve been doing stuff with kids around the show for years and years," he says. "Almost within a few series, I was doing stuff in primary schools. And then we started this Taskmaster education thing with other primary school kids."

Currently, 800 schools have registered for Taskmaster Education, a programme that takes elements of the show into the classroom to teach teamwork, problem-solving and more curriculum-based skills. Since 2023, schools can also set up after-school Taskmaster Clubs, which Horne has been known to visit for special occasions.

"Basically I’ve got first-hand experience of kids revelling in it, and coming up with really great solutions to tasks, and it being a really positive thing – without sounding too worthy," he says now. "Positive, but also really funny.

"So it just seemed a natural thing to try, I suppose. And I really, really love Harry Hill on Junior Bake Off. I see it as a way of treating kids like grown-ups, where it’s not just, ‘Oh, don’t kids say the funniest things?’ It’s kids being brilliant at being kids."

Filling Horne’s sidekick role on the junior series is Mike Wozniak, himself a contestant in 2021. After filming with the kids for weeks, he thinks it might even be better than the original.

"Their approach to things is wildly different, and sometimes more inventive than the average adult comedian," says Wozniak. "The tasks are all brand new. And they have not been dumbed down in any way."

"But who knows if [JTM] will work," Horne adds, "because they’re not celebrities – you don’t know who these children are. We’re relying on the kids being entertaining enough, which is quite a lot on their little shoulders. But we will find out."

Considering the popularity of the show with audiences of all ages – and younger viewers in particular, which has led to a family-friendly censored and "bleeped" version of the main show airing at teatime on Sundays (and online), there’s reason to be optimistic about the new spin-off’s success. In fact, it seems the only kids who don’t love the show are Horne’s own.

"It’s very frustrating as a parent of three – they won’t watch it, because I’m in it!" Horne laughs. "And it’s one of the few programmes we would like to watch together."

This autumn has also seen the London launch of Taskmaster: the Live Experience, giving members of the public the chance to take on tasks themselves in a facsimile of the main show’s house, with recordings of Horne and Davies egging them on. "It’s nerve-wracking in terms of entering a different world, but it’s almost going back to where we started – putting on shows at the Edinburgh Festival," Horne says.

There’s also a virtual reality game that offers a similar experience at home; there’s books, board games, Christmas crackers and wider merchandise, all shifting hundreds of thousands of units worldwide. It’s unlikely, however, Horne says, that there will be any more TV spin-offs for now.

"We did a pilot for Foodmaster," he reflects. "We’ve talked about Dogmaster and Carmaster and so on. But I think we’re pretty happy with where we are. There’s obviously a danger of diluting the product. I think, currently, junior and senior are our lot."

But it still seems like a lot to keep on top of. Does Horne – the man, even now, behind it all – worry he’ll lose control of it?

"Constantly," he admits. "It’s a real worry. At the moment, I’ve still got it all in my head. Down to the Christmas crackers... I write all the tasks for the crackers and the jokes.

"We’re not quite at full capacity. And if we hit that, then we would not do that thing, I think. Our policy is: we’ll only do it if it’s good. And I don’t think we’ve lost control yet."

The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.

Taskmaster airs Thursdays at 9pm on Channel 4.

Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.