The Taskmaster Challenge That Failed To Make It Into The Show… Twice
If you’re one of the millions of people that tunes into Taskmaster every week, you’ll likely be a huge fan of the somewhat irreverent games that the comedians are faced with.
Whether it’s choreographing a dance with Alex Horne or competing to see who can slide for the longest, the group of comics that appear in each season of the show are truly put through the ringer for our viewing pleasure.
But what about the proposed tasks that didn’t make it onto the show? What have we been missing out on?
Apparently, there are quite a few per season, as Ed Gamble revealed in a Reddit Ask Me Anything that there had been around 10 unaired tasks that didn’t make the eventual cut.
However, there’s one task that has actually failed to make into the show once in season one, and again two years later...
In the official book, Taskmaster : 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People, host and creator Alex Horne revealed that there was a bubble wrap task he’d tried to implement twice.
The task would have required challengers to burst all of the bubbles in a roll of bubble wrap, with the winner being whoever managed it in the fastest time.
Simple, right? Well, according to Alex, it’s actually a little too simple.
He wrote: “We tried this with the contestants of series one and series three. The roll of bubble wrap was five metres long... Tim Key found a large garden roller... Josh Widdicombe kneeled down next to the bubble wrap and wielded a knife.
“Unfortunately, bubble wrap is a brilliant invention. It is designed not to be popped quickly... [the] roller simply squeezed the air around the roll and failed to pop the bubbles.
“Josh is not particularly quick with a knife. All contestants ended up at some point jumping on the bubbles, and finally wringing them out one by one. None took less than 20 minutes and all attempts were deemed too dull to be shown on TV.”
To be fair, it does sound boring to watch but probably VERY satisfying to try for yourself at home.
Taskmaster is available to stream on Channel 4 now.