Frankie Boyle
People were slightly surprised when you signed up for it.
Yes, but I’ve got nothing to lose. I didn’t quite grasp the show at first because they asked me to do it years ago. I was a bit like, “This is just people trying to bake a cake only using their elbows. What the fuck is going on?” But then I started watching it like, “Oh, right. It’s a kind of play about humility.”
Did you become a fan of the show?
Yes. I watched it with my daughter. I thought about doing it a couple of series ago, and I asked my daughter what she thought about it, and she went, “You’re not jolly, you’re joyless.”
What was your answer to that?
I’d agree [laughs]. No, I’m quite jolly. I’m quite a singer. I create a lot of stupid songs. I’m more Winnie the Pooh than you’d imagine.
This might be showing a slightly different side of you than perhaps other TV shows that you’ve done before. Do you agree?
I do a bit of political stuff now so yes, it’s all quite serious. I guess politics is getting more immediate for people, so maybe those shows are a bit more serious. But I have been daft as well.
During one task, you ran off in only your pants. Has it been nice for you to show that side of yourself?
I would have swam in the river in my pants for that one if they hadn’t stopped me. In showbusiness, you overestimate how much people care or think about you at all. I was just happy to be on that scoreboard somewhere.
So why did you sign up? To prove your daughter wrong?
There’s a lot of stuff in our culture where people take themselves too seriously and it’s all about presenting a serious version of yourself. Maybe I’ve been tricked into that a little as well. I don’t take myself particularly seriously and it’s good to admit that, sometimes, you are inherently ridiculous.
You do have to leave your dignity at home with this show. Is that something you were perfectly comfortable with?
There’s not a lot of it to leave, but I’m happy. I think it’s a useful thing. I think there’s so much stuff, even in Britain’s idea of itself at the moment. We can see this has been punctured, our self-image. And that’s a really useful thing.
Did you have any strategy going into Taskmaster?
I didn’t care in the least about the tasks, but I thought I wanted to try and do them in a different way from the way other people would have done them, because I thought, “Well, if everyone’s done this, that will be really boring.” But more, I thought it’d be good to do a panel show. I’m not really allowed on too many panel shows, and I thought however I do at the tasks, it would be good to go and try and be funny and have a laugh. But this was even more competitive than the main show I did [Mock the Week] which had six people running to a microphone to tell a joke.
But then there was a backlash for that, of course.
Yes, and rightly so, I think. Because things you do together as a group are always more fun. It’s always more fun if someone puts a funny line on the end of the thing you say, or you put one at the end of what someone else says, or something else happens. When it’s just you, it’s never as good.
Is there literally a list of panel shows that you’re banned from? Or is that just a sense you get?
No, no, I don’t think there is. I think there’s probably more that would have me on than I would think. But I don’t know. I have New World Order, which is very fulfilling, but it does mean I have to write it pretty much all year because even the start monologues and end monologues, if you put them all together, that would be longer than a Fringe show – that would be seventy minutes. So I pretty much just do that all year. Even if I’m tweeting a joke in a car or something, I’m really thinking, “Maybe that’d be a joke that could go into New World Order.” It takes up my whole working life.
Have you learned anything about yourself doing Taskmaster?
I think it’s things I already knew about my own lack of problem-solving ability, hubris, and so on.
Have there been any particularly humiliating moments?
Every second.
What about the surreal aspect of it?
I feel it’s not surreal enough. I’d happily do it on acid, the whole thing. Have the hosts on acid as well.
Talking of which, what do you make of Greg and Alex and their relationship?
Well, basically it’s a show about humility. So the framework is of the British Empire. That’s the artwork, right? So it’s Edwardian, late Victorian, music hall-type art. And this is the British condition, hubris. And also, the condition of comedians generally is narcissism and hubris. So this is a game that is designed to create humility within those players. But then if you have a Taskmaster, then they’re not going to have humility, so Alex has Greg to humiliate him. And then Greg is the Taskmaster because Greg is a self-humiliating machine – all his jokes about himself, because he’s simply too large to have ever lived a normal life. So it’s this agnostic reminder of humility all the way through the show.
How have you got on with Alex: has he been useful, or just a huge hindrance?
By Scottish standards Alex is a pretty helpful person.
Tell me about the rest of your contestants. Did you know any of them beforehand?
I didn’t know Jenny, who I thought may be grumpy because I largely knew her from her early stand-up. I met a journalist who had interviewed her and I went, “I imagine she’d be a bit grumpy” and she went, “Oh, no. She’s bananas.” I hadn’t met Kiell, but I’d seen him in Ghosts. And I’d not met Mae but I’d seen all their stuff. That’s the thing, isn’t it? Sometimes you meet somebody like, “I’ve seen so much of your stuff, I almost feel I know you,” and you have to be careful not to be too familiar.
How do you feel that you all bonded?
Really well, considering it’s just a job. You don’t see each other during the tasks, apart from the occasional group one, so mainly you just get to know each other at the studio. So considering that, we got on really well.
We were going to take mushrooms together during the last episode. I wanted to go to Amsterdam with them and go on a psychedelic journey.
Ivo Graham
Did you enjoy your experience on Taskmaster or was it stressful? You seemed to be unravelling at one point.
It was so fun. So fun. You can quote me on that: “So fun”. I surprised a couple of people when I said I’d enjoyed the day you’re talking about, because the evidence seemed to suggest I hadn’t. I did find a lot of the tasks, and my failure to adapt to them, very stressful. I returned home every day, delighted with how fun and creative it had all been, and how I’d been taken care of, but with a lot of micro regrets about things I knew I could have done better.
Most people feel that way.
Really? Do you think Mae Martin went home with those kinds of feelings? The stone-faced killer? No, of course not. Everyone’s got their regrets, but there was a consistency to mine. My friend Jack, who loves the show, said to me, “You obviously don’t know what the task is going to be, so you can’t prepare anything – but none of that really matters. Just breathe and look for the loopholes.” So I tried that, but there were no loopholes that I could see anywhere, which induced an immediate state of panic. At the start, I decided I was almost certainly going to be playing Taskmaster for laughs, going for some sort of wooden spoon, and that was a nice thing to come to terms with. The team said generically reassuring things like, “You don’t know how everyone else has done,” but the day of the uravelling, a lot of things went badly wrong. So as much as it might have looked like I was unravelling, I was really just settling in. I was reaching full speed of unravel. And actually, I love full-speed unravelling.
What was it like in the studio?
It was so fun being with them all. It’s such a great group. I obviously love the show, and like so many shows it adapted really well, probably better than most, during the pandemic, but I was so pleased that we had a studio audience and that we were sat really near each other.
Were you a fan of the show?
Yes, right back to the first series, and I know Josh [Widdicombe] quite well – he obviously won the first series whilst also being victim of a few classic Taskmaster pranks like having to do humiliating tasks on his own. The whole line-up that year was fantastic – him, Roisin [Conaty], Romesh [Ranganathan], Frank [Skinner] and Tim [Key]. And Alex, I’ve been such a fan of for so long, and obviously I like Greg as a stand-up. My parents love The Horne Section, so that’s the sort of thing I’d always try and take them to if they were ever coming to Edinburgh, like, “Here’s a nice, wholesome thing.” The Horne Section gave me occasional guest spots at the Fringe years ago, so I felt like I had a little role in there. It’s a slightly eccentric universe. And also I loved the fact that it started out as a live show in Edinburgh and it’s become this juggernaut. There was a family feel to the team, which went from being a bit tentative around each other to really quite aggressive levels of pedantry in the studio.
There was a lot of backstabbing in the studio.
My parents came one night when I’d done badly and they were very happy with that narrative because it fits a lot of self-deprecating things they’ve been saying about me and our family in general for years. My dad, as he was getting into the car afterwards said, “It’ll never be as bad as under-13s football,” which is the gold standard for being a part of a team that got battered every Saturday morning as my dad watched. There were no laughs or financial remuneration there, though, just a load of 12-year-olds crying.
Did you feel competitive? Did you go in there wanting to win?
We all wanted to win, because then you get to do Champion of Champions. But I’ve got a fairly well-established reputation amongst my family and friends for being chaotic and easily flustered, and possessing not a lot of practical or lateral thinking skills. So I went in there wanting to show them that wasn’t entirely the case, and to do it in a broadly dignified manner. Taskmaster is so popular and so good that even if you’re being humiliated on it, it’s like top-tier humiliation. I did a dance in lingerie on ITV2 once, and I didn’t feel nearly as grateful for that as I was for this. But having worked out that I wasn’t going to pull any unexpected logic or practical decision making out of the bag, I was then very happy with whatever happened.
When I was arguing with Mae about whether drawing ducks means that they’re ducks or whatever, I didn’t really mind about the points, it was just really fun having these arguments on the show, and I hope it doesn’t come across otherwise. I’m not competitive. I did think quite obsessively about winning while I was doing the tasks, though, and carried a lot of regrets back home with me at the end of the day, in a way that someone like Frankie didn’t. I envied Frankie. I envied all of them, to be honest: they were clearly in a better headspace than I was throughout the tasks.
Did you learn anything about yourself on the show?
I think I’m coming to terms with the fact that when you start to do more stuff in the public eye, the full extent of your character is out there. When you’re doing stand-up, which has been the bulk of my career, you have a degree of control over what you’re putting out – and obviously, you’re slightly massaging your own character to make it more likeable or whimsical or whatever.
When you start doing lots of TV or podcasts, you’re documenting your life more extensively and truthfully. I found this a lot with being disorganised and late for things, which is something that I still really would like to think at the age of 32 that I am going to get on top of, but I haven’t yet. In fact I was late for a gig in Bristol a few weeks ago and they had to stretch out the interval before I came on. After the gig I was looking at my tweets and someone had posted just before the show started: “Waiting in a long interval for the latest man in comedy.” That’s not a title that I’ve ever put out into the world, but that’s something that has been now baked in beyond my control. Which is a very long way of saying the way I come across on Taskmaster is stuff that the people close to me have known to be true for quite a while. I would have loved to have clawed things back a little bit. Instead, I have really dotted the I’s and cross the T’s.
I genuinely watched Taskmaster as a fan and thought, “If I could do Taskmaster, I’d be a whole different beast”. But that’s a delusion. We did five days of task filming, with a gap of a few weeks in between each day. I had plenty of time to regroup. I didn’t regroup.
You mentioned Josh Widdecombe. Did you speak to anyone else about it beforehand?
Fern Brady and I did a travel show for Dave last year called British as Folk, so I talked to her. They obviously don’t want you to talk to the other contestants who you’re on with, which is a bit of a shame because I know Mae quite well, so not texting them about how much fun it all was, was one of the necessary limitations and frustrations of it. Ed Gamble is someone I know quite well, he’s very deep into Taskmaster and I listen to his podcast about it a lot, which is a good way to get under the skin of how things might be received, or how things might be done well.
But everyone said, “Just enjoy it – it’s the best experience you’ll have in your career.” And it has been the best experience I’ve had in my career. And I have mostly enjoyed it. And like a lot of other manic regrets in life, I could vicariously rant at future Taskmaster contestants about what they need to do, often probably with no prompt or request whatsoever. I remember someone telling me, about stand-up, when I was on Live at the Apollo, to just take a moment to enjoy it – so that’s what I did with this. My brother’s a big fan and I talked to him about it. I said, “I’m quite worried that it might be a bit humiliating.” And my brother said, “Yes, but that’s your thing, isn’t it?”
Have you had any particularly humiliating episodes?
There was one team task where I had to make it back to the lab within a time limit, the other contestant had given me all the direction they could, and I was on course for a photo finish. And then, at the very last second, I thought I could duck into the kitchen and try and do a bit more of the task. I’d certainly not known it was that tight timewise at the time. And to hear the tension in the room as I came close to getting it right, and then the frustration when I got it wrong, as well as the points that it cost me and my team, that was a classic example of greed and hubris and trying to pack too much in. I really saw a lot of my personal failings crystallised in that moment.
What do you think of your fellow contestants?
I loved them all. The Taskmaster experience was such a compact little summer camp of friendship. It’s testament to how well Taskmaster puts groups of people together. I was a fan of all of their work beforehand, but Mae was the only person I’d met more than once before so it was really exciting to get to hang out together. In fact, Mae had the very thing that I envy most, which was a very logical, calm, usually brilliant approach whilst also being so funny along the way and doing little skits and stuff. Frankie was so unruffled and cool and turned up to the live shows in his suit, but I also saw him in his pants. As someone who was a huge fan of Frankie Boyle as a teenage comedy fan I saw a real different side to him. Jenny made me laugh more than anyone else. Just watching her cackle away and frequently saying things like, “Fuck this shit!” was heaven. She also said the most outrageous things in between filming, with filth and amazing candour, or turned an unbelievably dramatic story about getting mugged in Battersea in the 90s into one of the most exciting stories I had ever been told. Kiell I could watch do anything. He’s just swaggering into every scene and being so funny, but also being someone whose competitiveness I’ve been able to hide behind a little bit.
Read interviews with Jenny Eclair, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Mae Martin here.
Taskmaster, Thursdays from March 30 at 9pm, C4.
Interviews supplied by C4.
Picture: Avalon
