Reece Shearsmith is one of the contestants on the new series of Taskmaster. the others are Ania Magliano, Maisie Adam, Phil Ellis and Sanjeev Bhaskar.

Below Reece talks about appearing on the show, how he got on with the other contestants and what it was like not being in control for a change. 

Read more Taskmaster interviews here.

Taskmaster, Thursdays from September 11, 9pm, C4.

Why did you want to do Taskmaster?

Well, obviously Steve [Pemberton] did it a couple of series back, and he was the one that put me on to how much fun it is. It’s absolutely the antithesis of what Steve and I normally go through with our own work: writing months in advance of a series, racking our brains in a room, trying to think of these carefully constructed things.

You can't plan for Taskmaster: you’ve just got to turn up. Part of the joy is that the tasks are thrust upon you in the moment, and all you can do is think on your feet. You can't prepare anything; you just have to think on your feet and be creative.

The other thing I've loved is the prize tasks, which have allowed me the joy of going back to doing my art, because I used to do a lot of art, and that’s a side of me that I would have pursued, but I ended up acting. So being given this homework to do these tasks and be creative and crafty, has been a real joy. It’s been like enforced homework because I never normally give myself the time to do it.

Steve famously put a huge amount of effort into his prize tasks, but – spoiler alert – there’s one in particular where you might have outdone him.

I know the one you mean, and that did take a long time! I possibly went a little too obsessed with that but I saw an opportunity and I loved doing it. I wasn’t trying to outdo Steve! It was an opportunity to really lean into it and give myself permission to work on something for weeks.

Fans have wanted you to do Taskmaster for years. Did you finally agree because of Inside No 9 coming to an end, and having the time to do something new?

Certainly Number 9 has been rolling on for ten years, and we’ve always been completely immersed in it. When one series finishes, the next six episodes have to be written, so it’s been a rolling slate of work continuously. It’s been lovely to have a break from the tyranny of that. We've got the live show, of course, which has now overtaken the TV show as we keep adding new dates! It’s never going to end … 

Did you have any tactics going into filming?

No, I'm not a massive nerd about it. I know the general gist, but I wasn't one of these people that knows it backwards and knows the ins and outs of going into a task thinking, “Right, they’ve normally got something hidden behind there, and this is usually a trick question.” I wasn't that avid a viewer.

That probably put me in good stead, though, because I was a bit more innocent going in, and I wasn't trying to second guess anything. I decided to just be myself and react accordingly. 

Half an antenna on the engine of the whole thing is to be funny, of course, so you’re thinking about how to do the task but also about how to do it in a comedic way.

Did Steve give you any specific advice?

He didn't, really, no. He just said he felt like he'd done things that he would never normally do. He felt like he'd been quite exposed, in a fun way. It’s a kind of humiliation that you can't avoid; you've got to completely let go of any dignity and just go for it.

As someone who usually writes, directs, and acts, was that lack of control quite frightening?

Yes, because I very rarely appear as me. I've done Bake Off, but that’s about it. I get offered lots of quiz shows, panel shows, but I don’t like to do those because they reveal your batting average and how stupid you are! That's what I'm afraid of, so I keep the reality of my thickness well hidden.

So this was quite exposing for me, just to be myself and take the opportunity to show how silly you can look and how stupid you can be. 

You do get task blindness. It's very difficult. Taskmaster is a very exclusive club, and only the people that have done it can understand in the moment what it's like to listen to a task being read out and to not have a clue what do when Alex says, “Your time starts now.”

Were you at all surprised by how you performed on the tasks?

As a viewer, you watch it from the comfort of your own sofa thinking, “Well, I wouldn't do that” or “That's the first thing I would have tried,” but it's a very different thing to actually be there. It’s the same as watching a quiz show at home and you shout the answers out, but under the pressure of the lights and the audience, the simplest question can go out of your mind, and you panic and don’t know what to do as time is ticking away. 

I feel brave to have done Taskmaster, to have dared to enter into this long ten weeks on telly, doing these silly things. It's quite a long time, and it's quite exposing. 

I thought possibly I might get more angry with myself and the people around me but actually, despite Greg trying to insist that I am quite cross all the time, I think I was quite calm and collected in the face of frustration, by my standards.

Some of the tasks are built to make you feel very frustrated, and you can't see the wood for the trees, but I thought I coped quite well.

Tell me a bit more about your relationship with Greg during those studio shows. 

I’d met him a couple of time before, but I don't know him particularly well. What you realise and marvel at when you're in these records – it takes three hours to create a 45-minute show – is how brilliant Greg is at working the audience and maintaining the energy and trying stuff out all the time. He's very comfortable knowing that things will be cut in the edit, so he can try and say anything, and he knows they’ll edit it well. He’s 

great at calling back things from the past, and he's so quick. 

He's very sharp on remembering something and then mining it for all its worth: something will become a theme of an episode because he can conjure a lot of comedy out of seemingly the smallest detail.

I was really impressed with him. He's been doing it for years, so he is a complete master of it and makes it look effortless but, of course, he’s thinking away all the time. For someone like me who's an actor and enjoys the power of the word, I marvel at it.

How did you react when he said that you veered between seeming like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, about to have a full meltdown, and then appearing in the next moment like a confused old man shuffling around a care home?

I’m slightly annoyed that he's labouring under a miscalculation that just because I'm around the same age as him means I’m equally the same fitness as him! 

How did you get on with Alex?

He’s the Stan Laurel of the of the whole enterprise, isn't he? He can seem very innocent, but he’s the mastermind, which is great. His mind works in a very particular way: everything he says means something. The elaborate wording of the tasks is all carefully thought through. It feels like nothing is ever left to chance with Alex. 

But then, sometimes that’s the thing that trips you up, because sometimes you think, ”It can't be this simple. What am I missing in this room?” and you end up over-complicating it.

That's one of the beauties of the whole show, isn't it? That things are turned on their head, and the person that looks like they're doing the worst, or who seems the least interested, can suddenly come out on top.

One of the things I love about the show is that the whole thing is like a really good, giant plot twist. You think it's going to go one way, then suddenly the rug is pulled from under you – sometimes in very brilliant edits where you don’t even realise you put your foot on the wrong thing or broke a rule. You can go from winning the task to being disqualified in a heartbeat because they deliberately lead you down a certain way. 

And that’s all down to Alex. He’s across everything; he lives and breathes it and he’s on every detail. Sometimes I took the written task card with the seal back to my room and he’d go round collecting them all back at the end of the day. He doesn’t miss a thing!

Was there anything about filming that surprised you?

Not really, it played out the way you would imagine. It's quite relentless on the task days because you do one task, then you go back to your little room and you wait for them to set up the next one, so you’re constantly in that mindset and that’s when you get task blindness. You go into it thinking, “I’ll read that really carefully and take my time”, but as soon as you open it, that all goes out the window.

But it's been one of the loveliest production teams to work with. I felt embraced by them all; they make you feel very special.

How did you get on with the other contestants?

I do think this series is really special; we felt that. We've already got a WhatsApp group, and I’m sure we’ll maintain our experience. It felt like being on a desert island with this set of people, because only we have had this strange experience together. That will stay with us for as long as we can remember.

Shall we go through them, starting with Sanjeev?

In 1993 we both did a pilot for a show that was trying to bring back Saturday Night Live, and that's where I first met Sanjeev. I was doing some sketches from The League of Gentlemen with the other guys, and he was there doing a monologue. I’ve never worked with him but we’ve met on and off over the years since then and he’s always been a friendly face. I saw him last year at the Hootananny with Jools Holland and we gave each other a sage nod, because you're not allowed to talk about it, but we both knew that we were doing Taskmaster.

And how do you think Sanjeev comes across on this series of Taskmaster?

Sanjeev is one of these characters where he's outside of everybody else, in a way. It appears that he's doing nothing: he blithely walks in as if he could be either going for a walk across a field on a summer Sunday afternoon or doing Taskmaster. He was unflappable. I don't know whether he’s like a swan on the surface, and his feet are furiously kicking away under the water, but he hasn't given the impression that he's been thrown by anything. He's taken everything in his stride: sort of, “This will do, and if that's not the right answer, I don't care.”

What about Phil?

Phil’s so infectious, he’s got so much energy. He's loving every minute of being on Taskmaster, in a way that anybody would if they had the opportunity to do it. It's joyous to see him and his funny mind enjoying every minute of it, making himself laugh more than anybody else. He’s launched himself into it. He's a very big, funny presence and he's coming across really well.

He told me he was a huge fan of yours, and many years ago even went to see your live show and queued outside to get your autograph.

That is so sweet. Thank you for telling me, because now I can go and tease him about that. He did say he'd been to some of our shows and I thought, well, that shows a certain amount of dedication.

What about Maisie?

Maisie is great. I’d never met her before. She's really funny, very sharp, and coming across really well. She's inventive and surprising in some of the choices she's made, which is always great to watch, isn't it?

She’s also very feisty, possibly more than me: she dares to challenge the results of the Taskmaster’s decision-making. Actually, as a group, we've all been a little bit rebellious. We’ve acted as a complete group against the pair of them; we’ve questioned lots of the final task studio tasks, probably more than any other group. 

Alex said that we've been really dissecting and trying to clarify what some of the tasks are, rather than just launching into them, so that's become a running gag. We question every beat of what it means before we even begin.

There’s a bit of a plan, something rumbling that we want to try and pull off for the last episode to reflect that, because it feels like we've seeded it throughout the nine previous episodes. 

Would that have been your idea, by any chance? I feel like that's got you written all over it.

Probably, yeah. I might have sown the seeds of it. But we all very quickly got on board and came up with the full idea, however it was initially sprouted in everyone’s minds.

What about Ania?

Ania is so brilliant and so funny. Her comedy is slightly ethereal. The way that she looks at the world is not surreal, exactly, but it feels like she's on a different matrix. She's in a slightly different parallel universe with the way that she thinks about the world.

She’s really funny and very sweet, but quite innocent, but then quite damning as well, which is funny. She’s gracefully doing the tasks to great effect, and being really funny with it as well. 

So despite your reservations about doing this type of show as yourself, I'm going to assume you have no regrets?

No regrets at all. I've probably delivered a version of me: something along the lines of what people expect, but hopefully people will be surprised that I've said ‘yes’ at all, because I don't do this sort of thing normally.

It’s been a fun thing to do, and I don't regret it at all, but it’s equally not made me think I should do more of these things where I'm myself. This show is quite unique: the fact that you have a mission to do is great, along with the kindness of the edit, which is brilliant and makes you look funny. 

It’s a great show, a bit like Bake Off, which is brilliantly edited as well. On both those shows you can be confident they won't make you look silent or not as funny as you could be. An edit can make you look terrible or meek, or like you never said a thing.

It feels like Taskmaster is a competition but, really, it's a comedy show. It allows five people to do silly things and it’s edited to make everyone look their best. That’s why it's brilliant, and why it's on its twentieth series. It's the engine that will never run out, as long as they can keep finding people that will approach things in five incredibly different ways.

It's a great watch, and I've now got a lot of episodes to catch up on because I never watched that much of it originally. I saw a lot of the Bob Mortimer ones, and I saw some of Steve’s, but I’ve got lots more to catch up on and that will be brilliant. 

Interview supplied by publicists