Taskmaster the Podcast Live with Nish Kumar - Part Two

Let's move on.

Let's move on to the next one, Nesh.

You have picked, using this flame, light the candle in the caravan.

Fastest wins, your time starts now.

Yes.

Do people remember this one?

Yes, correct.

We'll go through the catchphrase.

So they have to basically get a cupcake with a lit candle from the lab all the way to the caravan.

And there's some interesting attempts.

Nish, do you want to take us through what happened?

Well, again,

when you look back at it,

what am I doing?

Because I just sort of walk out and just have no plan.

Yeah, but you're way better than Mark Watson, who walks out, everyone else covers the flame.

Mark forgets what science is and walks out just with a completely uncovered flame.

But he also has the extra thing of not, the only words he can say have to feature the letters, they can't feature any letters that are in the word Tasmania.

That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which no one else had.

So all he's doing is thinking of words and just saying the word fiddly over and over.

The things that they did to that man,

the moment in the studio when he discovered that he had been texting Greg and no one else had been texting Greg.

There was a point where we went to an advert break and when they film it, obviously they don't show the adverts, but when they film it, there's like a break in filming and he just turned to me and he was like, did you seriously not have to send texts?

It was devastating.

Yeah, I remember Sally does a really great job.

She uses like a bell jar or something and then it doesn't like at the last minute.

It's like one of the thing with the tasks is someone has to do them well and someone has to do them almost well and then everyone else can kind of shit the bed in a few ways.

But otherwise it doesn't, it doesn't quite hang together if people aren't doing it properly.

Well, this is

with the basketball task, I don't think that would have made the edit had you not fucked it up so badly.

Right, yeah.

Because everyone else just sort of manages it quite well.

And if you'd done the same thing, it wouldn't have been in, because it would have been quite boring.

So in a way, I'm a hero.

Yeah.

But with Sally, she puts the bell jar over it, she arrives at the caravan.

The caravan is locked, so you have to get the key on the way.

Yeah.

And then she opens the door and then drops the bell jar and it just.

And it just, yeah, yeah.

So i walk out and i see and there's a thing where after this aired you said to me this you on taskmaster is the closest thing to you your real personality and i was like it's a bit offensive and then when i watched the bubble task i'm like yeah that is the truest expression of my real personality that has ever happened because i walk out see the bubbles and and then i walk out i get through the first door i'm sort of outraged that there anything has been obstacles have been put in my way.

I sort of agree with you because that is a hard task.

It is a really hard task.

It definitely is a hard task.

But then what then happens is there's a bubble machine.

And when I see the bubble machine, I say, oh, you bubbly fuck.

And then the F of fuck, a spit of split comes out and blows the candle out.

And then in the studio,

this is why the show is so fucking good.

In the studio, they slow it down like the Zapruder film of the Kennedy Assassin.

And so they actually slow it almost frame by frame so you see me go oh you're a bubbly fuck

oh no it went out when I said bubbly fuck

and the reason I picked that task is it is this one of the strangest things that people say to you is you were the first person to swear in front of my child

There are so many people that I've met who have said my child can't stop saying bubbly fuck

because of you on taskmaster you're the reason for the bleeped version yeah i'm the reason for the bleep and now there are children who are like adults who are like the first time i heard a smile

was when you said bubbly fuck on taskmaster and it is one of the things there's a couple of phrases that people just repeat to me from the show and one of them is oh you bubbly fuck and that is that is a keynote phrase that sums up it sums up a lot about my time on the show and it was it It's the thing that I think is the closest version of my personality is after it's happened I turn to the camera and say it went out when I said bubbly fuck

and that in that moment and that is the truest version of my personality that has ever been committed to film like that the outrage but also the knowledge that what happened was funny and so I don't know really how to feel about it because on the one hand I fucked up but on the other hand I think someone will laugh at that and so I'm quite pleased.

But that it's all in that one moment.

It is incredible, the replay is amazing because it is fuck and then it just gone.

Yeah, I thought I was sort of being semi-facetious at the time, but then when you look back at it, you're like, it is exactly what happens.

Like, the F comes at the flame, like the second gunman behind the grassy knots.

The candle goes back and to the left.

The candle goes back and to the left.

There is no way that the air could have bent.

But it is amazing.

Those little things that happen on Taskmaster sometimes, just like little happen-stance things that they can replay over and over again.

It sort of reminds me of Series 9, when I did Series 9, with the first episode where David Badil tried to hide an aubergine from Alex by taping it to the Gregg portrait.

And Alex came in, noticed it straight away, pointed at it, and it fell off.

Incredible, it's just like, just play that for half an hour.

I'm going to watch Alex pointing at an aubergine and it falling over.

I mean it's hard because I've watch it all, everything that's in my mind is the most recent series.

And the way, whatever the fuck, Stevie Martin is doing to get across that car park.

I don't know if it's skipping, it sort of looks like a kind of constipated skiff.

That is one of those things where you're like, yeah, they're going to replay that over and over.

But that gift's not going anywhere.

The two things that people say to me most, I think we can talk about this because I don't think we're going to talk about this at any other point.

The two things that people say to me most are, oh, you bubbly fuck, and

you're you're not a bad guy, Nish.

We should talk about you're not a bad guy, Nish.

Which is from the Sudoku task, which I was dreading.

It was right at the end of the day.

They were supposed to do, I think the task was do something impressive.

Yeah, it was with the GoPro.

With the GoPro, yeah.

The GoPro.

And I was so tired that I was just like, I'm going to do a load of Sudoku, but I didn't do any of it correctly.

I just wrote random numbers.

But the way that those,

no offense, cunts edited the show meant that there was an episode where I was doing quite well and then they put the Sudoku and I was like, like, oh man.

And then that's another piece of Taskmaster.

I mean history is, it's not, not all history is good.

Canada.

It's a piece of not ideal history.

That's the first time Greg ever led anyone off the set.

The only two times it's happened are me and James Acaster.

And

at least James Acaster called him a pussy.

And that's why they takes him off saying that.

And then he got proper told off, yeah.

But I got told off for just being so shit

like they takes me off into the corner of the studio and it's not that's just they don't like that bit of the studio that's why we're in darkness because no one is supposed to fucking be there

but because we're in half shadow it looks like a shot from the godfather

like it looks like he looks like Marlon Brando and I look like the cat from the ironic sequence and he and you just like

He says all this stuff to me, he's like, what is it?

Why are you self-destructing like this?

And then he says, you're not a bad guy, Nish.

And the number of times people will repeatedly say to me, you're not a bad guy,

that is very, very funny.

What a legacy.

You're not a bad guy, Nish and Bobbly Fuzz.

That is astonishing.

Let's move on, because I think a lot of people would expect us to talk about this one, so we will.

Write and perform a song about this woman.

Best song wins.

You have five minutes

to talk to the woman and 30 minutes to write the song, your time starts now.

Obviously a team task, you and Watto.

Yeah.

Last task I ever filmed.

Yeah.

That was the last task we did in Taskmaster and we really

at the beginning of episode one you don't know what tasks they've used and the first sense you have of what they've used is they play the opening credits on the big screen.

And so it's the first time you've seen anything that you've done in that show.

And at the very end of those credits, you see me and Watson playing the song.

And both of us just went, thank fucking God.

Because I think that was the only one we had a sense that we had done well on, and I mean, it's just classic Taskmaster, isn't it?

You just walk into a room, there's a woman you've got to write a song about.

It's as simple as that.

Like, there's no more information than that.

We never saw Rosalind again.

And she's at the studio.

She's in the studio, to be sure for additions, but she didn't stay for the after party or anything.

I just saw her at a distance.

And then

I directed our very good friend Stuart Laws' comedy special, which is

absolutely brilliant.

It's called Stuart Laws's Act Guy, still going.

I directed that last year, and I was, you know, we were sort of filming it and working on it.

And at the beginning of the show, Stu would flip beer mats and then he would get a person from the audience to announce him on stage.

And so we did all that, and I we had him in the audience, and he was doing it, and we had the camera filming everything.

And you just saw that everybody's just sort of working, you're just trying to get it done, get the show in.

And then when we went back to watch the edit, I saw him give the microphone to Rosalind.

What?

The person who announces Stuart Laws on stage.

It's like a weird, like, super meta joke that we didn't intend for Taskmaster Super.

And actually, I don't think any of the Taskmaster nerds have even spotted it yet.

But if you watch Stuart Laws' comedy special, the person who announces him on stage is Rosalind.

Is the fucking nightmare who jumps quite far for a woman of her age?

That's crazy.

I didn't know she'd be going to like comedy kicks and stuff because the way she reacts to all of you, she does not find any of you fucking listening, right?

Yeah, so we walk into the room, she's giving us nothing.

We're just interviewing her.

And that is a task where, you know,

there wasn't any time.

They're literally like, you do it in half an hour.

I just said, is there a guitar read around?

And they just had a guitar and a like child's drum kit.

Yeah.

And they set that up really quickly.

We wrote it incredibly quickly.

The chords are just...

Dancing in the dark by Bruce Brixton with like four different chords taken out.

We did it real quick.

I think

as soon as we did it, we thought, I think that's good.

Like, I think there's funny bits in it, and also, I think the melody kind of loosely hangs together.

And we were like, I think that that.

But we weren't thinking, when we saw the bit of it play in the opening credits, we weren't thinking, oh, well, that's fantastic.

What we were thinking was, that is a task in which we both escaped with our dignity.

We did this well, we just didn't actively embarrass ourselves in it.

Was there a moment, though, because you'd both sort of been through it in the series?

Yeah.

I mean, Mark, Mark, whenever I speak about Mark on the podcast, podcast, I act as if he's one of the worst contestants of all time.

He came second.

But in my mind, he feels like that.

I feel like he came second.

Because it feels like he's a fucking heron.

Just because he looks so downtrodden in everything he does.

Well, and also stuff happens to him, like the

text.

Watson-specific.

The text.

It's hard to not feel like in a moral way he lost.

But yes, he's lost.

Is there a moment where the song is about to come on?

Any point in your mind, you like, we think this is good, but will it be shit?

Have we remembered this wrong?

No, we didn't think, we didn't think it was, we thought, because we'd executed the task competently, in that we'd actually written a song about a woman, we were like, well, that's fine, it's not embarrassing.

I did think when I saw their song, I was like, oh, well, that's obviously, that's much better.

Like, because it's

well,

you do just think, like, well, that is funny, and it's, you know,

I think one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life is when, like, one of the most I've ever laughed in my entire life is when Bob enters the room, sees Rosalind and says, Do we strike you?

But he gets halfway through, he goes, Do we?

And then he's reaching for something and then he just goes, Strike you.