Taskmaster the Podcast Live with Nish Kumar - Part One

Yes, welcome!

Incredible.

You guys smart for a North American splutt for a long time, apart from this guy here, and I respect this guy so much.

Arms crossed, ready to go.

I love it.

Welcome to the first ever Taskmaster the podcast live.

That's exciting!

We're going to be right here when we discover that either we've been missing out on some incredible live shows or there is a reason why we've never done this live.

Now I'm going to ask a question and I hope I know the answer to it.

Give me a cheer if you are a fan of the television show Taskmaster.

I'm going to ask another question now and please be honest with me.

Give me a cheer if you have never seen the television show Taskmaster.

Good, right, fucking good.

Because I wasn't going to be gentle.

Because this show sold out immediately.

There were people stood outside as I walked in going, please can we get a ticket?

Begging for a ticket.

But now I can see on all your faces you have absolutely, you loved the television show Taskmaster.

And no offence, you all look like total nerds.

So

arms in the air, aloft.

I love that.

Well done.

Right, I'm going to pop myself down.

We're going to bring our special guest to the stage.

You don't know who the special guest is, do you?

No, well, obviously we were sort of hamstrung by who was in the geographical area.

But a lot of good people around.

Unfortunately, they were all busy.

So we do have a former Taskmaster contestant in Inverted Commas.

You might be getting an idea on who it is.

If you know who's in Montreal at the moment and who is the most contestant in inverted commas in Taskmaster history, you might have an idea of who I'm about to bring to the stage.

Please welcome from Taskmaster Series 5, not season series, please welcome Nishkuma!

We have been hamstrung.

What a way to be brought to the stage.

Here due to lack of available alternatives.

Why don't you get Ryan Reynolds down here anymore, hey?

He's in town doing fuck all, I think.

Well, welcome, Nish.

Hello, good to be here.

What an absolute pleasure.

Of course, even if we'd had all of the Taskmaster contestants of all time at our disposal, you still would have been my first choice.

Because I feel completely free to disrespect you

possible opportunity.

The people's champion.

I would say...

That's something, look, I'd say 50% of the people here agreed with you that you're the people's champion.

And the rest of them are racist.

Wow, that has taken approximately two minutes for you to cast out an accusation of racism.

Well done, you.

You really hung on there, buddy.

Look here's here's how today is going to work so I don't know if you've seen on YouTube quite often on Taskmaster YouTube they'll do a thing called the perfect episode where they'll get previous contestants back and they'll select things from their series that creates their perfect episode.

We're going to do that with you now.

I haven't been asked to do that so far.

I wonder why.

Well it's good sometimes I watch those, I've done one of those myself and it's nice to see people pick some of their successes and some of their failures.

It's good to have variety in them.

And I would say that lack of variety with yours, because they are mainly failures, aren't they, Lisha?

Failure is a state of mind.

It's not one I'm familiar with.

You did really badly, man.

Only if you measure it in terms of points.

If you measure it in terms of warmth generated.

Yes, also badly.

You generated a lot of warmth.

You told me in the past you doing Taskmaster, you love doing it because you had an opportunity to be silly on television.

Whereas quite often you are a very serious person.

Yeah, it was really fun.

It was also, it's so mad that I'm like, it's so mad to still be talking about it because I did it so long ago.

And I did it so long ago that the way...

I think I must have talked to you about this before, but the way I got offered Taskmaster was Alex Horne phoned me and said do you want to do Taskmaster?

I think it was less of a there's less of an operation around it in probably 2000 I mean I would have started doing it in 2016.

Yeah he was just making it on his phone back yeah

basically it was just yeah it was just Horne and his phone.

They didn't even have the budget for Greg's trousers.

I had to shoot Greg from the waist up.

Marlon Brando in the score for most of the first six years.

To be fair Greg's so tall you have to shoot him from the waist up.

He's not from the the same level as everyone else, it's just his nipples.

Yeah, but it was, I loved doing it.

I was a massive fan of the show, and so I loved doing it so much.

And I just went, the thing that I realized over the years is now when I talk to more people who've done it, people are like, what's your game plan when you go in?

Like, how are you going to price your tasks?

And I was like, I don't know, man, I turned up.

I turned up.

They gave me some porridge every day.

They said, do you want breakfast?

And I was like, yeah, let me have some porridge.

And so I just eat porridge, do the crossword, and then they go, do you want to do a task?

I go out, shit in the bed, back to my porridge.

You're basically a horse.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was.

I just needed some oats and somebody to shine my coat.

It was, yeah, I had such a good time.

I didn't really think about any of it.

There's an odd thing when you do it, when you're in the house, you feel very unsupervised.

Like, the house is, I mean, I don't need to tell the people in the room here because they're all the kind of, no offense, freaks that know exactly what the house is, even though they live in North America.

The house is, it's like, it's very out of the way.

It's like next to a golf, I think it's owned by the golf club.

Anyway, I don't know the specifics of it, but it feels very out of the way.

You feel very unsupervised, which is an odd thing to talk about a show where there are four cameras in every room that you walk into.

But I just had the absolute time of my life.

And then you have to go to the studio and a very tall, loud man asks you to explain your actions.

I don't know, man, I was all high on the porridge.

Is this an exclusive that all of your actions on Taskmaster were caused by porridge?

Because you know that's supposed to be slow release energy, and you

running around like you just were smacked off your tips.

I think, yeah, I think I like doing it so much, and it was, it

also came out at an interesting time for me because I just started doing the Mass Report, which was a political comedy show on the BBC.

And so there was this kind of two versions of me that appeared in the public sphere.

MASH, another great slow-releasing energy show.

Yeah, I only like white calves.

Pink bolts, not so much.

Have you read

anything from history?

No, I try and avoid it.

Okay, your lot don't come off well.

No offence, no offence.

Sorry, I know know in Canada no white people has ever done anything wrong.

Which Canada are you going to?

Which Canada am I going to?

The one from the where you murdered all the people?

Nish, we had a little chat backstage.

I know you do your solo show in this room as well.

No, Nish, no, no, no, no.

Remember, we're here to talk about the fun show.

Remember the porridge, let's talk about the porridge.

But yeah, it was so much fun and I had such a good time doing it.

And I love doing the studio records are the closest I've done in television terms to doing a live show.

Like doing a live show in front of an audience.

Like it really the audience, because a lot of the time those things are very long and the audience loses energy.

But even when I was doing it in Series 5, people had travelled from like Scandinavia and stuff to watch the studio records.

And the energy in the room was incredible.

I imagine now it's absolutely feral.

That was series five.

The show was still like in its kind of infancy.

And then just over, like it's nearly eight years since that went out.

And in the last five years, particularly, I think, post-pandemic, I think people watched it obsessively all over the world.

And I would say that I'm asked about Taskmaster so much more now than when it first actually came out.

Like it feels like something that happened during the pandemic.

And it was sort of extraordinary.

And then, obviously, the last series, I got to go back to the house, and I found it quite moving because, like, I haven't set foot in there for you know, whatever it is, eight years, and yet I'm asked about things that I did in this house like once a week.

And so it was really, it was, I genuinely found it quite you haven't been back to the house for eight years.

No, I found it genuinely quite moving to go back to the house.

What a way to find out you weren't invited to the barbecue.

There's a barbecue every minute.

They know if they get me there, I just try and dropkick the barbecue.

They know!

We are, of course, we should talk about this.

We're referencing the fact that you went back to the house to film a task with Jason Manzouka from the most recent series.

So now, you must have known this was coming.

Yeah.

So in some way, Jason was going to involve you in a task.

So during the pandemic,

Jason and I are friends truly because we were introduced to each other by mutual friends because we look similar.

That's not a joke.

I know that that's playing like a joke in the room.

It's

100% not a joke.

That's so dangerous isn't it?

Because I've had that before where you go oh my friend looks exactly like you and then you meet the friend you're like is that what I fucking

are you kidding me?

That guy's a monster.

I'm obviously a long-standing fan of Jason's work in Parks and Breck and in The Good Place and Brooklyn 99 and like he looked so much like me that my grandmother

thought when we I was at her house a couple of years ago and I put the TV on, Brooklyn 99 was on and my grandmother said, When did you film this?

I was like, what do you mean?

That's not me.

And then I started going like, that's not me, which doesn't help me because that's more like Jacksonville.

You do have very similar energies.

All of his characters are very niche-coded.

The thing is that lot, yeah, just loud.

Yeah.

Yeah, basically, you're both this sound.

Yeah, yeah.

There's lots of people that people are like, you know, you look like that person, you go, yeah, no, that's just another South Asian.

But Jason Manzikas, there are times where you're like, I see photos of him and I'm like, what did I meet Amy Parlour?

Oh no.

And so you were introduced to each other, actually by Ashley B, another Series 5 guest.

And another sort of cameo on

the Series 9.

When he told me he was asking if she had done that, and when she told me that she had done that, I was like, well, here we go.

That's going to be a tricky one for the family.

Freddy edits.

It's amazing how charming Jason is, that there's a running joke through the whole series that he's obsessed with boobs.

Yeah.

Everyone's like, oh, Jason.

Whereas anyone else would be like, get that grubby purse off.

But so he got obsessed with it.

During the pandemic, he was texting me saying, oh my God, I'm obsessed with the show.

This is unbelievable.

And then he said, I think I'm going to try and do it.

Do you think they would have me?

And I was like, they would bite your fucking hand off to have you and so then as soon as it was all confirmed and it was going to happen he said why don't you keep a day free and we'll work something out so there was no like forward plan of what it was going to be it was just based on his shoot days and what days I was free and so we landed on this day that I was going to go there and so basically he worked out what we were going to do

And I've seen lots of people commenting on who's going, oh, oh, I find it very difficult to believe that in the allotted time for the task, he was able to solve this shoe up from his hands.

I find that very difficult to wrap my mind around.

But the thing is, and I stand by that comment because I do think

why we couldn't break the rules.

But I was there, I was there.

So I was sort of, he was working out what task he was going to use me for and so that he he had that idea and and then they just put me in a make-up chair and they

so that I would look like him from behind and it was yeah so that we I knew that I was going to do something with him and when they announced the series

loads of people contacted me on the internet saying I imagine you're going to be involved in this I was like no

At the wonderful moment where clearly you have to improvise something just at the end and all you can come up with is saying your own name

which is historically the only thing you can generally come up with in an improv situation.

Having known you for God knows how long it is now, your catchphrase in public is Nish.

It's actually how your wife addresses me.

That specific intonation, she just goes, Nish.

Well, let's not talk about how you address my wife, which is my different nicknames every single day.

She's very bullied by by me.

We should look, we should talk about this.

We should talk about your dream episode.

Something which I've been pursuing you to come up with answers to this for the past four days in Montreal.

It's lovely to know what it would be like to be your agent.

So

you can find out.

Daisy at PPJ.

It's her email address.

Just email her, say what's it like to be Nisha's agent.

She recently got back from maternity leave, so if you want to throw congratulations in.

Nish says his agent's email in his solo show as well.

Won't stop saying it.

And I went to see him film his special recently, and I thought, well, he's going to have to change that for the special.

No, still the same.

It's also after I say some very borderline, libelous things about specific British comedians.

At least no one will really email your agent because you don't tend to cause any trouble or

no one disagrees with anything you say, so that's good.

Daisy at PBJManagement.com.

Let's talk, Nish, in your dream episode about the prize task that you want.

And I can remind you what you've picked.

Yeah.

You have picked, from episode one of Series 5, something that makes the most excellent noise.

Yeah.

I picked my own laugh.

Yes.

And I recorded my laugh and then looped it, and that loop got burged onto a CD.

Yes.

The reason I picked this is all my pro like or even in the shitness of what I did on Taskmaster my prize tasks are particularly shit.

My prize tasks are like first amongst dog shit.

I was looking back I've got the list of how you did in every task here.

Yeah and the first three episodes of the prize tasks you get one point

which is what a what a statement of intention

the thing is the prize tasks are supposed to be the easiest thing because you get told them in advance, you have to prepare them.

I forgot

due to being too much of a legend,

which is a euphemism for undiagnosed ADHD.

And then at the last minute, I was like, oh god, there's a cap here.

I think my laugh can be burned onto CD quickly.

But the reason I picked this task is because

I had not seen, I've seen every episode of Taskmaster except the ones that I was in, which I think is very normal.

And I could say, if you've only seen the ones that you're in, you need to be arrested.

Not normal at all.

If you're in it, you go and watch it multiple times afterwards.

Especially if you win, it's great.

You have your friends and family over to watch it with you.

You go and see people reacting to it on YouTube.

You have a watch of that.

And then you just do a podcast about it.

That's the normal thing, is to never let go.

But during the pandemic, we re-watched all the time, as I imagine everyone in this room did, we re-watched the whole thing.

And so we ended up re-watching the episodes that I was in.

And I saw them really for the first time.

And the first episode, which I hadn't really plotted this at the time, the first prize task, and the reason I picked this one, is because when

he's going down the line, when Greg's going down the line, he says to everybody, like, Ashley, what have you brought?

Sally, what have you brought?

And then he gets to me and he goes, and you.

And you realize that immediately Greg has decided who the series moron is.

And at the end of it, he gives me one point.

And he gives me one point because he said, Nish is already annoying me.

The exact quote is, he says, Nish gets one point.

I'm not going to justify it because he's already annoying me.

And it did blow me away because he does just, he decides.

Yeah.

And you are so sweet and polite in this first bit.

You're literally like, hello, Greg, here's what I brought brought in for you.

You're really trying to get it.

I kept calling him Gregory.

I decided the only two decisions, this tells you everything.

Like,

when friends go in, they're like, I'm going to do this with this task.

The two things I had planned was, I'm going to call Greg Gregory the whole time, and I'm going to call Alex Horny every time I talk to him.

And those were the only two things that I had planned for the whole of Taskmaster.

And so I call him Gregory, and then he immediately bullies me.

The thing with like he and I know each other because you and him are very good friends.

And so he, we, Greg and I have been

friends and have known each other for quite a long time.

Not necessarily particularly deeply, but because of you, we sort of knew each other at the time.

I'd say we know each other better now, but certainly at the time we knew each other relatively well.

And so, I guess he just decided that would be the funniest thing for him to go in hard on.

But even Greg has a conscience because after we recorded the record two episodes at a time, and after we recorded the first episode, he actually came to my room and was like, Are you fine with that?

I was like,

Yeah,

But what's amazing is it's before you've even started being shit.

Because it's the first prize task.

No, it's not a great prize task.

It's excellent noise.

You pick your laugh.

I think it's quite a sweet selection.

It made me laugh.

But we've not even seen a pre-film task yet.

So we don't, as an audience, we're like, Nish might be amazing at this.

And Greg's just decided he's terrible.

But he sniffed it in the air and he was absolutely great.

Yeah, so he just piled straight in on me.

But he did ask me if I was okay with it between episode one and two, and I was like, Yeah, I mean, if that's what it's like when I haven't given you consent,

but yeah, it was that's why I picked that task because when on the rewatch, when you watch it back, you realize he has immediately identified that the because you know, Greg is an incredible comedian, but also a sort of incredible improviser, and he has really good instincts comedically about how to interact with a room.

And so he identifies comedy dynamics very quickly.

And so every series you can see him, he's got like his sort of terminator brain.

Like this sort of this screen in his mind is sort of red and there's a target floating around.

And he can very quickly identify what the way is.

And you sometimes see it over the course of the series, he evolves the dynamic.

But with me, he was immediately like, the funniest thing, because this guy's going to be so fucking keen.

The funniest thing I can do is just be incredibly aggressive to him.

And then it's funny to watch Greg have to kind of scramble and watching him have to navigate fattier.

Absolutely incredible.

I know that we're all supposed to be against consistent, prolonged sexual harassment,

but I think we can all agree that what she did to Greg was funny and cool.

And he likes it.

You You look genuinely uncomfortable.

If you didn't want that to happen, he shouldn't have dressed like that.

He's begging for it.

With that amount of visible sock.

There's socks on that guy.

There's socks on that.

He's more sock than Matt.

They're up to the calf.

The guy's wearing Christmas stockings.

I could wear them as a boiler suit.

Okay, so you got one point for that.

Let's move on to your

first task that you've selected, the first pre-film task.

What is that?

Very prepared.

The first task that you've selected, we'll do them in this order.

Get the basketball through the hook.

You may not touch the basketball with your hands.

You may not wear gloves or anything that could be reasonably construed to be gloves.

Fastness wins, your time starts now.

Big reaction in the room.

I think everyone remembers this task, but if they don't, talk us through it, please, Nish.

Well, let's just start with a figure.

And let's let that figure be 45 minutes.

I got walked out, saw the basketball, saw the hoop, thought, oh no, this is bad.

Because when I started doing Taskmaster, my mum went, if there's any sport, you're fucked.

That is

a direct quote from the woman who birthed me.

So I, as soon as I saw the boss I was like, oh this is trouble.

But then so then I was like, oh I'll try and chip this.

And what's amazing when you look back on the episode is that Bob tries to chip it.

He tries to chip it.

He realises it's actually quite difficult to do and immediately abandons the idea.

Now that is because Bob Mortimer is a fucking pussy.

He's a fucking coward.

Real bravery takes many forms.

For some it's being a soldier against shot in some stupid fucking war.

But for me, it was trying to.

I got fixated on the idea that I was going to do it.

And the problem is, every time it looked like it was going to stop working, it would nearly work.

And that would give me another 10 minutes of optimism.

And then, after a certain point, there is a Taskmaster madness that happens to every single person who does Taskmaster at some point, where you get locked into an idea and you can't think your way out of trying that idea.

I don't know what you're talking about, mate.

It's not happening to me.

It's just amazing how it happens to everybody.

I just could not stop the idea.

And also, it briefly started to be funny for me.

When Alex brought, I remember on the day, Alex going into the caravan and coming back out with a chair and sitting down.

And even in my like sort of fevered state, I could think, that is funny.

That is funny.

That's happened.

But honestly, every time I i thought i would get i would be so close to it and then it wouldn't happen and then obviously when it did happen it was an amazing feeling obviously i went back thinking i've not done brilliantly on that task but then and again this is again wow this is really behind the scenes stuff um but they don't discuss anything that you've done the crew does not talk to you about anything that you've done ever so you but when you go to the studio you are completely unprepared for what they're about to show and sometimes you can't remember what you've done.

Sometimes you go, Oh my god, if it's that one, I'm in real trouble.

We could talk about the Sudoku later, but there's various things where you're like, but that was the only thing Andy Cartwright, one of the producers, said to me, We've done something with a basketball, and I think you'll understand how to play it.

Yeah, and that was it, that was all he said to me.

And when they showed me chipping the basketball in, I was like, Okay, I know what this is.

So, the only thing for me to do here is absolutely over-celebrate.

Also, I must have seen Goodwill Hunting very recently because when Goodwill Hunting came out, I rented it.

If you haven't seen Goodwill Hunting, it's kind of, it's Matt Damon and Bren Affleck won an Oscar for it.

It's like Damon is a math genius and Rob.

What do you think these people are?

I thought they'd be out smashing puss or something.

But when I was a kid and I saw Goodwill Hunting, I got obsessed with the phrase, how do you like them apples?

I thought it was so funny and like just a borderline monsequetteur, and I got absolutely obsessed with it.

And then I hadn't thought about it for years.

And then, for some reason,

when Taskmaster started, I just repeatedly would shout, How do you like them apples?

And like,

it's so

it's such a stupid thing to be.

You added something to it in the basketball task.

I don't know if you remember this because it wasn't just how do you like them apples.

I'm assuming, I've not seen Goodwill Hunting for a while, that the catchphrase isn't, how do you like them apples?

Kumar out.

Very, very controversial casting when Matt Damon played Will Hunting Kumar.

It's a different era.

It was a different era.

They boom polished his face a little bit.

It was a different era.

Yeah, Kumar out.

And then, obviously, Greg fucking Davis immediately seized on the phrase, how do you like them apples?

And immediately threw it back in my face.

And then his fucking stupid nerd friend had tabulated every single thing that I had done including

calling the ball racist

twice

and you mentioned Groundhog Day four times

and also there's a bit in it where I misused the phrase quid pro quo

when I think I mean to say the ball wasn't going in the basket I am brown ergo the ball is racist and I just said quid pro quo ball is racist.

Which makes literally no sense.

It basically literally means, this is literally translating what I said.

I am brown, the ball wasn't going in, this for that, I'm racist.

But the way, obviously the way it's edited, I mean, I'm sure everyone here remembers the moment, but just in case,

they show the ball going in as if you've done it the first time, you lose your mind celebrating, and then we see all of your other attempts.

I think it's from memory the first time that they did something like that.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's a huge moment in Taskmaster history.

It's like Joe Wilkinson's potatoes, right?

We couldn't, we're watching it, we could not believe it.

Well, I'll tell you who really can't believe it.

So, Ashlyn B is also a very close friend of mine.

And if you go back and watch it, watch the way that Ashlyn reacts when that ball goes into the basket.

She stands up and points at me.

And it's not pride, it's pure disbelief.

I watched it again today.

She does not buy it for a a fucking second.

And I actually have a screen grab on my phone of text from my mum

as she was watching it live and it says, oh my god, oh no.

And then for a second me and your dad were proud.

I don't think I've ever told you that.

I found that screen grab somewhere on my phone.

I recently, I don't know what I was doing, but I was looking for a photo from 2017 or something, and I found that screen camp and I was like, what?

And then I was like, oh fuck, I know exactly what this is.

Yeah, really funny.

Ashling B, if you watch it, she does not believe it for a second.

Like, it's almost like she's standing up and shouting Jacques Hughes.

Like, it really is.

Like, it's an incredible bit of footage.

I can't remember what episode this is actually on, but it does it feels early to feature the phrase, once again we've left Nishkumar till last.

I think it's the first second.

It's early, but it's, yeah, once again we've left Nishkumar till last.

Amazing, what a moment.