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I feel Mathew Baynton has the same essence as Ivo Graham on taskmaster - they really try but ultimately you feel bad and want to just give them a hug because they look like they might have a breakdown

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yes. yes. YES

i'm already getting wumar vibes from these two, PLEASE tell me they're on a team

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MATHEW BAYNTON OH MY WHAT A DAY

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from our home to yours, have a very try not to kill yourself christmas

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it's because you're always sexualizing that damn senior citizen

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I've forgotten how gorgeous Alex is in blue and pink...

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my new silly little life hack for doing everyday tasks is pretending I'm on taskmaster and reading the made up tasks in my head

"fold the most laundry in thirty minutes. you must fold all of the clothes properly. your time starts now."

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i haven't had a chance to sit down and watch last weeks taskmaster ep and now it's almost ep 3 and im getting quite sad about it but im really busy agahhagaa i haven't even been able to read or write fics and i feel like im back to lurking but not by choice im slowly losing my minddddd

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silly

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Greg Davies giving his bedroom eyes to Helen Baxendale on Cuckoo

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Daddy's back... Best intro ever Taskmaster s18e01 SPOILER

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Oh wowee what a way to start the series! Time for some thoughts on S18×01...

Firstly, I would just like to say daymn Greg and Alex are glowing this series! Greg seemed so happy and giggly this ep (not that he isn't like that every ep) but this one especially! Alex's banter section is one of my new favourites, as well as the look Greg gives him lol. As for the cast... I'm LOVING it! The chemistry is already there in ep 1 and I cannot wait to see it evolve. I want to talk more about the set/lighting, I haven't compared it to s17 but the colour grading looks different? In a good way (it feels a little warmer, more reminiscent of earlier series) but maybe I'm imagining it oh well. Also finally the contestant's chairs have arms!!! It always really bothered me and thought the chairs looked strange but that's just me I suppose. The theme for this series aaa how I do enjoy gushing over the theme! I'm loving how the main/living room is set up, it feels like the right amount of clutter in just the right places. I'm yet to see what the full garden looks like (i'll probably make a longer post about how it's changed over the series) but I really enjoy that they've now included the caravan into the theme! I love that Rosie ended up winning the ep just purely by guessing and getting it right, so glad to finally see her on the show :) (i would also simply like to add that greg looked mighty fine during the live task thank you)

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oh my GOD Greg's opening banter ITS EP 1?!?? It's already unhinged and im so here for it

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[x]

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S18E01

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There are a lot of things about Taskmaster that feel very... culturally British. That mixture of extreme silliness with occasionally very dark humour for example.

Or the particular tone of affectionate bullying and the way it's (mostly) taken in good humour. (And expected to be taken in good humour, even when it hits a nerve. Something that caused quite a bit of bad blood between the Brits and the Germans in my former workplace, because we generally don't shrug off insults that easily.)

But I think one difference is sort of... simmering under the surface in ways that aren't immediately obvious to international audiences (and makes me wish I was still writing uni papers, because it would be a GOLDMINE), is how much of the humour is based on the British class system.

I mean, the basic premise of "tyrannical taskmaster makes people jump through arbitrary hoops for his favour and then belittles them for doing so" is already something only an audience with a slightly monarchical bend would accept unquestioningly. Add to that the way the Taskmaster/Assistant relationship is set up... Let's just say it fetishises a social dynamic that doesn't exist in quite the same way elsewhere.

Which I think may partially explain why so many people seem to be oblivious to the D/s undertones. -- Of course it's often kink-blindness on the part of non-kinky people, but I strongly suspect it's helped along by the cultural perception of what constitutes an acceptable power differential acting as a buffer to seeing anything off about it. The threshold for when it becomes weird is different.

Now, I think (and since I'm not British, do correct me if I have it wrong!) a key part of what makes the basic premise funny to British audiences (and differently from how it's funny to international ones) is the way cultural expectations of power vs submission are subverted.

Purely based on accent? Alex is the posh one. By miles. And Greg -- very pointedly! -- doesn't do the matching Fauxbridge that most viewers would probably expect from someone presented in a position of authority (or even just a "neutral" BBC accent). It seems bizarre from a foreign point of view, but I've found that this kind of discrepancy immediately and viscerally registers with Brits. (It's uncanny how little it takes, too -- ask your favourite non-TM-aware English person to just listen to the different ways they say "taskmaster" and they will extrapolate things you cannot even imagine.) Instead of just the regional connotation, there are always implications of class and social status to an accent that are absolutely baffling to the unaware.

Add the fact that Greg Davies is from Wales, and a lot of English people have a weird colonial superiority complex towards Welsh people to this day... It's enough to make all these obvious gestures of devoted subservience from Alex very unexpected and therefore funny.

(Also notice how it adds interesting layers to Katherine Ryan buying Greg a fake lordship title? And makes it funnier in a way she may not even have fully been aware of herself, being Canadian? It's delightfully irreverent and pokes fun at the whole system.)

My guess is that this is also why the studio audience's reaction to linguistics-based jokes is always so strong. Lets take the recurring bit about Alex correcting Greg's grammar. To an international audience, the main joke is that Alex is a nerd and cares too much about grammar, with maybe a side of him being a smartarse towards his boss in a potentially ill-advised way. But to a British audience, the level of audacious insubordination implied there? Much stronger. Wildly offensive thing to do. (And a level of arrogance that is extra hilarious coming from someone shown to be sleeping in a dog bed.)

The same mechanism also puts Alex's snide little asides towards contestants with regional or "urban" accents into perspective. Offensive dick move on his part? Oh yes, extremely. But the audience is very much not supposed to be on his side in this. He's being a bigoted little bully, and either the contestants get to humiliate him in retaliation (it's certainly not a coincidence that the Welsh and Irish contestants are generally the ones having the most fun putting him in his place) or Greg calls him out on it in the studio. In a society in which Alex's brand of micro-aggression is still incredibly commonplace and accent discrimination a widely accepted default, it's actually very cathartic to see it openly acknowledged and condemned.

I mean Tumblr obviously loves Alex, because he's cute and funny and we love the Greg/Alex D/s thing (I'm definitely guilty of this as well), but we have to remember that -- in the context of the show's premise -- his character is supposed to be pathetic and ridiculous, so when Greg does the "next to me a man who once told me while drunk that he thinks regional accents are inversely correlated to intelligence" intro thing, we're meant to see it as an asshole opinion that is actually unacceptable to hold and no one in their right mind would openly admit to. So Greg is humiliating Alex by (supposedly) exposing him as someone who would spout that kind of opinion. (Same as the jokes about Alex's misogyny. I see people criticise these jokes all the time, but I think that's because they refuse to understand how the underlying mechanism actually works and take them at face value as the real Alex's actual opinion, rather than something deliberately assigned to his in-show character to make a point about them being terrible.)