![Ed Gamble on Taskmaster: Champion of Champions 2022](/web/20220629044812im_/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2022/06/22/TELEMMGLPICT000299865218_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtGQB12KHxxQCrwnTZkX0nwgWqwm85JEWpGVhFb46TTg.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![Ed Gamble on Taskmaster: Champion of Champions 2022](/web/20220629044812im_/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2022/06/22/TELEMMGLPICT000299865218_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtGQB12KHxxQCrwnTZkX0nwgWqwm85JEWpGVhFb46TTg.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Are you finding it hard to get back into the habit of things? Three different people have recently told me, in three unrelated conversations, that they’ve forgotten the cinema exists. It’s not on the post-Covid radar. Intellectually they know it does exist but it doesn’t occur to them; they choose on any given day between an early night or watching telly, a meal out or a drink with friends, and the next day they’ll walk past an Odeon and go, “Oh! I’d forgotten about that.”
It’s a bit scary. The arts can’t survive that sort of thing. A theatrical friend (that is, a friend who puts on plays, not a camp friend, although obviously he is both) tells me this tendency will be the death of theatre. Between the audiences who can’t afford it and the audiences who’ve forgotten to consider it, there are too few bums for the increasingly threadbare seats. Nobody dares stage anything experimental, and they worry enough about the easy crowd-pleasers.
This extends beyond the arts, into all those civilised concepts which the Covid lockdown violently and suddenly dismantled and which may never be entirely… mantled. We forget the routine visits to dentist or hairdresser; we forget one should patronise real shops and libraries to keep them alive, or even to visit the more distant or dull of one’s elderly relatives in far-flung places. Everything has shrunk. We feel a jolt, spotting an old photo or seeing boards hammered up over a once-bustling doorway: the jolt is our shoulders being shaken by the ghost of what we had forgotten. We switched off civilisation and we can’t quite switch it back on.
So, it’s scary. It feels like a recurrent anxiety dream I used to have, where I would “remember” I had a flat or a dog, and I’d be nervous to open the door and see the state of it. After my father died, I dreamt for years that he was still alive but I’d forgotten and just not gone to see him. In my memory, now, I have a horrible feeling that’s what actually happened with my actual grandma. But it was all so long ago.
We’re a bit defeated, aren’t we? Punch-drunk, time-weakened and shell-shocked by what we went along with, we’ve stopped speaking our minds because we don’t want to be shouted at, and we can’t see the point of trying to achieve anything anyway. We’ve stopped swimming against the tide because we’ve swallowed too much water. Nothing feels achievable, everything feels virtual, and the virtual world isn’t much of a place to be.
I was thinking about this while watching Taskmaster: Champion of Champions last Thursday on Channel 4. I found it truly cheering to see a bunch of people with the energy to really try and do something. Even if what they were trying to do was eat a grape in an elaborate manner, or trick Greg Davies into thinking a bag of bricks was a bag of balloons. It was still something. And they gave it a f---ing go.
That’s the thing about the comedians who won their respective series of Taskmaster: they really wanted to. And tried to. And weren’t ashamed to show they were trying to. The older I get, the more I admire that instinct. I was brought up to believe that one ought simultaneously to excel at things and look like you hadn’t tried. My father, God rest his soul, was good at that. So I’ve tried to be good at it too, just as I’ve tried to be good at everything he was good at (except horse-riding which is a terrifying activity for masochists so I’ve stuck to betting on how quickly other people can do it which is A LOT MORE FUN).
Unfortunately, when I was a contestant on Taskmaster myself, series 12, I did try, and I came last. Wrong way round. Oh well, I hope people enjoyed the failure. It’s usually funny, isn’t it, other people’s failure? I certainly laughed when I saw a comment about the Champion of Champions show from David Baddiel, who came last on series 9: “I have suggested a Loser of Losers to Alex Horne. Perhaps predictably, it hasn’t gone well.”
I thought I might not enjoy watching a champions’ show because nobody would be amusingly rubbish. In the event I was not just entertained but really interested – truly curious to see which of these driven competitors would win the title – which made me rethink everything I’ve ever believed about comedy panel shows.
The next night I watched One Question, Channel 4’s new quiz show in which Claudia Winkleman asks contestants a single question (like “What is a circle?”) and gives them 25 answers to choose from.
I would watch Claudia Winkleman do anything. And that’s not just a figure of speech, because she’s my best friend and I have watched her burp, scratch, wee, change nappies and eat whole roast chickens at one sitting.
She’s great as always here, which is obviously annoying. I’m a quiz show host myself. I fondly hoped this format would fail and be a dreadful embarrassment to all concerned. But I found it gripping. It completely works. I enjoyed the early schadenfreude of finding it too easy, laughing derisively as the contestants muttered, “The 1700s, that’s a long time ago”, and “Obviously the Scottish do have potatoes”, but then I found I couldn’t switch it off and was hunched in furious concentration over the remaining difficult options.
Also, in 2022, I am impressed that anybody ever does anything.
Can TV game shows point the way out of our post-pandemic malaise?
This week, Victoria has been watching Taskmaster: Champion of Champions and One Question on Channel 4