Matt Lucas and Richard Ayoade are both coming to Taskmaster
The Doctor Who and IT Crowd stars will be joined by Chloe Petts, Isy Suttie, and Nina Conti on the new season of the long-running British madness simulator.
There’s always a bit of a learning curve when it comes to a new season of long-running British panel series/game show/escape room/performance art/madness simulator Taskmaster. Because the series uses the same cast of five well-known comedians throughout the entirety of a ten-episode season, the first few episodes usually function as a bit of a getting-to-know you period, even with people (like recent American contestants Jason Mantzoukas and Kumail Nanjiani) you might be professionally familiar with. It’s a function of the series’ nature as a very silly sort of crucible: Public personas inevitably burn away in the face of the utter ridiculousness that cast members are asked to perform.
All of which is to say that we’re genuinely curious to see how the just-announced cast for the show’s 22nd season will fare, given how, uh, developed some of those public personas are. We’re thinking specifically here of LittleBritain, Doctor Who, and Great British Baking Show‘s Matt Lucas—a guy who’s spent his career working pretty much every rung of the ladder of British comedy tastefulness—and then most especially former IT Crowd and Garth Marengthi’s Darkplacestar Richard Ayoade, whose entire public presentation is built around such an ironclad vibe of composure that it feels like an immovable object is about to slam into an unstoppable force.
As usual, the season 22 cast is a mix of people at different points on the fame spectrum, albeit with no American interlopers involved this time around. (Sadly, Horne’s dreams of luring in Conan O’Brien have apparently yet to come to pass.) The other three competitors on the upcoming season are Chloe Petts, who appeared in 2024 on Netflix stand-up special Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda; Nina Conti, a comedian and ventriloquist you might know from her strange and fascinating mid-2010s film Her Master’s Voice; and Isy Suttie, a comedian and songwriter probably best known to American audiences for playing Dobby in Peep Show.
Taskmaster airs two seasons per year, so fans can expect to see Lucas, Ayoade, Petts, Conti, and Suttie in the house some time in the fall. All episodes of the series (including the just-finished season 21, during which Nanjiani publicly revealed his internet search history as part of a desperate quest for points) are currently available on YouTube.
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