Top 10 HARDEST Taskmaster Tasks

We haven’t had secret, solo tasks on the show for years, but many of them were needlessly difficult - particularly this one, designed to be impossible. Upon noticing Mel Giedroyc’s unwavering optimism, the crew took it upon themselves to frustrate her so much that she got genuinely angry. They asked her to hide this giant inflatable ball in just a few minutes without deflating it, which, obviously, she couldn’t do. They gave her a handful of other ball-related tasks, too, and she was livid when they cut back to her in the studio. It’s maybe the cruellest of all the secret tasks; Josh Widdicombe had to count a lot of beans, but at least that’s not physically exhausting.

As is nearly always the case on “Taskmaster”, there’s a trick to this one that makes it extremely simple: do something different with your hand so that it’s easy to spot - that’s what Sarah did. Of course, they didn’t know WHY a picture of their hand was being taken, so most of them didn’t do this. Instead, they found themselves locked in a storage container surrounded by thousands of photos of hands, asked to find their own. Dara and John were driven to complete madness and didn’t manage to complete the task at all. Munya solved it with the laser pointer and Sarah with her fist, but it was an ordeal for the other three.

As you’d expect, Victoria Coren Mitchell made this task look easy - and honestly, maybe it was unfair to pit her against the other contestants in a battle of wits like this. On the other hand, she did come dead last in that series by over forty points, so it was nice to have SOME tasks she excelled in. If you’re not Victoria, though, you’d have had a very tough time solving the riddle, as the team of three showed. Victoria and Alan - though, really, it was just Victoria on her own - managed to finish the task in 33 minutes, while the other team took an extra hour on top of that to do it, even with three of them working at once.

This task was gruelling for anybody who wasn’t Richard Osman, who bent the rules to bring the yoga mat to the bottom and make the challenge far easier. The other contestants, who followed the task to the letter and struggled to get the three yoga balls up the hill, were furious that Greg was going to allow Osman to get away with his trick. After seeing Joe, John, and Doc Brown work themselves to the bone trying to keep the yoga balls up there, it seems completely outrageous that they let him win the task so unscrupulously. Especially considering Joe Wilkinson’s infamous potato throw was in this same episode.

In this task, Alex was hiding on a bridge miles away at Buckinghamshire Railway Centre and they had to get as close to him as possible without being noticed. They had a lot of ground to cover and it was the dead of winter, and both Sian and Paul got caught - Sian twice. Lou and Iain fared better, but all of them talked about how arduous it was in the studio afterwards. But perhaps the hardest part of the task was watching Joe Thomas sail to victory and then chat to Alex; it was easily one of the most awkward things we’ve ever seen. He said he’d enjoyed himself, though.

Few things are as physically demanding as an eating competition, and series 1 of “Taskmaster” showed that thoroughly. It was the first-ever pre-recorded task in the whole show, and certainly set the tone. All they had to do was eat as much as possible in one minute, but that proved to be very difficult. Romesh and Tim both smashed the watermelon to pieces and ate it as if they’d been starving for days, while Roisin ended up taking just one bite. She came last, but she did manage to keep her dignity, which none of the others accomplished after making themselves sick.

Alex Horne almost never loses his temper with the contestants, but he actually snapped at Bridget Christie in this one. Yes, she may have been the single most infuriating “Taskmaster” contestant we’ve ever seen, but this task tested Alex almost as much as the players. In an old church, they had to find and display the shoe Alex was thinking of, and were only allowed to ask him yes or no questions. Worse, they each had to say or do something different after asking each question. They were exhausted by him and his shoe, and it took Chris Ramsey until the end of the task to realise he should have divided the room into halves.

Like the hands, this task seems designed to drive its players to the edge of sanity. The rules were simple: if they said a word containing the letter T or were silent for more than 7 seconds, the alarm would go off, and they had to go back to the beginning of the stepping stones. Except, obviously, Alex didn’t tell them the rules, they had to work it out themselves, and it did NOT look like fun. Lee and Mike did poorly enough, but the team of three had an even worse time, taking fifteen minutes to solve it and setting off the alarm far more often. Though, Charlotte did at one point suggest attacking Alex to stop him from making the noise.

If they picked these tasks in the correct order, as Rose did, they had to do one of the easiest tasks in the show. But if they did it in the wrong order, like everybody else, it was a nightmare. Ed Gamble went on the record as saying it was the worst day of his life, as he followed the task to the letter and restarted it when he failed, completing the entire gauntlet not once, but twice. David Baddiel, meanwhile, struggled with something far simpler: trying to work out where his hip was. And Jo Brand got away with not restarting by threatening to have a stroke.

More exercise balls, this looks like one of the most brutal tasks ever on the show. They were forced to sit in an inflatable dinghy on wheels and drag themselves around a warehouse in pursuit of yoga balls, and none of them enjoyed themselves. Just getting into the boat was difficult enough for Katherine, let alone completing the task. Crawling around, fighting with giant balls, and ending up utterly humiliated: it was one task we definitely wouldn’t want to do, and it does make you wonder how much they get paid to put themselves through this. We’d like to see Greg have a go at this one himself, though. Let us know in the comments which of these tasks you could ace, and which you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.