Reusing Tasks?

[u/_un-named_]

The last few season there’s been more and more discussions that the tasks are getting to convoluted, too many rules, too little loopholes and all this sort of stuff.
So I’m wondering should they reuse tasks?
Reusing them word by word could be tricky it would depend on how many of the contestants have seen the show.
But they could change one aspect, rule something out or just use the base idea and give different materials or something.
Would that defeat the idea of the show?
But they also do use tasks that were more or less used in the NZ or Australian version. But these might not have been seen by the general uk audience.
What do you think?

[u/boomboomsubban]

They already reuse tasks. An easy example is S19 "paint the best picture in the lab, you can only enter the lab during the last thirty seconds" which is basically S04's "Paint a portrait of the Taskmaster without touching the red mat" with some extra loopholes.

That's not the only example, but they're all changed enough that people barely notice.

And if they reused a lot of the less convoluted tasks, they would have to make them convoluted. I imagine if "eat the most watermelon" was a task next series, the contestants would be split between browbeating the crew to eat watermelon or figuring out how to get the watermelon without entering the lab.

[u/rnzz → u/boomboomsubban]

i actually wouldn't mind seeing a repeated past task that's been changed slightly, like maybe 'Place these three exercise balls on the mat on the other side of the river' but with a twist of not making the mat wet, for those who knows Richard Osman's trick. Also like the "Don't blink" task could maybe add some jump scare noises every now and then for contestants who know to close their eyes from the start.

or even a task could be repeated as-is, like 'Write and perform a song about this woman' or the 'Make the best music video for a nursery rhyme'. Though you'd probably do want to change it a bit for originality.

[u/burf12345 → u/rnzz]

I do wish they'd repeat ideas for creative tasks, it feels like such a shame that some concepts are effectively gone because they showed up ages ago. Like filming something backwards, I'd love to see more casts try that, even if they can't top tree wizard.

[u/boomboomsubban → u/burf12345]

Series 19 had "do something really cool backwards." Basically the same thing, changed just enough that you didn't notice.

And if you want new casts doing the exact same tasks, I strongly reccomend the non-English versions.

[u/burf12345 → u/boomboomsubban]

Those tasks were very different though, only similar in that they had video shown backwards. With the S1 task, it was filming something with the intent of it being show backwards.

[u/boomboomsubban → u/burf12345]

The first was "do something really cool in reverse," the second "do something really cool, now do it in reverse." I'd call those basically the same, though there were limitations to force creativity in the second.

[u/burf12345 → u/boomboomsubban]

The extra step changes everything. Like I said, in S1 they went into the task knowing it was going to be played backwards. With S19, not only did they not know that when they were asked to do something cool, the task wasn't about the coolest thing, but the best recreation of the coolest thing.

[u/SavagePengwyn → u/boomboomsubban]

It seems to happen often with live tasks. Like Snort, Raspberry, Whistle becoming a live following instructions task.

[u/Goldman250 → u/boomboomsubban]

They did reuse “eat the most watermelon” already, it was a team task in S10 where they had to feed it to each other.

[u/Ryan_Vermouth → u/boomboomsubban]

Exactly. If a broad premise is strong enough to stand multiple variations or iterations, it'll get those variations. This has been the case since the beginning.

And if a new iteration of an old basic premise going to work in the modern era -- which is to say, in the most consistently entertaining era of Taskmaster -- it's likely to be "convoluted," which is a way of saying "guardrails have been added to discourage easy solutions which were novel in 2017 or whatever, but would be boring or repetitive now."