Greg Davies and Alex Horne on the Taskmaster Series 20 contestants

As Taskmaster returns for a 20th series tomorrow, Greg Davies and Alex Horne give their verdict on this year’s contestants:  Reece Shearsmith, Ania Magliano, Maisie Adam, Phil Ellis and Sanjeev Bhaskar.

Alex, tell us about latest batch of contestants: had you been after any of them for a while?

Alex: Good question. I’d already spoken with Reece. We knew he was interested after Steve [Pemberton] did it, but we wanted to have a bit of a gap between Steve and him. We knew they were friends and colleagues, but also slightly rivals, so he was both the logical choice, but also someone we really wanted, so I'm pleased we managed to make that work because he's busy. 

And I guess Sanjeev is a slight surprise. Taskmaster has been going for such a long time, you sort of forget that you can have these big names in comedy that we haven't had yet: there's still so many out there. He’s a proper legend. You look at this CV: he’s an OBE and he’s been in Paddington 2, he’s done an awful lot. 

And then the other three are maybe newer names. Maisie is an old hand at panel shows, and is very competent, but also a bit mad. And then Phil and Ania are very different, very good comedians, but it was really nice to give them a push.

Let’s go through them one by one, then, starting with Maisie.

Alex: I would say she misunderstood pretty much every task. She wasn’t ditzy, but maybe klutzy or something.

Greg:  I think maybe she just didn't read the tasks properly, but then she’d get extremely cross with us – well, Alex, mainly – for not explaining it properly. 

Alex: I think she’s got a different energy from people we’ve had before. She has quite wild eyes!

Greg:  She was quite cross, Maisie. I was quite surprised by that. Mind you, I kept calling her Daisy, which made her quite annoyed.  The director kept saying in our ear, ‘She’s very feisty.’ That was Andy [Devonshire]’s word of the day. But it's important to say she was also very funny.

Alex: I would say she was really quick-witted in the studio, and really slow in the tasks, although she always found her own way to do the task eventually. 

Greg:  I think a good example was one task that involved weighing something, but there was a bonus point for also making it sexy, and all Maisie heard was ‘sexy’, so she spent all her efforts doing that and not bothering with the main bit of the task.

Alex: Yes, she was easily distracted and a bit mad, but very funny and very unusual. She was really great. She’s played in Soccer Aid a few times and done stuff with the lionesses so maybe she brought some of that energy to it.

Greg:  Are you saying you think she’s like a football yob?

Alex: No, I’m saying she was full throttle.

Greg:  And probably the most competitive of the lot. She questioned every single task and every score. Stroppy, competitive, funny. 

She led something of a rebellion amongst the contestants against you both, didn’t she?

Alex: They kept threatening to refuse to do certain tasks, but it never actually came to that. I kept hearing about this ‘rebellion’ they were planning, and they did do something in the final show which was quite anarchic. I think she was probably the leader of that. But she’s done a lot of panel shows and she was brilliant in the studio: very sharp with lots of callbacks to previous jokes.

What about Sanjeev?

Greg:  I think he’s only 61, but it does seem like he’s been around forever and he fulfilled that ‘elder statesman’ role very well. I found him a very calming presence. We always knew when we threw to him in the studio that something funny was going to come out. Even if he did badly in a task, he always said something funny. 

Alex: He’s maybe one of the most suave people we've had. We've had lots of older people who've come totally unstuck in the tasks, which Sanjeev never did. He just took it at his own pace, which was pretty slow,

Greg:  And he was often the one to do a nice, rounded joke during a silly discussion. He often constructed actual jokes, which is very admirable. 

Alex: I think he's a class act, and he was also generous with the others. At one moment, he said that something Ania did was one of the best things he'd ever seen, which I thought was really nice. He was really supportive, because everyone else was younger than him.

Greg:  I loved his presence. Thought he was great.

Can you explain the Paddington 2 running joke that you had with him? 

Greg:  I think it's quite handy when someone's done something prestigious in their career, then they're on our silly show doing something silly. I always like to pick up on that. When he revealed he was an OBE, which I didn’t realise, that also became a good juxtaposition: past glories and fancy titles are a good juxtaposition for the madness that we put them through.

Alex: Unforgotten is a huge show, it gets five million viewers, and it’s a very serious detective show. But it’s still Sanjeev wandering around trying to solve puzzles, which is a nice parallel with us.

We had John Hannah for the New Year special but we only had him for a few shows so we didn’t get to utilise the Hollywood status thing for that long. So being able to have Sanjeev for ten episodes is great for us because we can be silly and punch up. Not ‘punch up’ exactly, but you know what I mean.

Greg:  It's just good to remind people, when they're jumping over things and working out silly puzzles, that they've also achieved great accolades.

What about Reece?

Alex: We knew all the League of Gentlemen liked the show, which is a lovely thing to find out. I don't know why we asked Steve first: there was no pecking order. Maisie was quite scared of [Reece], and I think I was quite scared of him too.

Greg:  I think there's a brooding quality to him. I felt that at any given moment, he might attack Alex, and I enjoyed the tension of that.

Alex: It would bubble along and he’d get cross and then it would bubble down again, so there was something unpredictable about it.

Greg:  I kept drawing on the analogy that he put me in mind of Falling Down with Michael Douglas. I felt like he was Fit To Burst a lot of the time, but he never actually did burst. I thought he was absolutely charming and interesting and fun and brilliant in the studio.

Alex: He also brought all his film references to it, which we've never had before. He kept doing impressions of Dracula and bringing up references, a lot of which were quite obscure. 

Greg:  The man has very specific interests. We discovered he has a room at home where he keeps all his objets d'arts and horror stuff. He brought in an incredible prize task. I think we were all a bit in awe of him.

Alex: He’s very talented. He has peculiarities, but he’s very aware of those peculiarities. He was unpredictable. He’d quite deliberately keep a short temper bubbling under the surface. He’d get quite annoyed with the stupid rules we put in.

Greg:  I liked it when he turned on you and said, ‘How do you like it? Your time starts now.’

What about Ania?

Alex: She’s 27, so she’s not a child, but she did throw herself into the generational gap between us and we found that funny. She’d tease us for being old, and she didn’t mind us teasing her for being young. She’s smart and she's sort of quirky. She’s got a different angle. 

Greg:  She’s not exactly like Sam Campbell but she sort of puts [us] in mind of him, a bit, in that she has her own unique viewpoint and is very comfortable in her own skin for one of such tender years. She's quite a unique voice, I think, and often came at an angle I wasn't expecting.

Alex: I'm sure she would be able to handle herself on more traditional panel shows, but it's nice to have her on our show where you can see the full person instead of just having little soundbites. 

And what about Phil?

Alex: He seemed to be an audience favourite pretty quickly, considering they didn't know him, I think he found his feet quickly. He's been around for years but he hasn’t done that much telly.

Greg:  He’s 43, he’s no child. As I said repeatedly during the show, I think he's an old-school entertainer reborn in a younger man's body. He would cheesily look at the camera after every joke, which was hilarious. I thought he was going to break into a Mike Yarwood style version of Fly Me To The Moon.

Alex: He’s very lovable.

Greg:  He was the most enthusiastic. I felt he was the one who was having the time of his life.

Alex: He didn’t mind throwing away a point for a laugh. I don’t think he was too competitive.

Greg:  I don't think he was competitive at all. I think he was like a puppy of enthusiasm, running around and throwing himself into all tasks. I loved it. He's got a whole set of catchphrases that he kept using as well.

Alex: He’s completely uncynical. He knows it might help his career, I suppose, but that's not why he was there. He was genuinely there to have a good time. He was a huge fan of the show and just thrilled to be there. That sort of energy is so great for us.

• Taskmaster series 20 starts at 9pm on Thursday on Channel 4. Edited version of an interview supplied by publicists.

» Maisie Adam​
» Sanjeev Bhaskar​
» Phil Ellis​
» Ania Magliano​
» Reece Shearsmith​

Published: 10 Sep 2025