Mike Wozniak on touring, Taskmaster and Three Bean Salad

Mike Wozniak began performing comedy in a medics’ sketch group. After turning to stand-up in 2007, he was nominated for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe the following year, and for best show in 2013. He also played strait-laced financial adviser Brian in Greg Davies’s Channel 4 sitcom Man Down, had a breakout on Taskmaster series 11 and was Rose Matafeo's assistant on Junior Taskmaster. Alongside Henry Paker and Ben Partridge he hosts the Chortle Award-winning podcast Three Bean Salad and has just begun a tour of his latest stand-up show, The Bench. Here JAY RICHARDSON talks to him about all of that…

This is your biggest tour yet, how's it been so far?

It's been lush, thank you. I'm having a lovely old time. Every comic will have been somewhere where they've thrown something out and the audience has gone, 'do you know what? That is not up to snuff'. Or simply, 'not for me'. 

But when you tour, everyone's on the same side. They already know and like your shtick. Obviously, there will be some bring-alongs to be won over. But unlike an open mic, the starting point is wonderful. And through touring and doing Three Bean Salad live shows I've discovered my audience are lovely people. I'm having a riot.

With the spotlight that Taskmaster and Three Bean Salad have brought you, has your onstage persona shifted to acknowledge your success?

No, that hasn't be a concern. When you're writing, what comes out, comes out. I've been around the block a bit, had a few knocks. And I'm just more comfortable, much more than I would have been 10 or 15 years ago, writing the kind of show that I might enjoy, and seeing if there's an audience for it. Rather than trying to write something that's a good fit for everyone.

Early on, I experimented with all kinds of different types of comedy. I admire observational comics very much. But that style just felt clunky and didn't work for me.

Why do you think that was?

Because if I have an observation about something, it comes out more naturally in a story, character or little side-note. I really admire Jen Brister and Seann Walsh, the way they can concentrate something so beautifully into a perfect routine with an act-out. I'm a fan of that kind of comedy, watch it a lot and think about it a lot, usually when I'm rewriting. Because I have a bit more of a woolly, pattering style. As the show is developing, I'll think about them when I'm trying to hone and condense it.

Obviously, Taskmaster's made a huge difference in terms of the size of the audience. And there's a bit of shtick when you're on a show like that. But it's still kind of you. Or a very close version of you. People coming to the live shows know the shtick they like and it's never going to be a million miles from that.

And that's similar with Three Bean Salad?

Yes, except that that's maybe less shticky because you're talking for hours and it's with old friends. Maybe it's just different gears, the same way you have a different gear talking to a difficult in-law. The gears in Taskmaster and Three Bean Salad are absolutely in play in the live shows. And I might push that a bit here and there. 

But that's all part of the fun and the audience is in on it. They know I'm leaning hard into being a fusty, provincial middle-aged man, harder than I might in day-to-day life. That's part of the game. And particularly with this show, which features more chat with the audience, there's a game element.

Yes, tell me about The Bench. You're letting the crowd dictate the story to an extent?

The starting point is a local outrage, the vandalism of a memorial bench. Why that's happened and who might have done it, the impact on our little corner of the south-west. My little slice of Middle England will be recognisable to many, whether you live in places like it or not. Most people will have been there or visited relatives in similar places.

But there's a Choose Your Own Adventure component. Even in the first half, to a degree, the audience can choose which parts of the scandal and the mystery they want to explore. And in the second half, if they want, it can be very chatty and there's the potential for them to ask questions, posit theories. They can unlock all kinds of different bits of the show.

There's maybe been one show where they only wanted a show, thanks very much. They'd come to relax not chat. And that's fine. If it turns out that the audience's higher brain is in that mood, that's absolutely available to them. And fair play.

But if they want to go down the Choose Your Own Adventure route, if they want to get their Miss Marple gear in action, they absolutely can. Sometimes they unlock everything. Sometimes they only unlock part of what's happened. There are little sub-mysteries within the mystery.

How much is this you testing your improv skills and how much is it you craving collaboration?

It wasn't really planned. With my previous show, Zusa, that was something I'd been thinking about for years, a real bit of family mythology that was very unclear. And therefore it became almost a monologue really. But with the development of this one, I found myself asking them what they wanted to hear about. And there would be a list of leads, clues, bits or routines. And in those very unstructured early days, I really didn't mind where we went. The show was essentially written. But I was having a lot of fun with them choosing exactly where we'd go. 

Sometimes they will choose something that goes straight into a routine. But they might have a question, a theory, a comment or a complaint, leading us down an avenue that I've not thought about before. Then we're in the wind and we're having a lovely time together. They're getting an experience, it makes every show a bit of a one-off. And I wanted to make that permanent. 

It's really put a spring in my step and I get very excited, particularly in the interval. I'm jonesing to get back on stage and see what the audience is in the mood for.

Is there some crossover with the petty, parochial concerns of your St Elwick's Neighbourhood Association Newsletter podcast?

Yes and no. Not literally. But in terms of its origin, it's very St Elwick, in that both have come from me spending too much of my life in quite a small community in Devon, in Middle England. Where it's first world problems galore.

They're both ways of me lancing the boil. I arrogantly assume that there will be a time when I go forth and live elsewhere. Move to Seoul and learn Korean. Spend four years travelling around South America in a motorbike sidecar or join the burlesque scene in Berlin.

In reality, I'll probably be here until I'm dead. Still, I fantasise about what future me might do because it's got to come out somehow. Even if it was inspired by real life, St Elwick's was fiction of course. Whereas The Bench is closer to actual home.

Why did you feel a need to embellish your family history in Zusa?

Part of the thing with Zusa was that the story came from an unreliable narrator. The reality is that it would have been very difficult to talk about when she told it to her children. And then, when they talked about it again many years later, she was dead.

This was your Polish grandmother?

Yes, who I turned into my great aunt in the show. Just because I found that helpful. There were some slightly different accounts. Then my father and I unearthed some documents which contradicted some of what we had been told. It was clear some of the things that they'd picked out as a group were definitely true, some might have been true and some were definitely not. How much of that is memory? How much was her not wanting to talk about it? Was she so pestered about it that she came up with some other story that she eventually believed?

I was an unreliable narrator telling the story of an unreliable narrator. There were completely absurd moments that had true things buried within them, along with some other things that would have been true but I didn't know were true, or they were augmented in some way. 

And that's commonplace in families, particularly with families who've got a story a generation or two back that relates to some mass movement. A migration, a war, famine, whatever it might be. It gets murky.

Is this part of why you love Spike Milligan, his attempts to process war and the immigrant experience through humour?

I was very young when I first got into Spike Milligan and The Goons and I'm sure the reason initially was visceral. It would have been something that chimed taste-wise and just made me laugh to my core. But later on, the more I got to know about the man, the more of his books and essays I read, the more I realised that there was considerably more going on. 

Something I came to respect a lot was his approach to satire, political and social. I experimented with satire early on and it didn't fit for me to do it in the way that someone like Nish [Kumar] does, where it's straight down the line, where he takes something and he thoroughly, brilliantly, examines it.

With Spike, I love that there was satire in almost everything he did, unless he was going super-absurd. But it's buried, it's not up in your grill. It might simply be the way a character is represented, in what they say about a hierarchy, the systems and the way people treat each other within the Army. 

And also in society?

Yes, to do with families for example, about how we treat elderly people and how dismissive of them we might be in our day-to-day lives. What's happening will be hilarious and you can enjoy it on a surface level. But if you're revisiting it, especially as a comic thinking about writing, trying to kill the frog so to speak, you discover all this other stuff packed in. 

With Zusa, I hoped that it was also a story that humanised an immigrant, someone who had no intention of being an immigrant. What I don't want to be doing is railing and telling people that I'm a moral compass and this is how we should think about immigration. Particularly because I'd be preaching to the choir, most people in my audiences have probably got an outlook like mine I would imagine.

And similarly, with this show, what I've been dwelling on a lot is the rise of autocracy. And the fact that while it's happening, I'm still living in a place where we're not affected in the same way that they are in Russia, America, Hungary or China. We're still concerned with our First World problems. Yet this stuff is creeping up on us even as we continue to focus on what's under our noses. Those kind of anxieties, I'm reading and thinking about a lot. It's not a railing essay. But it's in there.

Your stand-up always seems to obliquely reflect upon what it is to be an 'Englishman'. How intentional is that?

It's always been there and it's the life I've lived. Some comics are hyper-honest, tell all about sex, relationships, family members they've fallen out with. I don't feel this is dishonest. But the experience that suits me to talk about, and which comes out naturally, is a bit vaguer. It's about institutions.

I went to a very dry, didactic grammar school. I've very much gone along an institutionalised travelator. University, NHS and what have you. And I'm definitely quite institutionalised. I've ticked a lot of the usual boxes in life, mortgage, dog, children. All that sort of stuff.

I ponder a lot about what it is to be English. I'm a form of English, born and raised here. It's the only country I've ever lived in. I sound very identifiably English if I go abroad, no-one's in any doubt where I might be from. 

But one side of my family is Welsh. The other side is Polish. Who would never have had any intention of living in England had history been different. 

I also grew up with grandparents of that great generation that saved the day, war stories. We got that nicely cleaned up and varnished for us, they became big adventure stories rather than tales of 19-year-olds being cut to ribbons in muddy fields. I only came to a slow, dawning awareness of that.

How?

I grew up in Portsmouth, a very military town. And the school I went to was very proud of that tradition. But I was born in 1979. So throughout my childhood, up until the time I left university, The Troubles were raging. This was an active, major historical event happening in our nation. But the only thing that they would tell us was that the IRA was a sort of bogeyman who might blow you up on the way to school. 

If you were doing cadets you had to change out of your uniform into your school uniform to go home. Otherwise an IRA gunman might target you. That was it. There was no context about where The Provisional IRA came from. Nothing about the UVF. Nothing about Plantagenets raging through Ireland, nothing about people being transported from Scotland. 

I mean, it's such a fascinating, complex story and it was happening then. You could have got us so interested in the history of the world by saying look, you heard about that car bomb? Let's try to explain it ...

But there was no investigation into the English character, this blinkeredness. You learned about the Churchill that Boris Johnson wants you to know about, versus the more complex Churchill, the less noble things he did and how he's viewed in other countries. And it's fascinating. I don't understand why anyone would want to just push that stuff away. 

And it feels really acute now. Because we're living in a time when your average Farage follower will get very, very cross if you try to challenge a figure like Churchill. If you try to suggest that the history of England, specifically, is complicated and has ugly bits, as any nation does. It doesn't mean you don't feel appreciative or privileged to have grown up in a country that has been safe from wars, typhoons and the rest of it. 

I'm not sure why this stuff comes out. As I'm hearing it now, what I'm saying isn't funny. But it's in my head when I'm writing. And when I'm driving from gigs it's what I'm dwelling on. I really want to make the audience laugh. But this is coming out in the mix of it all.

So is The Bench pushing back against Little Englanders?

It's more about distilling the absence of pushback. In the world of The Bench, those that should be pushing back are supine and haven't quite worked out that it's a problem yet.

You began your comedy career performing in a medics sketch group with Adam Kay. After you turned to stand-up, you made your Edinburgh Fringe debut almost straight-away. Why the hurry?

Partly it was feeling that if I was going to go for it, I had to really go for it and really burn the ships. I've always loved comedy and loved the idea of doing comedy. But I don't think I ever imagined that I could, or should, have the right to try and make a living out of it. So it always was just a side passion really, particularly with friends and doing sketch. But I just couldn't let it go. With the sketch group, we got scattered to the four winds as people started getting more into their careers and love affairs. But I couldn't let it go, to the point that it was just me alone. 

With stand-up, I'd longed to do it. But I felt I had no right to unless I'd lived a life like Billy Connolly had lived. Mine was a very middle-class, secure life with very supportive, loving parents. No-one wants to hear about that, that's awful. 

So I tried out on the open mic circuit, initially with some very, very heavily overwritten, over-rehearsed routines, just because that's all I could think to do to prepare. And discovered it was lovely and I loved it. The people on the circuit were glorious, some of them already brilliant, some of them clearly going to be brilliant and some were completely insane. And I thought, 'well, I think I am allowed to be here. This is ok'.

Once you get a taste, if you're into it, that's it. You're done, that's it for life. You're always going to do it or you're always going to want to return to it.

Was Man Down the reason you took a bit of a break from stand-up in 2015? 

I carried on gigging but off the radar, not taking any shows to Edinburgh. And there was a period where I wasn't gigging frequently but I'd go to Machynlleth Comedy Festival every year, take a completely brand new show and never do it again. They were fun in the moment. But on the way home I'd be thinking 'that's no good' and just abandon the whole project. Mostly I was doing low-key, new material-y and alternative type gigs or at little festivals.

I had other stuff going on. There was Man Down, a lot of Small Scenes, the Radio 4 show I did with Henry Paker, Ben Partridge and many others, as well as the logistics of having very small children. 

It was a mixture of work, the realities of day-to-day life, plus a fairly relentless, crushing dislike of what I was churning out stand-up-wise. I remember my internal monologue in the last few days of one particular Edinburgh telling me 'this is absolute rubbish'. The second I got up on stage it would be saying 'boring! This is complete nonsense!'

It was hard to shake that voice off. That's why the first time I toured properly after all that was Zusa. That was a show that for years I'd known I wanted to get around to writing properly. Then, having done Taskmaster, I felt there was a good chance I could turn up at an arts centre somewhere in the country and people might give it a go, give me the benefit of the doubt.

Finding that such a community exists, that there's an audience, that's wonderful. Once I discovered that I didn't want to stop. 

Will Junior Taskmaster return?

We haven't heard anything. But it's very much a case of never say never. I know for a fact that everyone involved would love another crack of the whip, that's for sure. It's in the hands of the suits.

Did Alex Horne explain why he chose you to be Rose Matafeo's assistant?

I'm not sure why he asked me. I did the first, live version of Taskmaster in Edinburgh [in 2010]. I didn't have a show in Edinburgh the following year when he got different competitors. But I came up as his assistant and didn't know what my function was. I sat there like a lemon the entire time doing nothing at all. 

So I was fairly astonished when he got in touch. He knows I love the world and love the show as a viewer, as well as having been a competitor. I was also available and DBS checked. That might have come into it.

He's spoken of a time in the future when he and Greg might step away from the show. Would you be prepared to take on the assistant role on regular Taskmaster if it was offered?

Were that to happen, how would they decide who gets it? Surely you'd be looking at some sort of Hunger Games-level contest. People would be queuing round the block for it. And they'd be missing a trick if they didn't livestream that series of deadly tasks over days for who would get that prize. 

I'll certainly throw my hat in the ring. I'll make sure my paperwork is in order and my life insurance set.

You starred in Ben Willbond and Laurence Rickard's prospective Dave sci-fi sitcom We Are Not Alone, which wasn't picked up for series. It doesn't seem a great time for the genre on television right now, but do you harbour ambitions of writing one?

Sitcom is a major love of mine so I'm always relentlessly trying to come up with ideas, writing scripts and sending them off. That has always been a huge, driving passion and a bucket list-level ambition. Whether it's me creating it. Or creating it with people I've collaborated with a lot in the past, like Ben and Henry, the Three Bean gang. I'm always trying. 

[We Are Not Alone] was a great show, I'd have loved that carrying on. It was another example where there was a lot of satire built into it. You could enjoy it on purely on the level of aliens being stupid, you could enjoy the satire. Or both. Larry and Ben did a great job and I'm sure they'll live to fight another day, either with that project or another.

You sported a bald cap in Adam Kay's recent television adaptation of his Dexter Proctor children's novel ...

That wasn't a bald cap actually. In the end, they didn't have one on set. I didn't have much going on for a few weeks so we shaved my head.

Wow, just like your impromptu Mohawk in the Taskmaster finale. You really commit where hair and moustache are concerned don't you?

With the hair, nothing else. Not with the actual acting. I don't know what I'm doing with acting unless the character looks like me and sounds like me. But with hair I go ultra-method.

Was that fun, being routinely verbally abused by a national treasure like Sue Johnston? 

Oh, she's a glory isn't she? And Gemma [Whelan] is an old friend that I hadn't seen for a while. Any excuse to muck about with Gemma is joyous. The director, Matt Lipsey, I've also done lots of stuff with back in the day, he was on Man Down at the beginning. It was very exciting but also just working with lots of old friends.

What's next?

Well, I'll be writing the next tour I expect and continuing to write scripts for sitcoms, bracing myself for a commissioner waving two fingers at me. 

And plenty more Three Bean Salad, podcast and live?

Always more, relentless Three Bean. Henry's got more gas in the tank, you can't stop the man. Until Henry's mouth dries up we'll keep Three Beaning.

• Mike Wozniak: The Bench is on tour until November. Tour dates. Dexter Proctor returns at Easter.

Published: 20 Feb 2026