Up to the Task: Selling comedy to the world

Successful, internationally-sellable television programme formats are a broadcasting holy grail, but they most often appear as reality series like Big Brother or entertainment shows such as Strictly Come Dancing. Formats in the comedy domain are a little more tricky.

BBC’s The Office - starring Ricky Gervais in the UK and Steve Carell in the US - may be one of very few standout cases in the scripted area, while funny studio-based panel games full of comedians - such as Would I Lie To You or Whose Line Is It Anyway - are much more common, but hardly ground breaking.

That is why the success story that is Taskmaster is worthy of close study. This British-made programme has created its own formatted comedic sub-genre – a hybrid that takes the panel gameshow format and mixes in unscripted improv comedy. The show comprises of a deliberately testy taskmaster and a trusty sidekick overseeing some comics undertaking a series of crazy tasks.

Each contestant’s effort is filmed separately on location over many weeks and their efforts are then edited together and revealed to them and in front of a live studio audience. The show climaxes with a final live task in the studio and a winner is declared, but crucially the cast of comics is the same over the whole series that can last up to 10 weeks.

Comedian Alex Horne first played around with the concept at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2010 - he sent 20 of his stand-up friends a series of tasks over the course of a year and then judged their efforts in front of the festival audience.

Horne says: “We kind of saw it vaguely as a TV idea when we were first doing it, but it was only after working on it for…