Before I begin, Taskmaster‘s back tonight and finally Channel 4 have added the Australian and New Zealand versions on 4oD having promised them for months, so enjoy them before someone works out they’ve probably made a mistake and they revert to “coming soon” for further months. Also we’ll have a Show Discussion post for The Box up on Saturday morning.
I’ve been off this week, so imagine my excitement when I went to Tesco on Saturday to see a big cardboard cutout of MrBeast holding a book, The Most Dangerous Games, a book written by him (and James Patterson) coming out this week. Well I love a good deathgame story, and obviously MrBeast writing a book is too interesting to resist, so I spent six hours reading it on Tuesday so you don’t have to.
It’s not great!
As a writer he’s no Dan Brown. But I didn’t go into it expecting Jane Austen, but I’ve enjoyed a MrBeast video or two in the past, he’ll have a big idea and he’ll just do it and fair enough really. Surely at the very least they’ll be some big, interesting, creative ideas and situations here, people forced into difficult sometimes ethical decisions with big money on the line, friendships and boundaries tested? Well no not really, it’s mainly quite trite expedition race stuff in the main – swimming with sharks, Death Valley, that sort of thing, I was definitely hoping for something more interesting.
And then we get on to the character of Jimmy Donaldson himself whose appearance consistently takes you out of the fiction. We are meant to believe that Donaldson becomes a Jason Bourne style character here to expose the big conspiracy but this is too unbelievable, Jimmy Donaldson isn’t Jason Bourne, he is Youtuber Jimmy Donaldson. And you’ll never guess who the real bad guys are.
I’m intrigued to find out how much input James Patterson had into this. As it is it’s difficult to recommend, even as an ironic purchase.
In other news I was at SoHo Walthamstow theatre last night to see Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee Live and had a great time. The set is rather pared back – Montgomery at a desk, the four comics on swivel chairs, projection screen in the back with all the graphics, but if you’ve watched the show on iPlayer it’s the same format – ostenably a spelling bee, but really closer to something like Shooting Stars with its gag rate and silliness. The guests were Lolly Adefope, Tim Key, Alex Horne and Lou Saunders, with assistance from Rose Matafeo and Sam Campbell (although it took a while for us to work out it was him coming out as a young Keir Starmer as we were towards the back). The contestants ran away with it a bit sometimes and it could do with a tight edit, as it were, but it was as entertaining as you’d have hoped. Some classic rounds (Homophones, Spell The Audience Member’s Name (here with Campbell and a camera crawling over the seats in the balcony)) and some new fun ideas (September 2nd In History, Restaurants of East London (spell the name of the restaurant the dish comes from)). Fun!
In weakly related news, Tom Cashman, Lesser Tom the assistant in Taskmaster Australia, hosted a comedy show at (IIRC) the Leicester Square Theatre tonight. I didn’t go, but I did recognise him on the District Line afterwards.
He was with someone and talking so I kept it very brief: told him I’d seen clips and was a fan, got a handshake, got back out of his way and just smiled to myself for 20 minutes. No pic, obvs, and wouldn’t have been even if my phone wasn’t on 0% and express cards only.
The District Line train terminated at Tower Hill which I don’t think he was expecting. I did work out in time that if I saw him looking confused and planning a route I would tell him “all the information is on the map”, but I never did.
The real esprit d’escalier gag would have been to ask him if he watched Game Changer and if so make a reference to a pierced wenis (referring to a TM Australia prize task).