Stewart Sowman-Lund gains access to the north Auckland mansion where the TVNZ comedy gameshow is filmed and uncovers the secrets the cameras don’t see.
After four years, the Taskmaster house is a cast member in its own right. The mysterious and ever-evolving setting for the TVNZ comedy show is ostensibly just a house north of Auckland. But for fans of Taskmaster, it’s a memorial to the show itself. Hey look, there are the rafters that David Correos climbed into, in what was probably a health and safety breach. There’s the bar where Leigh Hart attempted to use a leaf blower to make a cocktail. And I think that’s where Urzila Carlson drank a lot of scotch while playing hopscotch?
Returning tonight, season four of Taskmaster NZ sees five new famous faces vying to win a gold bust of Jeremy Wells’ head: Dai Henwood, Mel Bracewell, Ray O’Leary, Karen O’Leary and Sieni Leo’o Olo (aka Bubbah). You’d probably expect that after three seasons, the incoming cast of comedians would be well-versed on how Taskmaster works. But as I found out on a visit to the Taskmaster set back in March, that might not be the case.
It’s a few weeks after Cyclone Gabrielle when I pull up outside the Taskmaster house and am greeted by Paul Williams. In the world of the show, Williams is the Taskmaster’s assistant, a meek and slightly awkward character whose entire purpose is to do whatever it is the Taskmaster, Jeremy Wells, demands. Largely, that means guiding the contestants through the absurd challenges they find written in wax-sealed envelopes. “They all really like me,” Williams says sarcastically of his relationship with the contestants. “I don’t annoy them at all.” (Karen O’Leary later describes Williams to me as “a bit of a dick”, though reluctantly admits that he could be helpful during some tasks.).
In real life, Williams doesn’t seem that far removed from the character he plays on the show, leading me to question whether he’s still in character while showing me around the Taskmaster house. We start our tour upstairs in the study, this season made over with dark green paint and jungle-like vines hanging from the rafters. Behind the desk hangs a Rene Magritte-esque painting of Jeremy Wells with a long bird’s beak.
The bookshelves have also been packed with an assortment of loosely-themed objects, including a cheetah, a pair of binoculars and a globe. Books about travel and exploration are stacked up too. To the side of the study, just out of shot from the cameras, Williams points out a curtain that conceals an assortment of extra props, like a spare print of the Wells bird painting made “in case the comedians damage the one on the wall”. Given this is Taskmaster, you really do need to prepare for everything.
The study leads through to a small bedroom that Williams, with the awkwardness of a teenage boy apologising for not cleaning up, admits is his. Occasionally he sleeps over in the Taskmaster house so as to avoid an early morning commute to set. Piled up in a drawer next to the bed are artefacts from previous Taskmaster seasons that should really be collected and donated to some sort of Taskmaster museum. The pile includes draft lyrics from a Guy Montgomery musical task in season two and a piece of paper with some frantic scrawling that could only belong to David Correos.
Downstairs, we stop at a washing machine. I’m not sure it’s meant to be part of the tour until Williams grabs out a solitary pair of sodden black socks, which he proceeds to carry around with him until remembering they need to dry.
We head out towards the dock, a small wharf that overlooks a swampy green pond, and the setting for a number of water-based tasks. It’s a surprising distance from the main house and along the way, Williams points out several iconic locations from the show. There’s a life-sized lion sculpture, replacing the cow featured in previous seasons (“the cow’s on loan, I think,” says Williams). We pop into the shed and see the fish poster made internationally famous by Rose Matafeo on Taskmaster UK stuck to the inside of the door. There’s the bathtub used for the infuriating final task of season three: “Relocate the water in this bath to that bath”. We pass through the “enchanted forest” and I’m uncomfortably reminded of Paul Ego’s sex witch.
All the while, Williams is carrying his all-important iPad (and the socks) which reminds me of a question I’ve always had for the Taskmaster assistant, one that has perplexed Reddit for years. “Can you tell me once and for all if the iPad actually controls anything, or if it’s just a prop?” I ask Williams, who looks at me coyly: “I cannot disclose the secrets of the iPad.”
Later, after Williams has been called back for some filming, I’m standing in a gazebo on the back lawn about to watch a team task involving Dai Henwood, Karen O’Leary and Bubbah. They’ve been instructed to weave their way, blindfolded, through a maze. I’m told the task should only take about 10 minutes, but nearly an hour later we’re still standing there watching the trio of comics flounder as they try to complete it. There’s talk of breaking early for lunch, but the contestants are determined to finish the task no matter how long it takes. A crew member tells me that quite often the team tasks don’t make it to air, but this one definitely will. Why? Because “the other team [Mel Bracewell and Ray O’Leary] did it on their first go”.
It’s part of the joy of Taskmaster that being really bad at a task is often as impressive as being really good at it. For Wells as Taskmaster, that means his job is often determining whether to give points to the best contestant – or the funniest. Bubbah tells me she’d never even heard of the show before being cast, let alone how it works, and that means her performance in the season hasn’t been tampered by any thought of actually winning points. “It was like halfway in when Paul was like ‘what do you think the Taskmaster’s gonna say’? I was like ‘Who the fuck is the Taskmaster’?” she says. “Obviously I have not been thinking about how he’s going to react.”
Henwood also went in largely blind, though at least he actually knew what the show was. He was originally set to appear in season one of Taskmaster NZ, but ultimately had to wait another three years before being cast. “I went ‘I don’t want to watch it’ because I didn’t want to be influenced’. I purposefully kept myself in the dark and now I’m going to binge watch the old ones and go ‘I should have prepped for this’,” he laughs. Karen O’Leary was perhaps the most prepared – but she was hardly a diehard Taskmaster fan. She’d watched snippets from previous seasons and admits to trying to appeal to Wells’s ego in her performance. “I think he’s someone who is quite pedantic… My aim is to try and find my own exception to what the tasks are by mucking with how they have been worded,” she says. “I’m sure Jeremy will understand, but time will tell.”
For me, visiting the Taskmaster house means I’ll be watching this season of the show with a newfound eye for detail. I won’t just be looking for the David Correos rafters or the Paul Ego enchanted forest. Instead, will we learn why Paul Williams needed to wash his socks? Will I notice if they’ve swapped out the painting in the study for the back-up? And most importantly, will we get a glimpse inside that spare bedroom? Only time will tell.
Taskmaster NZ airs Mondays and Tuesdays at 7.30pm on TVNZ 2.