Sniggering at Trump with the White House gossips
Perhaps there was a time when a director using footage of interviewees off-guard seemed clever or revelatory. Now it just feels like a sneaky trick. The Trump Show (BBC Two) did it to all the contributors, who presumably thought the cameras weren’t rolling. So we had Rudy Giuliani asking how he should sit, Sean Spicer checking which lens to look into, former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman primping her hair in a pocket mirror. None of it revealed anything, except a sense of moral superiority on behalf of the film-makers.
What is the benefit of commissioning this series now, when Donald Trump is still in the White House? Perhaps the BBC believes that he’ll be out on his ear next month. But as the programme unfolded it did provide insight into a truly extraordinary presidency, from those who had a ringside seat. There is no shortage of ex-trump aides and professional Trump watchers prepared to go on the record about him, and to give the inside track on events that we watched with incredulity from the outside. Spicer walked us through his first press conference, when Trump plucked from nowhere the fake news that his inauguration was the mostwatched of all time. “I knew that this was not a good start,” Spicer sighed.
We were told of the rages, the paranoia (Trump was “freaked out” by White House cleaning staff attempting to change his sheets), the pettiness, the macho posturing. “He’s a big guy, likes being with other big guys, they do big guy things,” said former national security adviser John Bolton, of Trump’s dealings with Kim Jong-un. Some of it was very funny, such as the former French ambassador’s description of Trump at a military parade with Emmanuel Macron: “To his people he said, ‘I want the same military parade, with horses! Horses! Very important to have horses!’”
It was a light treatment, superficial and gossipy in an entertaining way. So much has happened in the past four years that the film barely scratched the surface. But it showed us that, for all his absurdity, Trump is a canny operator and master of tapping into the national mood. And it provided some psychological reasoning for his behaviour: a man whose bluster masks insecurity, a creature of habit in unfamiliar territory, someone who likes to be in total control but has ended up with the biggest and most overwhelming job in the world. A sympathetic portrait of Donald Trump, from the BBC? Surely some mistake.
If you are a fan of Taskmaster – and there are many, which accounts for the show’s new berth on Channel 4 – then I have a confession: I had never seen Taskmaster before this week. That’s partly because it was previously on a channel called Dave, which is aimed at men called Dave (and Gary and Geoff, at a push). I also have a fear of comedy panel shows, populated as they are by comedians treating every appearance as if it were a hustings for presidency of the student union.
How pleasant, then, to discover that Taskmaster is neither blokey nor political. It is just a very silly light entertainment show, which I mean as a compliment, in which most of the enjoyment is derived from seeing how much the people on it are enjoying themselves.
The format involves Greg Davies setting pointless tasks for the contestants and then judging them in a fairly arbitrary manner. Show creator Alex Horne joins in as a sort of Teller to his Penn. Taking part in this series are Daisy May Cooper, Mawaan Rizwan, Katherine Parkinson, Richard Herring and Johnny Vegas. None of them was annoying, which was another turn-up for the books. And none of them attempted to be political, unless you count Vegas smashing a cardboard Parliament with a giant chicken while chuntering about Jeremy Corbyn.
Written down, the tasks sound really weird, so I’ll just say they included pretending to make a cow disappear and attaching some balloons to an egg. The solutions were pretty inventive. It all seemed a bit awkward at first – five comedians sitting in socially distanced formation in a studio the size of an Amazon warehouse. But the longer I watched, the more I surrendered. And the longer I thought about it afterwards, the more it made sense.
For one hour a week, you can take yourself away from the awfulness of lockdowns and the tanking economy and instead watch a show in which a bunch of comedians try to cross someone’s back garden with a giant teddy, without touching the ground or spilling a tray of drinks. It’s fun, and little else is at the moment. Taskmaster is the show we need right now.
The Trump Show ★★★ Taskmaster ★★★★