Comics equal to the task

DISCERNING viewer that I am, I’ll always be drawn to any show that promises to make a cow vanish into thin air. Which is why I have no hesitation in recommending the first in the new series of TASKMASTER ( C4, 9pm), one of whose contestants tries to do precisely that, sort of.

I’d also recommend Taskmaster because ( a) it won a Bafta this year ( not that this necessarily means a lot – I was on a Bafta panel once where we gave out a prize to an iguana) and because ( b) it’s ridiculously funny.

The series starting tonight is actually its 10th, but up until now it’s gone out on digital channel Dave.

The move to Channel 4 ( who turned down an early incarnation, several years ago) should easily see it smash its record audience.

So far it’s peaked at around 1.5 million.

Taskmaster is in some ways hard to define. Hosted by the magnificent Greg Davies, assisted by his sidekick “Little” Alex Horne ( who’s actually the creator, and 6ft 2ins), it sets its five contestants, all of them comedians or at least actors with a comedy pedigree, a series of essentially ludicrous yet fiendishly challenging tasks.

Greg adopts the role of the hard- to- please Taskmaster himself, a semi- tyrannical type whose dubious dishing- out of points is based on whose inventiveness has impressed him the most, or unimpressed him the least.

However, to call it a comedy panel game would lump it with countless shows it has little in common with.

There’s nothing smug or self- satisfied about it, for one thing.

Nor is it trying to be cutting- edge or caustic or, heaven forbid, satirical ( please tell me I’m not the only person who finds the new Spitting Image dreadful).

It inhabits its own delightfully off- kilter world.

Each series also features the same contestants throughout ( here it’s Johnny Vegas, Richard Herring, Katherine Parkinson, Mawaan Rizwan and Daisy May Cooper) so there’s an ongoing competitiveness that gets funnier as the weeks go by. And key to its appeal, everyone really does want to win.

The same could be said, of course, of another bunch of comedians who compete each year for £ 250,000 of Lord Sugar’s reasonably hard- earned money.

THE APPRENTICE: BEST BITS ( BBC1, 9pm) turns its attention this week to tasks where the Sugarninnies have been sent abroad. Remember, for instance, their attempt to sell cheese to the French?

To be fair, it wasn’t just any cheese. No, it was the finest cling- filmed blocks of budget cheddar, lovingly sourced from the local cash and carry.