Today’s task: Explain why serious silliness is so ludicrously funny

There shouldn’t be anything entertaining about a grumpy quiz enthusiast searching for a lost baby monitor in a caravan. More interesting things happen to every one of us daily.

But the spectacle on Taskmaster (Dave channel) of a furious and frustrated Paul Sinha, better known as The Sinnerman from teatime general knowledge gameshow The Chase, was ludicrously funny.

he started off merely irritable, stomping around the show’s set in a hard hat (for no good reason), shouting into a plastic microphone and listening for the echo on the missing monitor.

Ten minutes later he was thoroughly cross. After half an hour, he was boiling with anger at himself and the rest of the universe. And I was wiping away tears of laughter that I can barely begin to explain.

‘Find the monitor’ was one of the inane, vaguely humiliating tasks set by compere Greg Davies and tackled by five contestants.

Sian Gibson, much loved as Peter Kay’s sweetheart in Car Share, had the most scientific approach — too complicated to detail here, it involved a laptop and a red telephone kiosk.

Other players, including Scottish comedian Ian Stirling, just bustled round, yelling into the mike, until they found the speaker . . . hidden in a mailbox outside the caravan.

If you think that doesn’t make much sense, you’re right. Neither did the other challenges, such as biting doughnuts off a washing line and catching them in a bucket, or playing a love scene to a hastily constructed puppet.

The fun lies in how seriously everyone plays the games.

Greg sets the tasks as though lives are hanging in the balance and, if anyone fails to give their all, he subjects them to excoriating rants. Losing a round of Taskmaster looks genuinely traumatic.

Growing out of a stage show invented by cohost Alex horne and first tried out at the edinburgh Fringe festival, Taskmaster has become the Dave channel’s flagship series. Numerous other formats have been tried and fizzled — standup comedy, video game playoffs, chat shows and more.

Dara O Briain, a man with an instinctive understanding of what makes good TV, admitted to me during an interview the other day that he and just about every other comic would love to come up with their own Taskmaster — but no one knows the formula.

My guess is that emotion is the magic ingredient. It’s just an hour of silly antics, but the players really care. And if you don’t believe that five adults can play hideandseek in a railway yard, as if their very survival depends on it, tune in and you’ll see what I mean.

emotion was running high in Saving Britain’s Hedgehogs (C5), as naturalist Steve Backshall visited the animal sanctuary funded by Queen guitarist Brian May. These bumbling, noisy little animals used to be commonplace in our gardens but, in the past 20 years, numbers have plummeted.

Steve urged us to put out water for them and maybe a bit of food, and to make sure they didn’t get trapped in garden netting. he made a halfhearted attempt to include a few Queen puns in his patter, describing one tubby hog as a ‘fatbottomed girl’.

But he missed a lot of tricks. What about We Will hog You, and Bohogmian rhapsody? When he hoicked a hedgehog out of a drainpipe, why didn’t he sing Save Me — or I Want To Break Free?

And when a hog huffed along a flowerbed, searching for a hole in the fence, surely that was Steve’s cue for a chorus of Don’t Stop Me Now.