Taskmaster NZ team revealed, show finally ready to go after coronavirus delays

Madeleine​ Sami is isolated, separated, spending too much time on her own.

As I enter her second floor bedroom on a secluded Riverhead estate, Sami stands up from the edge of her bed and says: "This is where they lock me away."

She points to a creepy black painting hanging on the wall and declares: "That's the kind of psychological state I'm in."

Sami is one of New Zealand's most beloved comic actors, a veteran with a reputation as a chameleonic goofball.

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She's always up for a laugh, but this time, it's a little less clear.

That's because Sami’s into her second week of isolation on the set of Taskmaster NZ, a long-running UK game show being adapted for Kiwi audiences.

Part game show, part panel experience, Taskmaster asks five comedians to complete infuriating tasks under time pressure, then plays the results for laughs to a live studio audience.

For the New Zealand version, Jeremy Wells is host, and Paul Williams is the Taskmaster. Joining Sami are veteran TV pranksters Leigh Hart and Guy Williams, and stand-up comics Angella Dravid​ and Brynley Stent.​

Back in March, when filming in Riverhead first got underway, Sami spent a lot of time in her room, killing time while waiting to film her solo segments for the show.

It was an eerie parallel to what was about to happen to the rest of the country, which was just days away from entering level four lockdown restrictions to curb the spread of Coronavirus.

The irony wasn't lost on Sami.

"I've got hand sanitiser. I've got black coffee. I've got a mandarin. I've got it covered," she told Stuff. "(This is) really good practice for when Coronavirus takes over."

We soon found out what that looked like, as film and TV sets shut down across the country. Production on Amazon Prime Video's big budget Lord of the Rings series ground to a halt. Shortland Street episodes were rationed, cut to just three a week.

The launch of Black Hands, an adaptation of a hit podcast on the Bain family murders, and a new season of Hart's Late Night Big Breakfast, were both delayed. Reality shows The Block NZ and Dancing With the Stars NZ won't return until next year.

Taskmaster NZ is among the first to be produced post Covid-19. It has done so through luck and good management: stage one of filming was narrowly finished just before the first lockdown, while its live audience elements had strict social distancing measures in place.

Back in March, Sami's only reason for being isolated from the rest of the cast and crew was to make sure no one spoiled the show for her.

"Everyone gets really stuck on keeping to the rules," she said. "It's quite weird."

Taskmaster works best when comics are pressured to complete tasks they struggle to understand, and Sami 's about to be given one of her weirdest yet.

In a downstairs room draped in plastic sheeting, producers set up a prank. As Sami walks in, task instructor Paul Williams sprints out, declaring “I forgot my whistle".

He doesn’t use one, but Sami is too busy staring at a pile of leaves on the table in front of her to notice.

The challenge, to "leave the room as fast as possible," is a simple one, but it's been designed to confuse contestants.

It’s working. Sami picks up a note containing her task, but doesn't read it.

"Now what do I do? Do I just start the task? Why are there leaves?" she asks.

As seconds tick by, laughter is stifled around the set as Sami grows more animated. "Is this part of it? He's not coming back?!"

Finally Sami opens the task, realises she's been had, swears, and runs out of the room.

Her time is well over a minute, one of the slowest.

That task, says executive producer Bronwynn Bakker, was chosen to test how well comics are playing the game.

"They're high risk, high reward. They could fail, but sometimes they give you the magic that you can't write," she says.

Joseph Moore, the show's "laugh consultant", is responsible for thinking up more than 50 tasks for the show.

While Taskmaster NZ has borrowed many of the UK show's attributes, including its outdoor caravan and Wells' garish gold throne, the tasks are all original.

Moore, a comedy performer and former Jono & Ben writer, says the best tasks are the simplest. Many came from just "looking around the house".

One challenge, in which contestants are asked to move an egg as far as possible without touching it, came from "opening the fridge and throwing stuff around".

"We realised how funny it was because of how slowly an egg moves, and how much energy you use," Moore says.

Bakker believes Taskmaster NZ is a "huge opportunity" for the show's stars to be exposed to a prime time audience they might not otherwise find.

"In the UK, panel shows are on for months," she says. "They can develop their characters. To do that in this market would be so exciting."

She prefers the tasks that gives comics a chance to showcase their own brand of comedy.

Bakker’s favourite was one that asked contestants to be as "unhealthy as possible" in the space of 10 seconds.

Stent called an ex and asked if he wanted to hook up. Guy Williams sunbathed, ate a burger, scrolled Twitter and smoked. Hart put fast food in a blender and drank it sitting next to an exercycle. Dravid "had her own funeral with Paul dressed as a priest as she lay in a coffin".

Then there was Sami who, continuing with the Coronavirus theme, asked all the show's crew to cough on her, a gag that might not land quite so well at this stage of the pandemic.

But, on a chilly spring night in a cold West Auckland studio, masked audience members finally got a chance to see just how all those tasks filmed months ago play out.

Quite well, it turns out. With his cheekbones and dry asides, Wells isn't as acerbic as his UK counterpart, but his banter with the show's stars is top notch.

The Kiwi DIY spirit is on full display in challenges, especially when Guy Williams repurposes a rake to help move a giant vat of soup from one side of a field to another.

But, as Bakker suggests, the gags that work best are those that let the comics' personalities fly. Sami’s acting experience comes in handy for a magic trick in which she dons dishwashing gloves to make the show’s caravan disappear.

And when her room leave fail is played, her confused, minute-long monologue is one of the funniest of them all.

Making the show, Sami says, has been “a joy and a nightmare at the same time”.

"It's quite fun to do something that's supposed to be silly (but) there are some tasks that you're literally just standing there staring at the desk trying to think of the answer."

"I'm really having all my flaws magnified for the entertainment of the New Zealand public."

* Taskmaster NZ begins screening on TVNZ 2 on October 21 at 8.30pm.