Over much of the 2020-21 period, when I was bored and frankly somewhat depressed, I took comfort in conducting a set of polls on Reddit about the British TV show Taskmaster. In this programme, a set of five comedian competitors all participate in a wide variety of tasks, and the “Taskmaster” (Greg Davies) scores them all arbitrarily and for comedic effect to crown a winner for each series. The points aren’t supposed to matter – it’s a comedy show before anything else – but human nature being what it is, I found that the fan community would often take umbrage to the scoring decisions and complain that some competitors in particular were consistently being scored unfairly. I figured I would let the fans score the tasks to see if there was any merit to such claims.
Here are the graphics I made after each season of fan-scoring was completed – as you can see, I played around a bit for the first three series before finding a formula that worked.
Although the points aren’t supposed to matter, by all accounts the showrunner (and comedian himself) Alex Horne takes immense joy in tracking the specifics. And so have I! Here is the master spreadsheet where I have kept all of the scores:
(Seasons 10 and 11 were conducted by someone else. I’ll embark on Seasons 9 and 12 at some point. Season 8 is over but I haven’t made the graphic.)
Naturally it’s a bit of fun more than anything else, but I am very pleased as some of the ways I’ve automated the process, such as how I can import the list of tasks for a whole season from a Fandom site, and it autofills the scorecard sheet for that series:
Or the functions that automatically take the raw Google Forms responses and turn it into a format that can easily be copy-pasted into that sheet above:
Next: how to automate the results graphics.
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