The finale of Series 20 of Taskmaster, a UK comedy show created by Alex Horne and co-hosted by Horne and Greg Davies, aired on November 13, 2025. In the show, a panel of five comedians are assigned ridiculous tasks they must complete in a certain amount of time, and points are awarded based on the results. Season 20 featured Ania Magliano, Maisie Adam, Phil Ellis, Reece Shearsmith, and Sanjeev Baskar. The winner will go on to compete on Champion of Champions IV, a special celebration of the top contestants hosted every five seasons, set to air around Christmas.
Because Taskmaster is a British show that uses British English, they typically say “series” where “season” would be used in American English. I am going to be using “series” throughout, as this is what is used on the show, but know that is what is meant here.
I will specifically discuss the finale outcome and series winner in the final paragraph of this article, so if you want to read it without having the ending spoiled, just skip the last paragraph. However, in general, know from here on out, a spoiler warning is in effect.
The series did kick off to an admittedly slower start than others recently. While Adam quickly emerged as a contestant who got mad at every task, the first couple of episodes were somewhat more mellow. Each Taskmaster series has five contestants, and usually, the more memorable series have several contestants whose sanity you seriously question over the course of the show. (I say that with love, but it is true.) So having only one insane person early on was atypical.
However, by about episode four, Shearsmith emerged as a clear second person. An episode with several tasks that were admittedly a bit more luck-based than most Taskmaster tasks (which typically are meant to highlight some sort of skill, even if that skill is bizarre and utterly impractical) and in which Shearsmith had bad luck set him off, and he never really calmed down after that. Ellis, for his part, became known as an absolute wild card, while Baskar gained a reputation as someone who could not care less.
While Taskmaster tends to avoid the scripted or semi-scripted plotlines that many series-based competition shows engage in (think about things like villain edits), there were at least a handful of plotlines that emerged naturally or that the contestants engaged in. For instance, Adam and Shearsmith were paired up together for certain tasks. Over the course of their team tasks, it becomes increasingly clear that Adam was genuinely worried about making Shearsmith angry on these tasks. (Adam laughed it off in the studio, and the two are on good terms.)
Magliano also introduced her own storyline: that she is Davies’ illegitimate, abandoned daughter. A contestant adding in their own storylines intentionally and actively is admittedly unusual; the two most prominent previous examples were likely Rhod Gilbert insisting on using an embarrassing photo of Davies, one of his best friends, at any opportunity, and Jason Mantzoukas’s determination to get on the roof of the Taskmaster house (where most tasks are filmed), something that no contestant had ever done. However, she kept this up throughout the series, and even produced a fake DNA test confirming her paternity in the series finale.
Horne and Davies continued to play into a supposed affair between them. For some time now, people on sites such as Ao3 have long “shipped” the two (“shipping” is a way of implying or writing a romantic and/or sexual relationship between two people popular in fanfiction circles). “Real person fics” (rpfs), or fanfiction about two real people rather than fictional characters, are typically considered taboo, though Horne and Davies have long made jokes about it and indicated they were comfortable with these fics and found them amusing.
However, in this series, they truly went above and beyond. Following a finale joke about him and Horne leaving a used bottle of lube in a park, Davies said of their relationship in an interview that “things can change” between two people, and that “if there’s something about it in the atmosphere, then we’ll explore it.” Davies described their relationship as “like any marriage.”
As alluded to when discussing Shearsmith, this series was known for some more controversial tasks. Episode 3, “Thompson.”, and 8, “Am I an idiom?” were particularly known for this, with “Thompson” having at least one task that was purely luck-based, and “Am I an idiom?” having tasks that fans described as feeling untested. (Most tasks are tested beforehand, to ensure they are skill-based, reasonably doable, and entertaining.) Additionally, a task in episode 6, “Is that number got curves?”, was criticized for breaking the cardinal rule of Taskmaster (“all the information is on the task”), by hiding additional rules in the room where it was recorded, and not referencing on the task that additional rules may be hidden.
This also extended to scoring, which many people thought changed the system from ranking-based to points-based. On each task, contestants receive some number of points from one to five (or zero if they fail to complete the task or are disqualified). Some tasks, such as completing something the fastest, are more objective, but others are subjective. When Horne designed the show, he intended these to be points for rankings. All five contestants could do a good job on a subjective task, but the person who did the worst would only receive one point; on the flip side, even on a subjective task where everyone did quite badly, the person who did the best would still receive five points. A points-based system would mean that someone who did badly would get one point, while someone who did well would get five. This season pushed the limits of this, with one task where all contestants received full points. Davies’ judgement has always been a point of criticism; however, these choices, which appeared to change it from ranking to points, were some of the most controversial yet.
This did result in the finale “outfit gag”. Some series do an “outfit gag”, where the contestants (or sometimes the hosts) will do a silly group outfit together. Not all series do this, but the members of season 20 chose to do a pirate theme for the finale. Adam has said that this was because the repeated scoring controversies had the contestants joking that they were going to mutiny against Horne and Davies.
Despite the scoring controversies (or perhaps because of it), the finale turned out to be quite close – and this is where I need to put in a spoiler warning for specifically the outcome of the series. This is the first series on the UK version of the show where all five contestants could have won the series going into the finale. (Only 25 points are available per episode, and in previous series, at least one contestant has had more than 25 points less than the leader going into the finale.) Not only was it technically possible, it really was a toss-up – the final scores were only 8 points apart across all contestants. Baskar came fifth, and Shearsmith was in fourth. Magliano, Adam, and Ellis all tied for first. Spin-off series in other countries have had finale ties, though this is the first finale tie in the original UK version of the show, and I believe it is the first three-way finale tie in any version. Adam ended up winning a live tiebreaker, winning the series, and becoming the 20th Taskmaster Champion. She will join four previous Taskmaster Champions (series 16’s Sam Campbell, series 17’s John Robbins, series 18’s Andy Zaltzman, and series 19’s Matthew Baynton) in a special episode to determine the Champion of Champions.