I had a brief stint as 'People's Journalist' for the West Sussex Gazette; I'd do golden-wedding anniversaries and pet deaths. I was always looking for an angle; it wasn't great.Collection: Anniversary
Eleven years ago, my wife and I had had a baby, so I didn't go to Edinburgh Fringe for the first time in years. Tim Key won the comedy award and I was sat at home with the baby feeling very jealous, genuinely.Collection: Home
I get asked, on a sort of daily basis, 'It's my wife's 30th birthday, can you set her a task?'Collection: Birthday
I haven't had nightmares for some time, but growing up 'Grotbags' certainly haunted my dreams.Collection: Dreams
I used to work in 'Big Brother' in the third series, I was a logger, which was the worst of all jobs, you had to sit and watch what happens and type it into a computer.Collection: Work
I get people using my admin skills to try to basically plan their wedding or stag night. They say, 'Can you just come up with six tasks for us on our hen night?'Collection: Wedding
Katherine Parkinson has got a classics degree from Cambridge yet is an idiot - in the best possible way.
I love 'Takeshi's Castle.'
Kids make the best audiences. They're like drunk people - they don't mind telling you exactly what they think.
When I created 'Taskmaster,' it was never meant to be suitable for family Christmases. The host, Greg Davies, is a sweary giant, the comedians are often uncouth and the show was on late-night TV.
Peter Crouch has been my hero for fifteen years, Maya Jama is a superstar and I am a mild-mannered bandleader with a motley troupe of absurdly talented musicians at my disposal - if those aren't the ingredients for a delicious post-football entertainment dish then we're all doomed.
I have children so I couldn't shave it off; my dad shaved his beard off once and we all disowned him. My wife's dad shaved his off and they freaked out. I think if you have kids, getting rid of a beard is bad.
It would be amazing if we got someone like Sarah Silverman on the show, not having a script and just being herself. That's the best part of doing this show: just having funny people being funny.
I've always felt more scrutinized. It's definitely not bullying, because you can see how much I enjoy it.
I'm a jazz musician in that I have achieved Grade 3 on the French horn.
I'm quite proud that my bird-feeders are always full.
If somebody does a task really badly, then that's better for us than if they do it really well. We always tell people when they get back to the green room after doing a task that they've cocked up, 'You've actually really won that task, because people remember them more than the geniuses.' No one likes the clever people.
One of the things we're really proud of is that every single task is different, even if there are similarities. You never know what's coming up next.
I nearly always wear a boring suit but I do sometimes furnish the with long dangly earrings or belly button jewelry.
I'm sometimes skeptical about Netflix - for no reason that I can put my finger on - but when you stumble upon a series and it delights you for ten nights in a row, that's a good feeling for a week and a half and a bit.
I never watched 'The Godfather' and it seems too late now. The same happened with 'The Sopranos,' 'The Wire' and 'Peaky Blinders.' I don't know if they can be compared but they feel to me like they had a lot of male violence that I'm not massively into.
We're not ashamed of the old stuff, but when you look back at the posters it does make you think: 'My God, six men and one woman.' Weirdly we didn't say 'that's wrong' and no one else did, either. It's been a really quick shift in the landscape of telly, which is brilliant.
There's a sort of unwritten rule that the more elaborate the task is, the less likely it is to work. If we spend a lot of money on a big prop, it almost certainly won't make it.
If you're a comedian, you can only really write jokes for about an hour a day, so you've got a lot of time to fill.
I definitely think everyone's competitive on some level, there's virtually no-one who hasn't cared at some point about something they've done.
I used to work as a logger, which is the lowest of the low, you just had to type up what happens.
TV is so expensive to make and these channels aren't necessarily rolling in money, that getting anything off the ground... they can't take that many risks.
I've been sent somebody's heart in a jar. At that point, you're thinking, I'm not sure if I should be opening this!
People are a lot less weird than they might seem.
Somebody said 'I've got a task here, can you give it to my girlfriend?' And in the task it said 'Marry me'. It was really emotional and really odd, but that sort of thing's happened a few times, weirdly.
New shows do tend to be eaten up by Twitter.
People are very quick to go, 'What is this nonsense?' if they've not seen something before and it's a bit different.
Greg never knows anything I'm going to say before the show, so when he's reacting to me it's completely off the cuff and we obviously never know what the contestants are going to say at any point.
I do quite often thank Frank Skinner because he agreed to do the very first series and that was a real stamp of approval.
I'm a big fan of Greg's in that he just turns up and is the Taskmaster straight away. He really enjoys the role and is very natural at it.
We definitely don't do everyone's tasks in the same order and that's quite useful. On someone's first day they might do it somewhat differently to how they'd do it on their last day because they become a different person by the end - they don't trust us anymore.
We try not to think, 'right, we need someone who is a weirdo, someone who is competitive.' We definitely want five very different brains, but it normally starts with one person. For example, with series five, we asked Bob Mortimer because he is one of my absolute heroes and we sort of built it around him.
I can't stand jazz.
I quite enjoy that, seeing people get tetchy.
I've got children and I wanted to impress them and show them what I do for a living, do something that they understand and enjoy.
Mine is slightly ginger and patchy so it's not really a hipster beard.
And in real life, I'm actually quite authoritative and strict.
It's nice not to have to talk about children all the time.
You know that film 'Tag' with Ed Helms? It's about these American friends who have this ongoing game of Tag. The movie's not brilliant but it's a really nice true story.
My wife works odd hours as a journalist for breakfast radio.
I love seeing Mark Steel or Mark Thomas, but I'm not that sort of person.
The most successful people in comedy do seem to be the most funny.
The Fringe is by far my favorite time of year; I like everything about it. But there are people I know who are much more successful than me who don't enjoy it.
I don't have courage in my convictions and I'm not interested in serious things or politics: if you're doing an hour of standup, you should talk about a few serious things.
There's lots of people I'd be keen to see doing things, someone like Jack Dee.