Alex Horne

If you’ve somehow managed to miss the show, it’s basically the strange thoughts you have in the shower, turned into a competition. ‘How do you make a snow globe?’, ‘From how far away can I blow out a candle’, ‘how high can a hose spray water?’. All the important stuff.

The sixth series has drawn to a close and Tim Vine, Russell Howard, Asim Chaudhry, Alice Levine and Lisa Tarbuck have all hung up their Taskmaster trainers and gone home for a rest. Now it’s the turn of a new bunch of comedians to face Taskmaster Greg Davies and his assistant Alex Horne!

The ‘unlikely jazz/comedy hybrid’ will feature guest performances from some of the biggest names in comedy and music.

The two hour show will be recorded live at The London Palladium later this year.

Alex Horne said, “I’m pretty sure no-one’s ever tried combining music with comedy before, let alone filming the whole thing and putting it on TV, so we’re pretty excited to see how Twitter will cope with jazz and jokes for two hours.”

The programme, which has been a hit with UKTV audiences and earned nominations for RTS, Bafta and Emmy awards, began life on stage in Edinburgh, explained its creator, Alex Horne, at a sold-out event at the London Transport Museum.

Every month for a year, in the run-up to the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Horne asked a bunch of fellow comics to complete a daft task. “The first task I sent them was, ‘Deposit some money in my bank account – most money wins.’ Mark Watson put nearly £200 in; no one else got over a pound – and that funded the project.”

The programme has been renewed for two more series and will increase each series run from five to eight episodes. The news comes as the show is nominated for Best Entertainment Programme at the 2016 Broadcast Awards, and became the most watched commission on UKTV's video-on-demand service, UKTV Play, in 2015.

So before the sun miraculously parts the clouds, the daffodils thrust their heads through the earth and the rain stops, there is just time to catch up on all top TV that you may have missed.