Comedy News Round Up
The Next Taskmaster Guests And Who Isn't Among The Next Guests. Plus Tours, Books, Interviews and Stuff.
The big news this week is that Taskmaster has revealed its next batch of contestants. I won’t go on about it now as I’ve written a whole post about it, but if you don’t recognise them from the picture below you can read who they are here.
One person that isn’t in the line-up, however, is Adam Buxton. I had a sneaking feeling that he was taking part after listening to his podcast interview this week with Guz Khan, where they phoned Alex Horne from the stage in Manchester and Guz asked Alex to put Adam in the series. Find out what happened here.
Meanwhile Alex Horne’s chum Tim Key has a book out. If you don’t already love Tim Key what’s wrong with you? He’s great onstage, he’s great onscreen – go watch The Ballad of Wallis Island – and he’s great on the page. Read about his latest exploits in L.A. Baby! More details here.
Just to reassure you that this Substack is not completely obsessed with Taskmaster here’s some other news. Tom Davis is going on tour - tickets have just gone on sale though it doesn’t start until 2026 and runs into 2027. The show is called Spudgun. More details here.
When I heard the title of Tom Davis’ tour I thought to myself that I’d heard the word Spudgun before. I couldn’t for the life of me think where, and then a day later I received a press release about the launch of Talking Bottom, a book devoted to the cult Mayall/Edmondson sitcom. Wasn’t one of the characters in Bottom called Spudgun? I’ll have to read the book and check. Find out more about the book here. Picture Credit: Mark Thomas.
And finally two more Edinburgh Rarely Asked Questions interviews to get you in the mood for the Fringe. This week we profiled Alex Stringer and Jessie Nixon, two rising stars with eventful pasts that they will be talking about onstage. Read our interview with Alex here (pictured below, top) and Jessie here (pictured below bottom). Both pictured by Rebecca Need-Menear.
