What Taskmaster series was Bob Mortimer in?
Bob Mortimer has one of the shortest runs of any Taskmaster champion and one of the most quoted. If you're trying to work out which episodes to go back for, it's a single series, eight episodes, and a two-part special. Here's the full picture.
Series 5, broadcast on Dave from 13 September to 1 November 2017. Mortimer competed against Aisling Bea, Mark Watson, Nish Kumar, and Sally Phillips, and won the series with 138 points. The studio episodes were recorded at Pinewood Studios between 3 and 6 July 2017.
Series 5 in numbers
- 8 episodes — the last series before Taskmaster moved to its current ten-episode structure.
- Most individual tasks of any series — series 5 still holds that record.
- The only series where multiple contestants never won an episode — Kumar and Watson both went the full run without a win.
- Frensham Great Pond — where most of the series' location tasks were filmed.
Greg Davies and Alex Horne presided, as ever.
The Bob bits people remember
The Sausage Presentation Unit, brought in for the "best thing they've made themselves" prize task in episode 6, "Spoony Neeson". Mortimer built it to persuade his children to eat cheaper cuts of meat. Five points, top of the round, and a device that later resurfaced on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown as a Pork Pie Presentation Unit.
The satsumas are the other one. A satsuma appears to have been left out for Mortimer at the start of every single task he attempted across the series.
There's also a scoring dispute that Taskmaster obsessives still bring up: in the coconut task, Bea's distance was longer than Mortimer's, but Mortimer took four points and Bea three.
Did he come back?
Once. Mortimer returned for Taskmaster: Champion of Champions, a two-part special that aired on Dave in December 2017, against fellow winners Josh Widdicombe, Katherine Ryan, Noel Fielding, and Rob Beckett. He finished last with 24 points.
That's the lot. Excluding Mae Martin, who missed their Champion of Champions special, Mortimer holds the shortest span of any champion — 98 days between his first and last episode.
For the record: he's still collecting silverware. Mortimer won the BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance in 2026 for LOL: Last One Laughing UK.