“You kind of have to just surrender to the madness,” says Yorkshire comedian Maisie Adam, explaining how she survived being a contestant on the current series of Taskmaster. On her very first episode, that meant navigating a baffling task while her trousers made a break for it.
“The outfit I was going for was Sandy from Grease, because she overhauls her entire identity to come out on top,” she says. But – she confesses with her trademark self-mockery – “unfortunately I went very cheap with the outfit. It was ill-fitting, flammable, and sliding down in all the wrong places. Awful.”
Although the costume might have sabotaged her, it’s still a neat, pleather-clad metaphor for Adam’s rapid metamorphosis since she hit the comedy scene almost a decade ago. In 2017, she won the prestigous So You Think You’re Funny? contest with a set about her “10/10 Northern” GCSE French teacher, looking like an unassuming schoolgirl with her stripy top and long brown hair with a fringe.
For the next two years, Adam brought hit shows to the Edinburgh fringe and was soon picked to star on pretty much every panel show on TV, including Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You?, Would I Lie To You? and QI. She completed her own transformation by giving her hair a radical chop, and curating a sharp wardrobe of Mod-inspired looks.
Taskmaster, she explains, was always the ultimate goal: the Danny to her Sandy (“It doesn’t reflect well nowadays that the big prize was a man, does it?” she says).
As well as being a crowning achievement for any British comedian, the series – in which participants compete in a variety of ridiculous tasks – is a golden opportunity for Adam to showcase what she does best: making hilariously frank off-the-cuff observations, often to her own detriment. “It’s something I’d been desperate to do for years, because it’s the closest thing to live stand-up,” she says, explaining that the show’s loose structure is the key to its enduring success while more traditional panel shows have foundered.
“With other formats, there’s only so far you can go, because it’s limited to questions. But it’s such a testament to Taskmaster that it’s on series 20 and it’s still getting five comedians bent double with laughter at the ridiculousness of it,” says Adam. Still, that silliness doesn’t make its challenges any less terrifying. “On the first task we were backstage with make-up powdering our faces because we were sweating so much,” she remembers. “We were reassuring each other that it would be all right but we were all bricking it.”
Happily, the four other comedians became instant allies. “It’s been really nice vibes,” she says. “We’ve got Ania [Magliano] who’s incredibly bright, Phil [Ellis] who’s incredibly bonkers, Sanjeev [Bhaskar] who’s so laidback he’s horizontal, and Reece [Shearsmith] who’s so brilliant – he’s got this vibe of a frustrated teacher in an assembly when everything’s going wrong.”
Adam’s love of comedy began in childhood, in her “loud and really, really silly” family home in the North Yorkshire village of Pannal. “The average age was over 100,” she jokes. “So I loved Vicar of Dibley, because you’d totally see all those old men who don’t like change.”
Another beloved reference point is Victoria Wood, whose Lancashire-accented, self-deprecating brilliance was an antidote to the male-dominated comedy mainstream. “Her stand-up DVDs were a huge influence on me,” says Adam. “She was from an era when there weren’t many women being funny… Well, actually, there were loads of women being funny, but almost none of them were given the opportunity to showcase it.”
But instead of dreaming of a career as a professional funny person, Adam enrolled at the long-established, famously eccentric drama school East 15 in Essex. “It was absolute rubbish!” she says with refreshing bluntness, remembering weeks spent living as a medieval peasant in the woods. “Over the three years I was there I slowly started to realise it wasn’t for me, pretending to be animals or living in the woods in a way that felt more akin to a Bear Grylls show. I found myself going, ‘I’m chopping grass with a sickle… I’m not sure this is acting.’”
She hung up her tabard and landed back at home. “I felt like a bit of a failure really, still living with mum and dad,” she says. “I was driven by this boredom and frustration so I ended up giving comedy a go on a whim, then getting instantly hooked. I said OK, that’s what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna do stand-up.”
Adam followed the classic, time-honoured route for emerging comedians: circuit gigs and two month-long stints at the Edinburgh Fringe. But that doesn’t mean she romanticises that path. “It’s so gruelling, financially and mentally,” she says. “Now there are more opportunities online, it’s good that people can break through in different ways. They don’t have to depend on being in Edinburgh for a month hoping a TV commissioner comes to see their show – ironically on a free ticket.”
Still, what Adam did get from her early gigs is a talent for holding tough audiences in the palm of her hand, and she now finds the “instant feedback” of laughter addictive. So, like her previous shows, her latest tour will start out with half an hour of crowd work.
“I like chatting to the audience and getting the vibe of who’s in,” she says. It’s that genuine sense of curiosity about human nature that makes her live shows so hilarious, along with her flexibility. “I can’t make the same jokes to a front row of teachers as I can to a stag do,” she explains. Still, even with the most pissed-up crowds, there’s something about Adam’s no-nonsense demeanour that keeps everyone in line. “People who heckle me soon regret it,” she says, with a hint of pride. “I started out on the circuit, and you quickly learn the tricks of the trade to cut them down quickly.”
Adam’s off-the-cuff style means that she hasn’t yet started writing her new show, which embarks on a national tour this autumn. “My process is sporadic, I’d say,” she admits. “I jot down bits and bobs of things that happen to me while I’m out, then jumble them together in previews.”
When she’s not collecting observational gems for her shows, she’s pursuing her other big love – football. She spent the whole month of the Women’s Euros out in Switzerland for Big Kick Energy, her podcast with fellow footie-loving comedian Suzi Ruffell: “We were right behind the goal for the penalty shootout and it was just phenomenal, proper core memories made.”
She’s even become friends with former England midfielder Jill Scott, who smuggled her and Ruffell into a Uefa club after-party, where she took full advantage of the sirloin steak buffet, even though she couldn’t find the cutlery: “I was eating it like toast,” she laughingly admits on the podcast.
“I always have a big joke with Jill that we’ve both got ideas well above our station,” she says now. “She thinks, ‘Oh yeah I could do your job,’ and I like to give a bit of banter back that I could be a footballer, but there’s absolutely no chance. I actually played a pre-season friendly yesterday with my Sunday league. I found myself going, ‘This is insane. It’s so hot and this is so hard.’”
With professional footballing off the table, her next ambition is to follow in the footsteps of Victoria Wood and write a sitcom. “Character comedy is always something I’ve always been a fan of and have enjoyed writing,” she says, “but it’s so hard to get anything off the ground while everyone’s fighting over the last remaining crumbs of TV.”
As such, she’s thinking of another transformation, one that’s totally in keeping with her mullet hairstyle: “Maybe I need to adopt that punk DIY attitude and just do it myself.”
‘Taskmaster’ is on Thursdays at 9pm on Channel 4. Maisie Adam’s new tour will be on sale from October maisieadam.com. She also co-hosts the podcast ‘Big Kick Energy‘
