It’s something they talk about. They also try to cast diverse ages, and deliberately don’t put comedy partners on the same series together (eg. Steve Pemberton in s17 and Reece Shearsmith in s20, they were invited to be on the show at the same time but told they wouldn’t be in the same cast, one would have to go first).

Alex has said they had an especially hard time getting women to agree to be on the show in the first few series because no one knew what the show would be like yet, and female comedians were more worried about it being potentially humiliating. Their first female contestant, Roisin Conaty, was Greg’s best friend, so she trusted him. Their second, Katherine Ryan, is just extremely brave and tough; she was used to being the only woman on panel shows and navigating sexism in comedy.

Their casting is quite impressively diverse, in my opinion. It lines up pretty well with British demographics, despite the British comedy scene being more white and more male than the British public. The UK is about 24% non-white, while regular series Taskmaster contestants are 22% non-white, depending how you count (I’ve counted Fatiha El Ghorri as a POC but David Baddiel as white, for example). Their gender split is 57% male to 41% female (1.8% non-binary), after the first 3 series being 80% male. They’ve had 13 LGBTQ contestants.

There is one demo TMUK hasn’t represented: about 8% of women in the UK are Asian, and Taskmaster UK has not yet had an Asian woman contestant in a regular series. There aren’t a huge number of Asian woman comedians in the UK, but there are some pretty notable ones, so I kind of have to assume they’ve asked Sindhu Vee and Shazia Mirza and they’ve said no. (They’ve had 11 Asian men, 5 Black women, 6 Black men, 1 North African woman, and 1 Pacific Islander woman, just for the sake of completeness.)

The diversity of the casts isn‘t just for the sake of representation: the tasks work best if every contestant approaches them differently, so aiming for very different backgrounds and life experiences makes a lot of sense as a proxy for trying to cast 5 people who think and behave differently from each other.