Mike Wozniak: ‘Alex Horne is utterly ruthless’

Mike Wozniak has no complaints. Speaking to him over video call from his desk at his home in Exeter, where he lives with his family and vizsla dog, Pam – a view that diehard listeners of his extremely funny podcast, Three Bean Salad, will know well – I am struck by his resounding contentment. Whether it’s his stand-up tour schedule (“I really don’t work that hard, don’t worry”), his work on the sitcom Man Down (“happiness on a stick”), the producers of Taskmaster (“masterful”) or the podcast (“my favourite bit of the week”), there is, it seems, nothing with which Wozniak is less than pretty chuffed. And why shouldn’t he be? Wozniak, who next week will take his tour show, The Bench, to the Edinburgh Fringe, has enjoyed a long and eclectic career, which it’s fair to say has allowed him to divert from comedy’s straight-and-narrow and “find my tribe”. “I’ve tried observational stand-up many times. I was hopeless at it,” he says. “People who are really good at it make it look easy – it’s not. Someone like [Michael] MacIntyre has come under fire in the past for being mundane, but it’s not. It’s bloody amazing what he and his ilk do.” Wozniak has instead leaned into something more spontaneous and meandering. On Three Bean Salad and on panel-show appearances, as well as in his stand-up, Wozniak is mild-mannered and charming, yet quick-witted and game for anything. His current show sounds like a similar blend of these attributes. Drawing on his love of crime fiction and status as a self-professed “provincial dad”, The Bench is a choose-your-own-adventure whodunnit story in which, in the first half, Wozniak lays out a local mystery “about an outrage, an act of vandalism that’s happened in my little corner of Exeter”, before allowing the audience to investigate it in the second. “There’s a bit of cosy crime, definitely, although I hope it’s not too cosy,” he says. Is he a Richard Osman fan? “Yeah, love a bit of Osman. I’m very jealous of Osman. It doesn’t seem quite fair that a man like that can be A) a lovely man, B) have a successful career in other spheres and then decide at that point in life, ‘Oh I’ll just smash it out the park with something else as well’. It’s frankly rude.” Wozniak says making ‘Man Down’ was one of the happiest working experiences of his life (Photo: Simon Webb/Channel 4) That the show is different every night, depending on the audience’s lines of inquiry, means Wozniak is “jonesing to get back on stage” in the interval – the risk and uncertainty is what makes it exciting. What happens if he hasn’t prepared for a question? “What I’d like to tell you is that I brilliantly and deftly handle it and improvise a sensational routine, but what probably happens is I panic, come up with some complete guff, they can tell that the show is coming apart at the seams, then we bring it back together and have a jolly time.” Wozniak, who is now 46, grew up in Portsmouth in the 80s and 90s. His comedic persona is a riff on the stereotypical Englishman: geography-teacher suit-and-tie; retro-posh voice; and fighter-pilot moustache – without which, Wozniak says, he looks like a “panicky weasel”. His hometown was “quite conservative”, he says, “strongly affiliated with the Royal Navy. The school I was at was quite dry.” But he was able to view it all with some detachment. His mother descends from south Wales miners, and his father’s family were Polish refugees of the war. “They were always outside observers and able to see the funny and strange side of it,” he says. “That’s definitely influenced me comedically. Not least because I look the part, sound the part, and come across as very English.” At home, there was a lot of comedy around: Victoria Wood, Billy Connolly, Eddie Izzard, The Goons. “I imagined that was the best job in the world,” Wozniak says of the latter, “to get together with your friends and, having written a show that week, to put it out live on the radio” – now that dream has essentially come true. At university in London, studying medicine, he joined a revue, started performing sketch shows, and fell in love with it. He and a group of friends took a show up to Edinburgh, “and it just became all-consuming. Then we qualified, people dispersed, and everyone got jobs, but I couldn’t let it go.” These days, many people will know Wozniak from his impressive turn in the 11th series of Taskmaster in 2021, in which, among other exploits, he spent two hours trying to fart on a grounded plane and shaved his hair into a real Mohican, ultimately coming second to Sarah Kendall (in 2024 he went on to become the assistant taskmaster to Rose Matafeo in the so-far only series of Junior Taskmaster). Wozniak was assistant taskmaster to Rose Matafeo in ‘Junior Taskmaster’ (Photo: Avalon/Channel 4) Unlike the contestants who take part as something of a comedian’s rite of passage, Wozniak already had a relationship with the show: he had won the original version at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010. Alex Horne, now the assistant taskmaster, and creator of the show, would post tasks to comedians to complete in the run-up – and, just like on the show, would not give them any information beyond what was on the card. “You’d get these instructions that would inevitably lead to questions – what am I allowed to do, what are my limits – he’s not going to answer those questions. Doesn’t care, tough. Hard cheese,” says Wozniak. That philosophy has persisted on the show, which is now in its 21st series. “[You] genuinely have no idea [what’s going to happen] – you’ll be in this tiny room in the house, properly sequestered from everyone else – even if you want to go to the loo, someone will be monitoring you so you don’t sneak a peek at what they’re preparing outside. Alex is utterly ruthless.” Wozniak also has a long history with Taskmaster’s esteemed host, Greg Davies. Wozniak starred as the hapless Brian in Davies’ 2010s Channel 4 sitcom Man Down, about a man in his forties (played by Davies) having a midlife crisis. “Man Down was one of the happiest working experiences of my life,” says Wozniak. “It was a literal dream come true. I love sitcoms, I always have, so it was pure joy. I would have been perfectly happy if that job had gone on and on and on, way past jumping the shark, until we’d really ruined it.” Working with Davies and Roisin Conaty, who starred opposite him as Jo, was “riotous”, Wozniak goes on. “Greg can’t help himself from laughing at his own jokes. Disgraceful, in a way. There would often be scenes that would take a long time to get through because he’s setting himself off, and that’s setting off everyone else. Including, often, the cameramen. If you can make the crew laugh, you’re onto something.” These days, though, Wozniak is less often on TV (it remains to be seen whether Junior Taskmaster will get another outing; “I hope so, cos it was an awful lot of fun,” says Wozniak) and instead being beamed into the ears of the half a million listeners to Three Bean Salad, the rambling improvisational podcast that he makes with Ben Partridge and Henry Paker. I tell Wozniak that I have listened to little but the back catalogue for several months. “So you’ve basically solidly been listening to Henry Paker,” he says. “That’s not very good for a person. You should be careful. You need breaks.” ‘Three Bean Salad’ is the improvisational podcast Wozniak makes with Ben Partridge and Henry Paker He’s referring to Paker’s tendency for tangents, long anecdotes and complicated explanations for ordinary things: “Something that everyone else takes for granted, like hinges, can stop him in his tracks. It’s whatever the opposite of an epiphany is.” The podcast’s rambling nature is of course what makes it so listenable. But at the beginning, they weren’t sure: the three of them used to meet up to write together and find by the end of the day they had achieved nothing, but made each other laugh through miscellaneous conversation. “Then Henry became aware that podcasts were a thing and began pestering Ben and me about making a podcast, and we told him it was a bad idea,” explains Wozniak. “He became aware that there was a phenomenon where groups of men who thought they were funny, often in threes, would do podcasts, and people seemed to like it and you could do tour shows out of them and all that stuff. “Again we said no, the market is saturated, it’s gross, it’s awful, no one needs this, the best thing we can do for the world is not add to this problem.” Eventually, they gave in – “So we give it a go, and the problem is that we immediately start really enjoying ourselves.” Crucially, the audience “isn’t just a room of provincial dads or bald middle-aged men”, says Wozniak – this makes them feel better. But it’s also “not trying to be edgy or provocative… [listeners] aren’t going to be hit with some extreme bit of bigotry dressed up as a joke”. Rather, it taps into a left-field kind of comedy that, in its spontaneous nature, is anathema to the stagey stand-up of yore. On TV, Wozniak posits that this is the success of these kinds of shows: “There aren’t several layers of executive involvement, there is no weird spinning wheel that happens to land accidentally on swans, and oh look at that you’ve got a perfect three minutes about swans. We know that you haven’t just come up with that on the spot – audiences are quite savvy now.” On Three Bean Salad, in which listeners send in a topic for the beans to discuss every week, there is something of a spinning wheel that might land accidentally on swans. It just really is an accident this time. Contrary to his stoic English persona, it’s this sense of muddling through, winging it and bouncing off other people that unites Wozniak’s work. And perhaps this laid-back attitude helps him remain so happy with his lot. He would love to write a sitcom one day, he says, but mainly hopes “that I’ll continue to do lovely gigs in front of lovely crowds in lovely rooms. And have a lovely old time mucking about with my beans.” Yet, despite his modesty and self-deprecation, there’s a quiet confidence to Wozniak. At one point, we go off on a tangent discussing his moustache. “That was an accidental discovery,” he says. “That was me travelling with some friends at the age of 23, growing it as a joke and then discovering that actually I preferred it and it suited me. I got married in it. It’s structurally a crucial part of the face, as it turns out.” Seeing other moustaches in the wild can lead, he jokes, either to a quiet nod of acknowledgement for people who are “naturally able to do something quite strong” or an encouraging look for those for whom growing one “wasn’t how they came out the packet” – but “not so encouraging that you want to suggest they should continue doing what they’re doing”. It’s good to keep them in their place, I suggest light-heartedly. “You don’t need to do that,” Wozniak says. “Listen, when it comes to being a bit alpha with a moustache, if you’re beating your chest and dancing about and showing your bright red bum, you’re actually showing weakness.” Safe to say that can be applied to more than just the moustache. ‘The Bench’ is at Assembly Hall during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from 6-16 August