Bäst i Test

Bäst i Test is the Swedish version of the British TV show Taskmaster, produced by the production company Baluba.

Until the seventh season, which first aired in 2023, the show was commissioned by and broadcast on the SVT channel in Sweden. However, beginning in 2024, the rights to the format are owned by the competing commercial channel, TV4.

The show features four fixed contestants per season, along with one guest contestant per episode, competing to complete tasks set by the Taskmaster, Babben Larsson, who is assisted by David Sundin.

Alternate names

• On Finland's MTV Katsomo service, this show is titled 'Suurmestari Ruotsi' (Grandmaster Sweden).

Contestant notes

• In seasons 1 through 7, the panel consists of four fixed contestants, and a different guest contestant in each episode. A representative of the production company, Baluba, shared that this allowed them to have the best of both worlds - both continuity across the season, and variety between episodes.
• From season 8, there is no weekly guest contestant, but a fixed panel of five contestants throughout each season, plus a consistent single guest contestant throughout the season who only appears in team tasks, to make the teams even.
• There has not yet been a Champion of Champions special, featuring the winners of previous seasons.
• People who have previously appeared as guest contestants in a season have reappeared in a later season as fixed contestants, though. Also, the worst-performing fixed contestant in each season returned as a guest contestant in the following season, as an opportunity for redemption, during seasons 2 through 7.
• Previous contestants may also return as in-studio stand-ins for contestants who are ill.
• In seasons 1 through 7, the guest contestants were considered a team, for the purposes of the season scores, and so were able to win the season (and did so, once).

Team task notes

• In seasons 1 through 7, team tasks are only completed by the fixed contestants of each season, in even teams of two, and the guest contestant in each episode may earn points by correctly predicting which of the teams will win the task.
• Starting in season 8, since there is no weekly guest contestant anymore, team tasks are completed by all contestants, but the teams are kept even by inviting back another previous contestant to make the team of two up to a team of three.

Tie-break notes

• Episode ties have sometimes been broken through tiebreaker tasks, either pre-recorded or live in studio, but have also sometimes been left as ties.

Prize notes

• In the first two seasons, a prize pool was established for each episode from items brought in by contestants for the prize task.
• In season 2, the prize task was moved to later in the show, so reduce the wait between the start of the episode and the appearance of the first pre-filmed task.
• From season 3 onwards, the prize task was removed from the format altogether, in favour of a joke prize - usually relating to something that happened during one of the other tasks - selected by the production team.

Awards notes

Bäst i Test has received the following awards:

• Season 3: Kristallen award in the category Programme of the Year (2019)
• Season 4: Kristallen award in the category Best Entertainment Programme (2020)
• Season 4: Children's Prize at Barncancergalan – Det svenska humorpriset [The Children's Cancer Gala - The Swedish Humour Prize] (2020)

Other notes

• The show's name is also a phrase used frequently in consumer reviews, referring to the best product tested in a specific category. It was chosen because Swedish has no equivalent word for 'Taskmaster', and also because the word 'task' is slang for 'penis' in Sweden.
• The first season of the show only had four episodes because SVT had also commissioned four episodes of another show, Gissa låten (‘Guess the song’), to see which of the two formats performed better in the time slot. Gissa låten ultimately ended up performing much worse than Bäst i Test, which then got eight episodes for its second season.
• Instead of sitting next to one another in throne-like chairs, the hosts have adjoining wooden desks, with David Sundin (the Taskmaster’s assistant) occupying a significantly smaller one than the Taskmaster herself.
• Until the fourth series, the contestants, rather than being seated on separate chairs, occupied two sofas (one three-seater, and one two-seater). This changed to separate seats in the fifth series, presumably due to social distancing precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic, but reverted back in season 6.
• Regarding the studio design, a representative of the production company Baluba stated that "We wanted the studio to feel more primetime weekend. More like a living room and less like a stage. And we thought that people sitting in chairs looked a bit stiff and less inviting. The desks are mainly there to show status differences between the two hosts but also towards the contestants."
• The show features an additional live task each episode, in a segment known as ‘Middle of the Show’, which begins with David badly interviewing the episode’s guest contestant in order to force a pun-based segue into the title of the task.
• The title sequence for each episode features clips exclusively from that episode.
• The final scoreboards in many episodes may be seen not to match the points that were observed to be awarded during the episode. These discrepancies are addressed broadly on SVT's website, where it states: "Sometimes an episode's final score does not match the points that have been reported in the programme. This is because we record more tests than are included in an episode. This is to insure us in case something should go wrong. It will be the correct winner, and it will be especially right at the end of the series when we will crown the winner of Babben's bust. Most of the clipped tests will be shown in a separate bonus episode, episode 10."
• The prize trophy in the show is a full and heavy golden bust of Babben Larssen, of which there is only one copy (i.e. the contestants do not get to take it home with them).