Isy Suttie is remembering the time she went skiing and launched herself down a black run that had been used in the Winter Olympics. That sort of thing happened a lot. She’d just pick a run, throw herself at it and see what happened.
“My attitude was always like, ‘If I believe I can do it, I can do it.’” She looks up from her coffee. “That just isn’t true.”
Once she’d got going, though, there wasn’t really any way to stop. “There were people on the ski lift just open-mouthed. I was in the fetal position trying to get the edges of my skis and just rolling and rolling and gathering speed.”
Her mate managed to catch up and slow her down, guiding her down to the bottom of the slope. Exhausted and relieved, she started telling the small crowd of skiers around her that she’d done the Olympic black run. Non-plussed, they told her she hadn’t actually made it to the start of the black run yet. “It was like going on a slip road and thinking that you’ve driven on the whole motorway.”
Which, in a roundabout way, is what it’s like going on Taskmaster. Alongside Matt Lucas, Richard Ayoade, Chloe Petts and Nina Conti, Suttie is part of the 22nd series of Channel 4’s lateral-thinking juggernaut, and particularly loved the tasks where she had absolutely no idea what she was meant to be doing (“like being plunged into an ice bath”). It was a bit of herself she thought, aged 48, she’d misplaced.
“I feel like that part of me had muted itself a bit, since having kids and getting a bit older. But I quite like that feeling of, ‘Oh my God, I do not know what to do, I’ve got to just rely on instinct to get me through this.’”
The vibes were good with this Taskmaster crop, she says. She had met Matt Lucas before – a long, long time before – when as a young would-be musician-slash-comic she had accosted him in the street in Soho, promising to send him demos of her stuff. (She never did.) In person, she’s quietly earnest and will, when making a particularly important point, lean in conspiratorially.
One handy Taskmaster primer was a clowning course she went on with SNL UK’s Ania Magliano a couple of years ago. It’s typical of Suttie’s magpie approach to her career so far: between writing memoirs and a novel, writing for radio, acting – most notably as the oddball Dobby in Peep Show – and gigging as a stand-up, Suttie has hopscotched between different ideas.
She grew up in Matlock in Derbyshire, where among other capers she got very into ouija boards and derelict houses (the latter something she tried to convince Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong to work into a storyline for Dobby, to no avail) and played in a prog-rock band called Infinite Drift.
She moved south to study at the Guildford School of Acting in the late 90s. Slightly mad challenges were a bit of a feature even then, like her attempt to read every single book in the fiction section of Dalston library at one point in her twenties. “And then I got the first one out and didn’t really like it. And I was like, ‘What the f**k am I doing?’ But that’s very me.”
Her first gigs as a stand-up were on the queer circuit – she is straight, but fell into the scene because she had a lot of gay friends – where the reception could be a bit mixed. She only really had three songs, and insisted on taking off her guitar between each of them, and didn’t talk to the audience at all. But at one gig she started snapping back at the audience, heckling them back and it started working – her mix of funny songs, storytelling and stand-up made her stand out.
“ I didn’t get much sleep through the whole of my twenties,” she says. “I’d have a day job at a call centre or cleaning or handing out flyers or yo-yos or something, and then I’d go and do a gig in, like, St Andrews and try to get back for my shift the next day. I just have nothing but admiration for people who are so obsessed with it to the point where that seems like a reasonable thing to do.”
Dobby and Peep Show still come up a lot. Despite it being a show with a pretty bleak outlook – the bit where Robert Webb’s Jeremy kills, partially barbecues and then eats a beloved family dog maybe makes the top 10 most heinous things its characters do – fans will tell her that it’s got them through extremely difficult times.
“ I think that a lot of people find comfort in it in a way that perhaps they…” She trails off. “Actually, I really understand that because when my dad died in 2011, I’d just been to the British Comedy Awards about a month earlier, and we got given a DVD of The Inbetweeners movie. And that is basically what got me through that time.”
She would watch and rewatch Jay, Will, Simon and Neil’s travails in Magaluf. “I have such a special bond with that movie because I tie it into such a difficult and unpredictable time of my life. And sometimes that seems to happen with Peep Show.”
Jeremy and David Mitchell’s Mark are, she thinks, what keep them coming back: one a neurotic self-sabotager just about hanging on in normal society, the other an explosively selfish and deluded man-child, both completely unable to allow anyone else to just be happy.
“I think Rob and David’s characters somehow give people hope because they’re so flawed,” she says. “Well, all our characters are, really, aren’t they? But I think especially those two, they’re so flawed in very specific ways.” When she first got the part of Dobby, Suttie’s best friend asked if the part had been written specifically for her, but they don’t map onto each other entirely. “I think she was more confident than me in a way, and maybe a bit more bolshy, a bit more feisty, prepared to kind of throw her hat into the ring in a way that I’m not.”
She married fellow comedian Elis James in 2024 – and brought his pair of “lucky” boxer shorts in for a Taskmaster prize task, a truly horrifying piece of not-quite-underwear with so many rips and holes they look like they’re made of cobwebs – and the couple have two children together. The balance of what she does and how she writes has shifted since then.
“To be honest, I don’t think I’ve written a decent song since I had my daughter, who’s 11 now. And it’s something to do with not having the space to kind of fall, to fail, and to…” She thinks. “There’s something weird, that your brain has to get onto a weird wavelength to write a song, or it almost feels like it’s coming to you. And it used to be such a big part of my life.”
Still, Suttie is in CBBC’s High Hoops – along with Webb – and is writing with fellow Taskmaster alum Sian Gibson, and she fancies writing another novel. Lots of Taskmaster types spin out into a stand-up tour or a new podcast launch; Suttie, whose comfort watch while she’s away filming tends to be documentaries about cults, wants to write something about “power and control”. That Olympic black run is calling again.
‘Taskmaster’ continues on Thursday at 9pm on Channel 4