Is this the new Taskmaster? 7 reasons to watch The Way Out on U&Dave

If you’ve ever watched your friends flail around hopelessly during an escape room and thought, “Hmmm, someone should really film this and put it on television”, we’ve got some good news and some bad news (it’s mainly good news).

The bad news is that none of your friends are remotely famous enough to be invited onto primetime British TV, no matter how badly they blow at escape rooms. Condolences. But the good news is that telly is doing it with famous and funny faces instead. 

Hosted by Last One Laughing favourite Mel Giedroyc and landing on U&Dave HD (CH 127) and Apps > U from Tuesday 12 May 2026, The Way Out is a fast-paced comedy competition that drops six of the UK’s best comedians into wildly surreal escape rooms and watches the chaos unfold.

Could it be the next Taskmaster? Here’s why you need The Way Out in your life.

Two teams, six comedians, virtually zero chill. The least chill of them all, Ed Gamble, captains the magnificently named Horrid Little Rat People, with Chloe Petts and Lou Sanders alongside him. Facing them down are The Society of Best Friends with Nish Kumar leading Amy Annette and David O’Doherty.

But these aren’t strangers thrown together for telly. Or famous folk who pretend they’re mates because they’re more bookable as a pairing. They’re proper mates, comedians who’ve gigged, toured and lived together. And it shows.

As Mel puts it: “They’re all pals – it’s just adorable. Comedy is quite a small world, so everyone knows each other, but these are proper buds and it’s just beautiful. The vibe is great, the gags are platinum!”

This isn’t your basic padlock-and-clipboard escape room experience that you’ve been dragged to on a weekend because of a group deal. Each of the four episodes throws the teams into an entirely different world, built with serious production values.

Episode 1, “Gone Fishing”, puts the teams on a boat, complete with sea mist, gulls and marine creatures. Episode 2 sends them into the Louvre for an “Art Heist”, navigating lasers, lifts and ducts to nick the Mona Lisa. Episode 3, “Shrink Machine”, traps them in an oversized world where nothing is what it seems. And episode 4, “Fire Fighters”, is exactly what it says on the tin.

Mel describes the fishing room experience as “an actual boat, it moves on ‘almost’ real sea – there’s a lot of fog and seagulls, there’s also fish being thrown out of the sea and onto the boat. Then, they go into a fish processing plant – when you see it, you’ll be absolutely hooked, excuse the pun!”

Whether someone’s nose tunnels are a reason to watch a TV show, we’ll let you be the judge. But according to Mel, Ed Gamble transforms entirely once he’s inside an escape room and the competitive instincts kick in, hard: “Ed literally becomes a different person in the escape room. I’ve witnessed this on many occasions. He gets, I’m not going to say serious, but quite focused… and watch out for his nostrils!

“They do a kind of flare-y thing. It’s like he’s breathing in the adrenaline and somehow it goes straight to the nostril! It’s a beautiful thing to watch. He’s a lovely guy, love him.”

Ed, for his part, has no illusions about the stressful environment: “I definitely feel more pressure knowing it’s a race against Nish’s team. I’ve done an escape room with Nish before. He did not care for it, and he wasn’t very good at it. So, if we lose to Nish, I feel like I’m gonna have to retire from escape rooms and indeed life.”

If you watched Nish Kumar’s series of Taskmaster – series 5, in our opinion still the best one – you’ll know that Nish’s brain doesn’t really work laterally. We’d go as far to say if there was one UK comedian who might get locked in an escape room for the rest of his life, it would be Nish. And yet… he’s somehow a team captain here.

His approach to leadership is, shall we say, unique. Where Ed rules with an iron fist, Nish goes a different route: “I’m running my team with a jelly fist. It’s going everywhere. No one’s paying attention to anything. It’s carnage.”

His teammates David and Amy have noticed. David summarises the dynamic with characteristic precision: “I think what you want is a yin and a yang, and the problem is we’ve put three yins together. And I think you’ll be able to see that in the show.”

Nish does have one genuine strength, though: “What I’ve got is a big brain, and a couple of big, round cojones – I’m smart and I’m brave.” Ed helpfully adds: “And Nish will also be showing the top of his bum, repeatedly.” You have been warned…

One of the show’s purest joys is David O’Doherty going into the whole experience essentially blind. Not just literally – though he is led in blindfolded – but conceptually. His teammates confirm that asking David to join the escape room show was an optimistic gamble.

As Amy recalls in conversation with DO’D: “You kept saying things like, ‘Well, I think I’ll just wing it,’ and one time you were like, ‘It’s vibes-based.’ Another time you were like, ‘My personality will get me through.’” David’s defence? “I’m a stand-up comedian. What is my entire life if not an escape room from The Man?” 

His bewildered approach to “Gone Fishing” is a particular highlight: “The thing about the maritime life is that it’s slippy. It does involve wearing a seafaring hat that I’ve now absorbed into my brand, and I did it with Nish, who, when I tried to hoist him up to put fish into a sky basket, which I didn’t even know was a big part of fishing, Nish unfortunately flipped upside down.”

Lou Sanders describes her own role with admirable honesty: “Yeah – I’m just here for a laugh.” She is a “loose cannon” (her words) who approaches the escape rooms as a free spirit rather than a competitor. Chloe Petts describes the “Gone Fishing” experience in vivid detail: “Lou Sanders went in, she went very grey and nearly threw up because she got motion sickness in a rocking boat. She had to throw some water at a map of the sea, which was meant to change colour to reveal a code, but she kept throwing it on the same spot and only getting the number three.”

Lou’s assessment of this strategy? “If it doesn’t work the first time, try another six.”

But Lou is upbeat about the experience: “In the room I actually got really sick, I got very peaky. I was gonna throw up at one point and I thought, ‘Well if that’s not good telly, I’ll eat my hat.’ I didn’t throw up, so it wasn’t good telly. But I thought that room was beautiful, the way they’d done it. Everything looked beautiful. Very televisual, if you ask me!”

Hosting from a control room (slinkily dressed in pleather), Mel oversees the chaos with the particular glee of someone who gets to watch other people suffer without having to do any of the work themselves. She’s magnificently, pointedly impartial throughout.

“It’s essential that I remain impartial. I’ll say to one team ‘That was crap’ and then I’ll say to the others ‘That was crap’. However, I’ll also say to them ‘You’ve got this’, to which I also tell the other team ‘You’ve got this’… Yeah, you understand how impartiality works, but I’ve just explained it for you!”

On why escape rooms make such perfect telly right now, she puts it simply: “Listen, we all need a bit of an escape, don’t we? I think we like to feel like we’ve got control over something… There’s a lot of heavy stuff going on in the world at the moment, so it’s nice to have something that’s just pure escapism.”

The Way Out starts Tuesday 12 May 2026 on Apps > U and U&Dave. Virgin TV customers can find U&Dave HD on CH 127, while the U app is available on our Stream, Virgin TV 360 and V6 boxes.

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