Okay, right off the bat, I have altered the historical timeline a bit, so let’s get that elephant out of the room. I’ve already rearranged a small patch of West London to make the setting operate a bit more smoothly, which I haven’t really properly addressed either. So let’s consider that addressed and acknowledged, and move on.
The painting that unsettles Alex in the flashback part of this chapter is a piece by Joos van Craesbeeck piece, evoking the works of Hieronymus Bosch, titled Terror and Desire – The Temptation of St Anthony. It looks like this:
I picked it because it was the perfect mix of batshit unhinged, and weird-ass portrait. The problem with it is that it wasn’t revealed until 2016, and the flashbacks take place well before that. I usually don’t like fucking with the timeline (historical or canonical, and yet I’ve done both) where I can help it, but I wanted a really fucked up portrait and immediately fell in love with this one the second I saw it, honestly. Nothing else I found lived up to it. So we’re just gonna pretend it was unearthed from whatever basement it was found in a few decades sooner than reality in this universe.
But honestly, it had to be this painting. What else was it going to be? Just look at it; it’s fucking insane.
As for the timing of the flashback itself, it’s sort of another area where I’ve altered canonical history a little bit to make the lore work in a way that makes better sense. The lore on this show is all over the place, but that’s because it was never intended to make sense. And that’s fine. It was never supposed to exist in the first place. It just happened organically by accident, and now here we are with these two doing whatever the fuck it is they do. I sort of have it in my head that Alex started working for Greg much earlier than the show would have started, so that fancy “new” flat screen television that would have cost about £4,000 that Alex is definitely not thinking about would be circa around 2004 or so (thanks to that delightful outtake with Rhod). I’m shuffling things around to make them go where they fit best, because the lore doesn’t fit together smoothly anyway. It’s a wild mess of contradiction, often within the same banter segments, so like, fuck it. This is going to be the sort of fic where all I can ask is that you roll with what I throw at you and trust that it’ll work out in the end.
The “present” part of the story takes place just before series 5, so you can decide for yourself if that’s Alice Lavine or not. It wasn’t meant to be. I think I accidentally and subconsciously turned that character into her while not paying enough attention to the name I gave her, but given what I’ve done with Greg to make the whole framing of the task element make sense, it could go either way. The show doesn’t recycle panelists except for Champion of Champions, but if we count Fringe shows as lore, there are quite a few people who have done it more than once. And I like the thought of that on a thematically messed up level, because I can do something with it helps brace up some more wobbly bits of my worldbuilding where the lore isn’t doing me many favours. And I am counting the Fringe shows as lore for plot reasons, but in a backwards, janky sort of way. TL;DR, the lore as it exists doesn’t make sense, so I’m giving myself carte blanche to cherry pick from it and do with what exists of it as I please.
As for what I’ve done with the whole task element, I really wanted to play with the entire lore element of that concept. There are so many jokes and references and allusions to the tasks being done for Greg. It’s his house, and he wants these things done for whatever insane reason. Obviously, it’s just a framing device, because it gives some semblance of context for what is ultimately a very stupid and silly television show. But this is a new fandom for me, fic-wise, which means most of you are probably new readers here, and my favourite question to ask when writing fic is why. Why does this insane man want these things done? But also, what is the in-universe context behind all of it? If we take away the obvious answer—that one very silly man wrote some lines for another very silly man to read into a camera—and look at this through a fully Watsonian lens (which is often my favourite lens to look at anything), the answer becomes a lot more opaque. Luckily, thanks to the frankly baffling amount of yes-and improv that happens on this stupid show, we do have an answer. And it is just as insane and unhinged as that painting, but it’s also an answer that doesn’t need a lot of shoe-horning in for the exact same reason. Because the man who wants things done really enjoys telling people to carry out pointless tasks, and is in a position of power that allows him to tell people to do these things. He’s the sort of eccentric weirdo who can give himself a daft title, and nobody really questions it. In fact, enough people treat it with at least a sort of mocking respect that it encourages him to keep doing it.
Alex, meanwhile, has something else entirely going on. They both do. Last week I talked about how there are two very different versions of Alex in this fic, and this is where we really see it. Right off the bat, we see that Alex has always suffered from, “Guy who just says things” syndrome. Somewhere along the line, that changed from nervously chattering on about whatever popped into his head to casually chattering on about whatever pops into his head. So really, not much as changed, except he’s probably got a little more casually randy about the shit that comes out of his mouth. I made this odd decision to break the chapters up this way, putting the flashback bit in the middle because I wanted to immediately show both of them at their worst—Greg at his meanest and Alex at his most needy and pathetic—immediately followed by both of them before they became whatever broken creatures they are now. In the flashback parts, we’re going to see how they got to this broken state, while the present-day part is going to be something else entirely, set to the backdrop of series 5.
I’m also slightly altering that timeline a bit, and pretending that series 5 lasted ten weeks just for the sake of the narrative. This is a world without the television show, and therefore a world without the constraints of such schedules. The whole task element doesn’t work the same way the show does, because it doesn’t need to. The guests stay on the estate for ten weeks, endure what is probably a war crime amount of psychological torture, take their compensation, and get sent on their way, with weekly meetings with the Taskmaster to discuss their performance. It’s all very comic book villain, but he sort of is one. And it’s a good job I’ve got plenty of experience writing those guys, because idk how I’d be able to handle that with a straight face otherwise, honestly. When I was sitting down to work out how this would even, well, work, comic books were exactly where my mind kept gravitating back toward and eventually I had to just give in to the temptation. It’s a patently stupid concept, and I think leaning into the stupidity without any amount of self-consciousness is really the only way to make it work at all. Just embrace how ridiculous it is. This guy, an actual lord, would likely have a lot of connections that would let him get away with a lot of dodgy bullshit. They’ve joked about him having wealth, and multiple homes, so he could probably pay off people who weren’t already willing to look the other way, honestly. He’s already admitted to being willing to take bribes to fix the competition; if he’s taking them, he’s probably not above making them, let’s be real.
TL;DR, Lord Greg Davies is dodgy as fuck, in more ways than one, and he should not be trusted.
As for Little Alex Horne, he’s got some problems of his own. I pretty much went entirely stage persona with him, so don’t be surprised if certain details are missing. He’s still a fucking weirdo though. The key thing I’m leaning on here is the “Alex will do anything you tell him to” bit that Greg is often all too eager to exploit. And that’s going to be the crux of this entire fic. Alex will do anything he’s told, and he has bumblefucked his way into an interview to work for a man who far too much enjoys telling people what to do. That right there is a match made in hell.
I’m going to be making a lot of executive decisions along similar lines as we go with the rest of the fic and characters as well, because this is a sort of Lore AU, or whatever we want to call this thing. Things need to make sense in that context. There is no television show. The whole thing has been restructured and reframed into something a little more sinister to fit the lore as it’s presented around Greg and Alex’s weird-ass relationship as presented in the show, because that’s the primary thing I wanted to explore here. I’ve been fiddling and tweaking my original outline, removing and replacing a plotline that I’ve been uncertain about, and I think I have settled on keeping it, but keeping it means that I’m going to really need to rework it because in coming back to this I’ve decided that I hated how I was planning on doing it the first time round. It’s a bit thematically out of pocket, but also kind of on brand at the same time, so I think it works. Basically, this fic is weird, but it needs to be weird because everything about this show is weird. I’ve already talked about the warnings and how they make everything seem worse than it is. But it’s also not going to be a fluff-filled love-fest either.
I write weird fic for weird people. And shit just got very League of Gentlemen all of a sudden somehow.
I’ll be updating the tag list that shows up on the landing page as I go with this, which does mean it will continue to get more and more insane and nonsensical as I go. But also, this fic has exploded into something much bigger than I expected it to be. I think it’s just going to become my new pet project, because I wound up with more ideas than I know what to do with at this point. But we’ll burn those bridges when we get to them.