This chapter contains a scene that I knew early I wanted to include. I don’t know why this particular scene needed to make it in, aside from the fact that it’s one of those weird ones that definitely has precedent if we read into the studio banter. Precedent in more ways than one. It keeps coming up. But we’ll get to it later.
Let’s talk about the task and subsequent breakdown at the beginning of this chapter, because I spent money on this. I bought the books because I wanted to dissect how this weirdo writes the tasks. And I still don’t think I got it right. But also, just like the house is a character, so are the tasks in a way. I wanted to use the tasks as a reflection of Alex’s mood, because they do tend to reflect something from series to series sometimes. I wanted to create a scenario where Alex has just enough control in his life where he’s able to lash out at someone else, and he does that via the tasks. Greg has not been treating him kindly, and Alex has spent the last three chapters clinging to any scrap of stability he can, hoping that either Greg’s mood mellows out, or he figures out what he did to irritate him in the first place. Alex never got an answer to the question that had been bothering him, and it’s not really clear whether Greg’s truly come round, or if he’s still playing around. And even when Alex is rewarded, it’s not a reward for him. His reward is doing something he knows makes Greg happy, and then being thoroughly humiliated after. Not much of a reward, really. So when Greg asks for teams immediately after, Alex lashes out in the only way he perceives as safe. He words the task in a way that closes as many loopholes as possible, and makes the task as unpleasant and stressful as possible, which will only go further in filling the brief Greg gave him. He wants to see them hurry, and he wants eggs. Alex can deliver that, and he can feel in control of something at the same time.
Because the dubiously consensual part of the whole thing applies to the entire situation between him and Greg. Not just the sex, but everything else. Alex being incapable of saying no to anything is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen about a human being, and it is the root of his entire problem. He would not be here at all if he could just say no to anything. Any one thing, at any point, if he’d just said no to it, he’d be in a very different place in life right now. As it is, he’s desperate to make Greg happy, because that’s what he’s wired to do, but there’s some disconnect between what he wants and what Greg wants. An entire, yawning cosmic void of a difference. And if they were proper, mature adults about this situation they’ve found themselves in, they might be able to get themselves on the same page about it. Instead, they’re on different planets about it, and Alex is left having to passive-aggressively bully other people to make up for years of bullying from Greg. And what’s worse, he’s deluded himself into thinking it works for him.
Of course, it all goes immediately to hell when he’s locked in the shed. I’ll be honest, this one comes from the “surprise Alex” task in series 3. I’ve always wondered why nobody just locked him in there. They wouldn’t have even had to properly lock him in. Just feed the lock through the hasp and pretend to have locked it, and then panic when “nobody can find the key.” I’m sure that would definitely surprise him. It was my very first thought. And then the opportunity presented itself to really lock him in there, and of course that’s what I did.
I probably rewrote this scene about five or six times, because nothing I did seemed quite right though. I didn’t like the idea of Alex doing anything to deliberately damage the shed, because Greg would absolutely wallop him for that. I didn’t want to leave him in there too long either, nor did I want to rescue him too quickly, or give him an easily exploitable way out. I’m fairly certain the whole window frame actually pops out on the shed, or at least it seems like it does, and now at least there’s a very large back window he could have easily got out of. But at this point, which would have been between series 4 and 5, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there at that point. Either way, locking Alex in the shed seemed like a good way to get Greg to go right back to pissed off with him all over again, so that’s what I did. But at least this time, Alex knows what he did, which is all Alex wanted in the first place.
As for the flashback, I know this is what you’re probably wanting to see. Here’s the portrait:
It’s called Fisheye, and it’s another one that just screamed “Taskmaster portrait” to me when I saw it. Annoyingly, this is the only photo of it I could find on the internet. I have to admit, I don’t know a whole lot about this artist, and only found him while looking for someone who could be reasonably mistaken for Banksy, and who would have been active at this time. I can’t even find any information on when this piece was done, but let’s say for the sake of this fic it was done before 2004, and thus would have been something a person into art would have wanted copied by that point. But he definitely ticks all the boxes, and had a fantastic self portrait that worked for what I needed as well.
Back to the present, we have Alex having to deal with the aftermath of being locked in the shed. I’ve always loved that bit in series 12 when he had to break in after Guz locked him out, and this is kind of drawing from that a bit. I feel like in this universe, Alex has broken into the house more than a few times, so he knows all of its weak spots. But this part of the chapter isn’t about Alex breaking into the house. It’s about Alex and Greg, and their terrible, terrible relationship. This chapter plays straight a common bit that’s played for laughs on the show, which is that Greg does slap Alex around. There are a few times throughout the series where Greg raises his hand to him in warning, and Alex leans away, and it’s a wonderful little bit of physical telegraphing between them, because it says so much about what must go on between them when they haven’t got eyes on them. Greg doesn’t need to say anything to get Alex to step back into line. There have even been a few times where he has actually slapped Alex on camera, even. And then this is the same Alex who finds the courage to shit talk panellists to their faces because he’s “next to [his] big man.”
There’s a certain journey there, and Alex is currently lost somewhere in the weeds along it. He’s also so turned around and fucked up from whatever’s been done to him so far that he apparently truly believes that this relationship or situation or whatever you want to call it will kill him, and the biggest emotion he can manage to conjure about it is at best a hopeful indifference. He doesn’t want to die. He’d like to avoid it, actually. But he’s accepted that it’s inevitable and is probably going to happen sooner than he’d have planned for. He knows exactly what Greg means by those contradictory statements when Greg says that Alex is here for life, and that he can be replaced by morning.
Now, we get to the part that I mentioned earlier. I don’t know why this burrowed into my brain, but it sure lived there rent free for ages until I found a place for it. There’s a lot of banter about Alex not being toilet trained, and one in particular about Greg cleaning the mess up with Alex’s beard, and a part of my brain supplied the thought that he’d done that before. Greg has absolutely rubbed Alex’s face in his own piss, and it’s absolutely a thing that’s happened more than once. Then I got to thinking about the dog bed, and the cuddle banter, and this bit from the podcast where he was locked in a cupboard (???), and this whole weird scenario sort of popped up fully formed where Alex is basically a kept pet with chores. He’s kept in a cupboard when he misbehaves, and when he’s very good he gets to sleep in the big bed, and sometimes Greg puts up with having his leg humped and occasionally has to rub Alex’s nose in his own piss.