Goal:

Design a new permanent structure for the Taskmaster garden: multifaceted, unexpected, buildable in two days, and legal under the rental restrictions of a London property. It had to keep generating tasks across seasons.

The brief's winning word was "multifaceted." A toilet seemed like the most multifaceted place we could think of.

Role: Group project — my contribution: the toilet concept, the pub's visual identity, beer labels, photography, and the presentation.

1. What everyone had missed

I pointed out that the London show has no visible toilet — there's a lone bathtub in the garden for tasks, but no WC. Visiting the house confirmed it: one toilet, hidden by the entrance, and Andy admitted the crew is quietly short on them. Mundane spaces on Taskmaster get hidden, unless there's a chance to decorate them into something. Nobody had done both.

2. Why a toilet

We'd looked at other multifaceted spaces — a cat house, an underground, a subway carriage where people do everything. The cat house had no practical build; it'd last one season at most. The toilet covered more ground than any of them: public or private, awkward, silly, contrasting, and the word itself is funny. That's what made it fit. We built a 1:10 model proportioned like a real outdoor toilet, worked in Taskmaster's visual language — a pineapple-shaped window, red carpet, a golden pineapple toilet brush — tested on camera how tasks actually play in an enclosed space, and presented it at midway.

3. Then we built a pub around it

The midway note was one word: expand. So we tried a bigger toilet first — urinals, sinks, closed stalls, more to do. But a bigger toilet isn't a bigger idea. The better version came from following Taskmaster's own logic: they didn't have a toilet, so they built one — and then built a pub for the toilet. Why not? In the plot, Greg wanted a pub, ran out of budget, and London building rules are strict, so it's scaled down. The pub is the same size as the toilet, because the tasks need the equipment, not the floor space. And a scaled-down pub is funny on its own. We kept it open-plan — no full roof, half the walls off — which is easier to shoot, gives better angles, and is cheaper to build.

4. The Teaspoon

The pub had to feel specifically British, not generically pubby, so we drew on Wetherspoons — 650-odd of them, each with its own carpet. We called it The Teaspoon. I did the visual identity. I collected the beers most commonly on tap in London pubs and rewrote their logos into Taskmaster references — labels printed and put on real bottles, realistic enough that people didn't clock them until they looked twice, then were surprised how real they looked. I made coasters in the shape of the Taskmaster logo at real coaster proportions, custom stickers of the kind people stick inside pub toilets and applied them to a real detachable toilet seat, and a carpet referencing the Wetherspoons regional-pattern system. I also shot, colour-graded, directed and laid out the final presentation.

5. How it landed

Alex Horne named the beer labels, carpet and pub sign specifically. After the presentation, Alex, Andy and Luke started proposing tasks for the space on the spot — a lock-in was one of many. There were a lot of laughs. When the room starts inventing tasks for your set, it's doing the thing the set was for.