Visiting the newly opened Taskmaster Experience is a profoundly odd experience. A plastic cow awaits on a fake lawn. A giant white statue of Greg Davies sits by the entrance. Taskmaster letters with red wax seals are everywhere.
Taskmaster has become something of a worldwide phenomenon after it first aired in 2015. Since then, we’ve had 18 UK series, several global spinoffs (including TM New Zealand, Spain and Sweden) and even a few ‘All Stars’ series.
It has amassed a huge following and, make no mistake, this experience is one for its many uber-fans. A peek inside the warehouse reveals the Taskonbury bar (complete with Taskmaster themed beers), various garden sheds and a caravan that looks ripped from the set of the show. When I say set, I mean the crumbling Taskmaster House in Chiswick, where the contestants do many of their tasks.
There’s even a Taskmaster museum, complete with props from the show, that visitors can peruse while they wait to enter the experience itself (this is also free to access for people who just fancy wandering in off the street). Most of these are paintings, inexplicably kept behind plexiglass like exhibits in the Louvre – if the Louvre featured works of art drawn with sausages or by people with massive goggles on.
All this, before we get to the tasks themselves. Contestants must enter through a replica front door of the Taskmaster House in groups of 12 and pass through a series of rooms modelled after their real-life counterparts: the garage, the entrance hall, the weird room with plastic sheeting they save for messy tasks. There are two experiences here: the ‘Absolute Casserole’ and the ‘Melon Buffet’, both of which offer an entirely different set of tasks to complete and must be booked separately.
Either way, many hours of fun await. I won’t reveal too much here, but the premise is basically the same as the show: one mini starter task, three main ones and a grand finale in which points are totted up and the highest scorers get to compete for the dubious honour of Greg’s approval.
None of the tasks have (as far as I can recall) featured in the show itself, but they do a great job of replicating the general air of chaos that permeates Taskmaster’s actual episodes, while also scaling it up for big groups. There are secret answers to find. There are trick questions. There are, importantly, a lot of rubber ducks, and there are many gags at Alex Horne’s expense.
The show’s two stars – Horne and the ferociously-eyebrowed Greg Davies – do pop up throughout the experience. It wouldn’t be Taskmaster without them, after all, but how much you get out of these video cameos depends on how much you appreciate their alpha/beta male schtick, and of Alex’s desperate bids for Greg’s approval.
An hour and a half later, it’s a relief to escape their joshing. But don’t worry: there’s still time to sip an Old Honkfoot beer by the plastic cow before you leave.
