A mini Stonehenge. An £8k sofa. Is this the Grandest Design ever?

An Englishman’s home is his castle. Or, if the whim takes him, it’s his private village of interlocking iron age roundhouses.

From tree houses to converted post offices and space-age glass cubes, Grand Designs (C4) has celebrated plenty of architectural oddities over the past 20 years.

But for sheer eccentricity, the cluster of wood-framed wheels by a lincolnshire fenland lake will take some beating.

apparently designed with a spirograph toy, the plot consisted of intersecting circular buildings of various heights, based on a prehistoric template. One of the rings contained a kitchen, another a swimming pool. There was a roundhouse for the washing machine, one more for a pool table — and even one for the dogs.

at the centre of it all, there was a three-storey, glass-domed, circular home for property developer Paul, wife amy and their three children.

The waterside complex cost £1.3 million to create, and Paul had to be on site up to 18 hours a day, overseeing the work, for more than a year.

it’s a good job, then, that the couple never intend to sell — they’d surely struggle to recoup everything they laid out. still, that’s the fun of grand Designs: nothing is built with estate agents in mind. Being beside a lake, on flat land so close to the Wash, i’d tend to worry about flooding. But i’m not a builder, so what do i know?

my interest was more tickled by Paul and amy’s ideas about decor. The kitchen sink was an undulating snakelike trench, inlaid with glowing quartz: it looked stunning, but you’d struggle to scrub a saucepan in it.

in the middle of the lounge, a wooden spiral staircase with semiprecious stones in every step went corkscrewing upwards. The sofa was serpentine, too, and apparently made from silver leather. it cost eight grand, amy said casually.

By the window was a large plastic sculpture of a stoned alien smoking a joint like a small megaphone, and all along the outdoor paths were Easter island heads carved from wood.

Best of all was the miniature stonehenge on the front lawn. i take it back about the house being hard to sell: any members of fictional rock group spinal Tap would swap a lifetime’s album royalties to live here.

none of the contestants on Taskmaster (Dave) have been challenged to design a building yet. But as the tasks become ever more convoluted, it’s bound to happen.

The latest series has already featured a game where blindfolded players identified coloured ice lollies by taste and arranged them in rainbow order, while simultaneously trying to find a plastic dodo. That’s a bit more complicated than the old-style Taskmaster contests to see who could kick a beachball the furthest.

This time, the celebs followed an apparently endless sequence of instructions, which only ended when one of them said the word ‘demeaning’.

Presenter greg Davies is tormenting his sidekick, little alex horne, more than ever, too — force-feeding him sour sweets and making him squat in a wheelie bin.

it’s all deliriously childish — and stupidly funny.

a generation gap is opening up between the rivals. Youngsters Katy Wix, Rose matafeo and Ed gamble are bursting with energy. But when Jo Brand, 62, found herself paired with 55-year- old David Baddiel, it was all she could do to groan, ‘Oh god . . .’

Then the two oldies shuffled off to make sandwiches, before getting sidetracked by a discussion about when Earl grey was preferable to Breakfast Tea.

ah, bless ’em.