Contestants on this year’s season of The Block will face a situation not seen before in the 21 previous seasons of the show: Rather than living on-site, they will all bunker down together in a share house off-site.
Host Scott Cam breaks the news in this week’s premiere, airing 7pm Sunday on Nine – and it’s immediately met with a mixed reaction from the contestants.
While some are happy to have a proper roof over their heads for the whole season – compared to previous years where contestants have started out camping in tents before moving into the first finished rooms of their houses – others are unhappy at being forced to live in such close confines with their competitors.
More than one team remarks that it’ll be hard to keep the plans for their build a secret, living in a house crawling with other contestants.
news.com.au attended The Block’s Mount Eliza site for a recent inspection of the near-finished houses, and seeing where they are situated this year, one can understand Nine producers wanting to keep the neighbours happy by getting the contestants off-site each night: This year, The Block houses jut up against some of Melbourne’s most exclusive multimillion-dollar addresses.
As Scott Cam told news.com.au during the visit, piling the contestants into a share house wasn’t so much an attempt to launch a spin-off of the show, more part of the show’s ongoing attempts to fall more in line with expected building industry standards.
On your average building site, workers don’t camp out amid the mess and rubble – they go home to rest and recharge in a comfortable space so they can arrive back at work the next day feeling ready to work safely again.
The Block Executive Producer Justin Sturzak explained at the same event that producers wanted to make the share house situation as comfortable as they could for contestants, decking out the house with a sauna, spa, gymnasium and other mod cons.
“It had absolutely everything you could want to have in a house – the only thing you had to do was share it with eight other people,” he said.
Sturzak said that the 20-minute drive to site each morning provided an opportunity for each team to vent about being thrust into share house living.
“We got to give you stories about how frustrated they were with their neighbours, their competitors, and everything that happened inside. That created something really new and interesting for the show that we’re going to see this year.”
Among this year’s crop of contestants, South Australian couple Adam and Jolene perhaps got the best deal: With not enough bedrooms in the house, they were put up in a large luxury caravan in the backyard. Adam described it as “beautiful” compared to the situation inside: “It was 23 and a half foot of quietness.”
One couple who had no complaints about the share house situation were WA’s Lisa and Rosco – this despite Lisa discovering in the early days of the season that she was pregnant with the couple’s second child.
“I don’t mind it. We spend our first five years of our relationship living in a share house with five to seven other people our age … we’re pretty used to lining up for a shower,” she said.
The new season of The Block premieres 7pm this Sunday on Nine.
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