COVID-19 might have temporarily shut the hit TV series down, but as host Scott Cam explains, you can’t keep a good Blockhead down.
This year, The Block is being filmed in Brighton, a picturesque and very expensive suburb in Melbourne’s bayside. Five houses have been craned into position ready for five pairs of contestants to renovate up a storm over the course of 12 weeks.
This year’s contestants are father/daughter duo, Harry and Tash from Victoria, Sarah and George from New South Wales, farmer Daniel and his wife Jade from South Australia, Luke and Jasmine from Western Australia and young couple, Jimmy and Tam from Queensland.
Realestate.com.au chatted to The Block host Scott Cam to find out what to expect from this year’s epic, COVID-19-affected series.
Scott Cam returns as host in The Block 2020. Picture: Channel Nine
Every year it feels like The Block gets bigger and bigger, but this year looks epic! Just how big will it be?
This year, it’s not so much bigger, as better. We talked last year about the fact [The Oslo] was too big, and that we should scale it down. We decided we couldn’t do a big [series] like that again.
So you’ve gone back to basics, like Elsternwick in 2017?
[Don’t get me wrong], this is still big – it’s five houses with studio garages and it’s a massive build – but this year we’ve added new elements. And of course, the biggest element, by no fault of our own, is the pandemic.
You guys began filming in February this year, just as the COVID-19 crisis was gathering pace…
Yes. And as we do on The Block, if something comes up, we always write it into our show. Unfortunately, if we have a death in the family or something like that, that’s written into the show. And COVID-19 was like that.
We are a building and real estate show, but this year we also became a bit of a documentary about what everyone in Australia went through around that time in March when we locked down for six weeks and then made our way back.
No one could ever have predicted something like that would happen…
That’s right. And it’s all there, written in, all the way through – the shut-down, the comeback…
That’s not the only massive change to this series, right?
We have got five different eras of home this year – [houses built in the] tens, twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.
Each contestant has got to put a nod to that era in their front part of their house and it’s very difficult for them to work out how they are going to do that and still have a modern 2020-version of a bathroom, or a bedroom, with a nod to the 1910s, 20s or 30s.
They are judged on that, and so that really brings a few of them unstuck in the early days.
What did you think when you heard about the return to houses concept?
It is genius – a terrific idea. I am always in favour of timber or weatherboard houses. And I’m always in favour of recycling and repurposing those beautiful homes. I said this the first time we did those moveable houses in Elsternwick – 100 years ago, a bunch of blokes built those houses with love and care and put so much effort in with the tools they had at the time. Now, those homes are back and have been repurposed to stand once more for another 100 years.
If you demolish a house it goes straight to landfill – we are repurposing these homes, and they are all amazing. We have got the modern version out the back and the original version out the front. They are just incredible.
This year’s lineup of Blockheads are set for a challenge. Picture: Channel Nine
The timing of lockdown actually ended up working for The Block, as construction was able to continue while the contestants went home, right?
Yes. It was an amazing piece of timing. A fluke, really. When London went into lockdown with no notice, we were concerned that our contestants would be locked in here indefinitely, away from their families. So we wanted to send them home and get them out of here.
We worked out that if we could get back by early May, we would stay on schedule to put it to air when we wanted to. So we came back in early May and we did two months, and we had a lot of things in place so we could get through it.
And then Lockdown 2.0 was announced in Melbourne…
That’s right. When we finished, I had to scarper out of Melbourne pretty quickly to avoid lockdown again. I was very lucky to get out with about three or four days to spare. I just left my house in Melbourne – I left it with clothes on the floor, and dishes in the sink. I just packed my bags and got out.
We are all about family on The Block. contestants and family are first, and the TV show is second – we have always been like that. Many years ago, one of our contestants, Bec Douros, her mother passed away – we shut the show down for a week. Family always comes first – we are just making a TV show, we’re not curing bloody diseases here.
Were you worried the show might not ever finish? How stressful was it?
100 percent – it was so stressful for production, for all of us, wondering [what would happen]. And our camera crew and production crew, because they’re freelance, they wouldn’t be paid. We had no idea what was going to happen – I thought we might be locked down for three months.
The Block obviously keeps you busy. Do you ever have time to get on the tools in your own life?
I do. A lot. I just don’t work for other people. I just work for myself, in my own projects. Every year when I come home from The Block, I do a reno on my house where I live with my family. Last year I did the backyard, and the year before that I did the kitchen and a couple of bathrooms.
Mr Cam still manages to work on his own renovations with his family in his down time. Picture: Channel Nine
Do you pick up ideas from The Block?
We do get some inspiration from The Block, for sure. I got some ideas for our bathrooms. And in our kitchen, I think we used the Ceasar Stone from the challenge apartment from The Gatwick. This year, when we were in [lockdown 1.0] for six weeks, I did a few projects while I was home because I had nothing to do. I was meaning to do a little reno in one of my son’s rooms, so I got stuck into that and finished it.
And we read you built a ‘man cave’?
We had a bit of a gym in like a cave-type thing in the back of our house. We improved it during lockdown – I’ve got two twenty-something [year-old] sons who like to stay fit. They couldn’t go to the gym, so it was important we kept healthy and fit.
Any word yet on what might happen to next year’s production?
It’s too early to tell – I have no idea about next year and what the story is. I don’t even know about this year’s auction. It’s in November, and we still aren’t sure! Hopefully, in three months time things are different, but you never know.
But we will have no open-for-inspections – they have been cancelled already. Which is a real shame for the contestants? And more so for the viewing public and Block fans. We are the only show on television that invites the viewers to the set to meet our cast, in numbers like 20,000 people! So it’s a big thing.
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