The Block

Synopsis

Massive Australian hit which flopped equally massively when applied over here. Those crazy Australians, it's like they do everything upside-down. Cuh.

Anyway. Four couples do up four identical apartments near the Brighton seafront (we think) on a very limited budget of £25,000. They have to do this whilst keeping up their normal lives and jobs, and those who don't have a job were barred from entering the premises between nine and five.

Each couple was challenged to do a room a week. At the end of each episode, Nicholas Cowell (yes, Simon's brother) judged each room and gave a cash award (along with some other prizes) to the couple whose done-up room was deemed the best.

In theory each house was going to be auctioned off at the end of the series and the couple whose house went for the highest amount would win £50,000. Unfortunately, the show got shunted to a post 11pm timeslot after a couple of weeks and auctioning houses isn't the done way of doing things over here so it ended up going to sealed bids instead.

Ironically, the few episodes of this we did bother to watch turned out to be quite entertaining. Sadly in the same way that supply and demand fuels the housing market, this was a property development show the already saturated market didn't really need and it sunk without trace.

Inventor

Based on an Australian format by David Barbour and Julian Cress.

Trivia

More4 aired the Aussie version in 2022, at 6.55pm on weekdays.

Web links

Wikipedia entry

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