Review – The Block
The Block – Nine – 7:30pm Wednesday – AUS
Welcome back to The Block. The show people stopped watching even when it was popular 6 years ago has returned! Thank god, because the underground demand for a reinvention of this series was reaching near bursting point. Jamie Durie is gone as host but Channel 9’s resident host-anything-remotely-renovation-related everyman Scott Cam has stepped up to take on the duties. 4 couples have been selected, they’ve been given 4 apartments and they’ve got 8 weeks to finish the renovations and sell their property.
The eight chumps who have stepped into this renovator’s nightmare are boyfriend & girlfriend Chez & Brenton, married couple Neisha & John, engaged couple Jake & Erin and best mates Mark & Duncan. Every contestant is a slightly different shade of boring, even the fifty something tradies Mark & Duncan, whom I sure the producers thought would add some colour, have a severe case of the blands. Mark seems like a great bloke, although I’m only saying that because he’s a massive North Sydney Bears fan; then again it is kind of worrying that he’s wearing so much Bears merchandise and they haven’t been a team since the 90’s. The only other contestant with a whiff of personality is Chez, but unfortunately it smells more ‘annoying’ than ‘interesting’.
Renovation shows were last popular when John Howard was Prime Minister and for some reason television executives have decided that it’s about time they came back in fashion, presumably because they’ve run out of ideas for shows about cooking. There is nothing about The Block that feels fresh or new; the couples move into the house, they gawp at how much of a mess it is, then they get about stripping wallpaper. Lord have mercy, when will the fun ever end? There’s more fun to be had in the play-at-home version of this show where you just renovate your own bathroom.
The biggest sin that The Block commits is the sheer number of product placements it tries to squeeze into the episode and not just the number but the audacity with which brands are shoehorned into every moment of the show. Say what you will about MasterChef and its mountains of endorsements but that’s a show that knows how to use a product placement. Their product placement is always in the background and never splashed in your face every ten seconds. The Block, on the other hand, can’t get enough of freezing on a sponsor’s logo for as long as possible.
Is somebody going to go furniture shopping? Alright, let’s pan up to the Freedom sign and hold for a moment too long. Did contestants get given $30,000 for their budget? Who was that from? Hold on the Commonwealth Bank logo. What cars are they driving? Slowly pan up from the Toyota logo. Are they calling a real estate agent? Is that the new Telstra T-Hub they’re calling on? Are they using their Panasonic computers to look up the Trading Post on the Big Pond website? The show even spent two whole scenes with the contestants perusing The Block’s own website for Christ’s sake. We get that these guys are sponsors and have paid big money appear on your show but you could at least try to be subtle about it you arrogant assholes.
The worst part about all the product placement is that the show being propped up by all those brand names is far more boring than just watching 40 minutes of ads. The Block is boring, plain and simple. The contestants aren’t remotely fun, and watching people do over a home hasn’t become any more interesting in the six years since The Block was last on the air. We can only hope that The Block dies for a second time and we don’t have to see it for another 6 years until some misguided fool thinks that renovations shows are back in. In the meantime I can go back to watching my LG TV, whilst sipping from a Pepsi can and using my Dell laptop to peruse this fabulous website called Change The Channel.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
