Edit: And it’s back! That was an easy campaign. The point still stands though.
Gang, there comes a point around the age of thirty where the prospect of a trip to the garden centre or the local Homebase is actually quite appealing. I suspect most of my audience haven’t reached this point yet – but you will – and it might pleasantly surprise you. And then you will also understand why property shows are so popular.
Since moving back to help look after my mobility impaired mother last year, we’ve made a habit of putting things on over dinner – sometimes it’s the big Saturday night quizzes on Sunday evening. Sometimes it’s some stand-up comedy. Most of the time it’s property and renovation shows like Escape to the Country, or more recently Phil and Kirstie’s ouevre and The Great House Giveaway (she’s well into Love Island as well but I just let her get on with that). We recently finished watching the quite fun if a bit flawed Instant Hotel on Netflix, originally on Australia’s Channel 7, basically Come Stay At My Air B’n’B with Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen. Privately I’d been watching Aussie Survivor and Amazon had also recommended The Block, so as it was The Sort Of Thing We Quite Enjoy we thought we’d try it out. We thought we’d start with the latest series they’ve got (2018’s one, based on The Gatwick hotel), then if we like it we can go back and watch older ones.
You might not know The Block – there was one series in the UK with Simon Cowell’s brother as a judge which nobody remembers but it’s one of Australia’s most popular and long running shows. In it, four/five couples each get (I think the term is) a shithole to renovate and a budget and are charged with doing one room a week. They have to do all the design themselves, but can and do get tradies in to do the labouring as far as their budget allows. Each week the judges judge the presented room, and the couple with the room deemed the best win a cash bonus. At the end of the series, all the houses are auctioned off – anything it makes past reserve they get to keep, but whichever sells for the most money gets a big bonus on top. There are twists and turns, but that’s basically it.
We do like it! Like quite a lot of Aussie reality, there’s a bit too much of it – it looks like four episodes a week? – much of it filled with reminders of previous storylines. But we like (most of) the contestants. We like what they do to the rooms. We like host Scott Cam’s amusingly blunt commentary. We like the drama. We like the camaraderie. Personally, I think the soundtrack is a bit of a banger. I am amused by the amount of product placement.
So imagine getting ready to watch another episode tonight only to discover that whoops! Amazon’s rights seem to have lapsed and the video is currently unavailable.
Now this is a thing that happens, and I have no doubt it will return eventually much like Aussie Survivor did. But at least Netflix have the politeness to say at the beginning of the vid, if you’re watching a series, that it’s leaving the service on a date so you can choose to binge watch it or decide if your energies are better directed elsewhere. We’re invested now, but if we had known we wouldn’t have nearly enough time to finish we’d have got into something else instead. Frustrating.
Streaming services should provide a countdown to when they’re going to lose the rights to a series you’ve watched more than one episode of.
I thought this was a back-handed reference to the fact that, almost implausibly, short-lived cult hit US late-’70s game show Whew! is going to be repeated on US channel Buzzr. There are a handful of episodes on YouTube in terrible picture quality, but surely we’ll get to see as many Blocks as we like in glorious NTSC. (Well, dubious uploads thereof.)
For those who don’t know, Whew! is a rules-heavy “gamer’s game” of a quiz format conducted at great pace with a tremendous, infectious style all its own, something like a fever dream that Shigeru Miyamoto might have had five years before making Super Mario Bros. Perhaps its short lifespan actually illustrates what happens in practice to modestly complicated formats. Or perhaps it was forty years ahead of its time and it’s ripe for a revival!!!!!1one
The originsl Aussie version of The Block was probably one of the first foreign reality shows I watched but never been a fan of the bloated revival.
Rival show House Rules has been a guilty pleasure of mine the last few years, though is now axed. Couples renovating each others homes (in 7 days) just adds a bit more to it than just renovating for profit. Not on any streamer though it seems.
One thing I’d love to know about The Block but have never been able to find out: why, if it was such a huge success, was the show axed after series 2 and didn’t return until 6 years later? I can see the ratings for the second series were a bit lower than series 1 (though still generally strong) but given it was previously a monster hit they’d have tried to capitalise on that and improve series 3 rather than just can it completely. I can only assume something else was going on behind the scenes with Channel 9 or something? Though shows flip around the Australian networks so often I’d have thought a rival would have picked it up too.