Creator of The Block lifts the lid on show's biggest secrets
Following the end of this year’s dramatic season of The Block, winners Mitch and Mark have started their own podcast and brought on Block co-creator Julian Cress as their first guest.
The pair interviewed Cress for their podcast Reality Reno, which saw him sharing some of his best and worst moments during the show’s 17-year-run.
Image: @mitchandmark / Instagram
He also shared some of the show’s biggest secrets, including how Mitch and Mark secured their win thanks to a mysterious last-minute bidder.
“You had a buyer, and that buyer came on board the night before the auction,” Cress recalled.
“A guy came to your house and sat in the front garden, on that beautiful seat under that beautiful tree, and fell in love with it.”
If their buyer had not appeared, Cress said multi-millionaire Danny Wallis would have bought the home - making it his fourth Block purchase this year - and paid less for it.
“Danny Wallis would’ve happily paid $3-$400,000 less for it on the day, let’s be honest, but there was this guy who really wanted it and just kept bidding against him,” Cress said.
“That’s the perfect storm, right?”
The co-creator also tackled a common complaint that was especially relevant during the latest season, as some viewers have complained on social media that The Block spends too much time on the drama and not enough on the actual renovations.
“It’s bulls**t. Translated, it’s ‘I don’t want to watch this big fight - I want to watch paint dry’. It’s just not real, and the ratings reflect that.”
With this season’s cheating scandal, the show’s ratings were quick to pick up after a soft start.
Cress did note that they did try to “strike a balance” between the drama and renovations on the show.
“But we’ve never just been about paint drying, we’ve always been about human drama,” he explained.
“It used to be written in huge letters on our whiteboard in our office when we made the first series: ‘HUMAN DRAMA’. It was our reminder we weren’t just making a renovation show.”
As for his lowest moment on the show, Cress shared that it came during the first week of the 2019 season - which was Mitch and Mark’s debut on the competition - as contestants went about renovating the Oslo hotel in St Kilda.
“I thought, this isn’t going to actually work. No-one’s going to deliver a room this week - I’ve asked too much,” he recalled.
“We didn’t do a lot of preparation before you came in because I thought, ‘It’s just going to be so dramatic! The contestants having to make a room out of THIS? It’ll be brilliant TV!’”
He also revealed that couples are most likely to get on the show rather than friends.
“We haven’t had many examples of mates, or friends who don’t live together but they love catching up on the weekend so they thought they’d go on The Block. I don’t think they have what it takes to get through it - I think, for a team to get through it, they need to be a couple and they need to have been a couple for some time.”
Cress said that some couples who had only been together for a few years before going on the show had split “immediately after finishing” the show.
“The Block is too much pressure for a relationship that young,” he explained.
According to Cress, those who have the best odds of getting chosen are people “who know each other well enough that they’ll find a way through it; it’s going to be OK.”
Image: @mitchandmark / Instagram