Is The Block too easy this season? Former contestant Luke Packham weighs in 

The Block has changed dramatically since Luke Packham competed alongside his twin brother Josh in 2021, and the former contestant isn’t convinced the current teams know just how hard the competition once was.

With strict council restrictions in Mount Eliza, contestants are being forced to leave site at 6pm on weekdays and 3pm on Saturdays, rather than working into the early hours as previous teams did. For Luke, 31, that makes the current competition look a little too comfortable.

“They need to try and paint throughout the night [to be tired],” the business owner and father of two tells TV WEEK with a laugh. “I don’t watch the show but I’ve heard that they would either not paint at night or would have painters in there to help them.

“The hard work of it all is gone now because the whole show for me was wrapped around having to paint the rooms late at night and rush the finish, so if they say they’re tired… they’re really not tired.”

Luke and Josh appeared on Season 17, The Block: Fans v Faves, where they were labelled villains following a game-disrupting cheating scandal and other off-site antics. While he ended up confessing to their involvement in this particular transgression, he has said the show manipulated their edit to make them appear worse than they were.

“Josh and I would go to bed at 6am and wake up at 8.30am,” he recalls. “Then when I watch the show back, I’ve got a voice-over of Scotty Cam saying, ‘The boys are sleeping in till 8.30am in the morning,’ and we’d get hammered by people saying that we’re lazy and don’t deserve to be on the show.”

The backlash eventually became too much, forcing Luke to step away from social media.

“I’d be getting some pretty heavy abuse each night,” he says. “I made the choice to step away from social media because I think you can get caught up in it. For me, my mental health, my family, and my business come first. No one can give me more validation than my kids.”

Now back on reality TV alongside Josh on The Traitors, Luke says despite his previous struggles with the format and the fallout that can come with it, there is one more person he’d love to share the experience with.

“I would love to do a series with my wife Olivia,” he reveals.

“But it’s good fun doing things with my brother. Love us or hate us, we make good TV and we wear our hearts on our sleeve.”