When The Block‘s judge Shaynna Blayze walked into Jas and Luke’s winning kids’ bedroom, she loved what she saw, but felt a touch of déjà vu… had she seen it somewhere before?
At the time, she thought she must have been mistaken, so she gave her score – a perfect 10 – and moved on. But the seed of doubt was still there, so she started an internet search.
“I thought: ‘I’m just going to have a look’ – and I found an identical one,” Shaynna, 57, tells TV WEEK. “There are one or two teeny-tiny tweaks, but it’s literally a carbon copy!”
As an interior designer herself, that’s more than enough to send Shaynna back to The Block this week to read the riot act.
Shaynna was impressed by Jas & Luke’s bedroom…
(Channel Nine)
…until she realised where she had seen it before.
(Channel Nine)“We’re not into copy-and-pasting,” she says. “And not only that, it takes months and expertise to put all that together – the research, actually finding all those pieces…
“When you present it in a competition and say, ‘I put this together’, it’s like, ‘Well, no you haven’t! You just copied somebody else’s hard work and claimed it as your own.'”
Confronting the West Australians, Shaynna explains that taking inspiration from what you see is fine, but take it too far and you’re not playing fair.
It’s something Jas and Luke say took the shine off their win, but they’re adamant they didn’t break any rules.
“Australia, we are not cheats,” Jas, 36, tells TV WEEK. “I was showing the mood board that featured that inspiration photo all week – to all the crew, our trades and in front of cameras/producers.
“If I were cheating, I probably wouldn’t have been so open about it!”
The blockheads deny they cheated.
(Channel Nine)Jas says the photo Shaynna found was just one of many she had collected before coming onto The Block that reflected a similar theme she liked.
“No-one ever gives you a set of rules when you start The Block,” she says. “The only way you know you’ve broken a ‘rule’ is when you get told that it’s a rule. No-one said you couldn’t copy parts of inspiration photos.
“I know for a fact that other contestants did the same for rooms in their houses this season and in previous seasons. None of us are designers – we’re just ordinary people having a crack at something very unfamiliar. We need all the help we can get.”
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