“The battle lines are drawn,” announces Richardson at the start of episode 2.
It’s all over the hunt for a safe, which contains “a secret advantage” and was hidden in one of the houses.
A builder from Tom and Ben’s team found it but Amy reckons she saw it and touched it first and “that builder stole it”, so it should go to her.
Tom, who is looking more and more like Game of Thrones nutjob Ramsay Bolton, and Ben back their builder.
“I can see how desperately you want to have it, so just have it,” says Amy.
Tom — whose Game of Thrones psychopathic lookalike would probably have slaughtered Amy and her family, castrated Stu and made him his man-slave — refers to her as “passive aggressive”.
Stu and an upset Amy go for a drive to clear her head.
“I feel like I need to vomit,” she says.
“But if there’s one thing Stu is good at,” Richardson says in a voiceover, “it’s cheering Amy up.”
Laidback Stu rips into a reworded version of a John Rowles song. Cheryl Moana Marie has never sounded the same.
“What do you think is going to be in the safe,” Amy asks.
Stu suggests a sex toy. They both crack up.
On the building front, Stu and Amy are lagging behind and after emptying the cliché book with talk of “giving it 110 percent, “smashing it out of the park” and going in “no holds barred”, the focus is fully fixated on their “Moody Botanical”-themed guest house, which is where the creativity of Amy comes to the fore.
She looks to Stu for input on that front but after he asks “can you get moody neutral?” and suggests “you don’t need plants to be botanical”, it’s clear who will be driving this side of the reno.
Teams face their next reward challenge — creating an abstract art work for their house in an hour.
Think Pollock or Kadinsky, they’re advised.
“Are you familiar with Kadinsky,” Amy asks Stu.
“No. Canned spaghetti, maybe?”
Stu “lets a bit of gravity do the job” by pouring paint from the top of a ladder, then gives it a personal touch — a tribute to the bare bums against the back window of the bus days — with a purple print of his butt cheeks.
“I think we’ve cracked it,” he proclaims.
The challenge is won by Tom and Ben for their piece Stu aptly describes as “ a grey smear”.
Even Tom and Ben can’t believe they won.
Thanks to builder Dave and his hard-working crew, Amy and Stu have made great strides.
They suffer a bit of a dehumidifier setback when trying to speed up the drying of their plaster work. Stu points the dehumidifier at where they are sleeping, rather than the plastered room.
“That’s probably why I woke up with dry lips,” he says.
But he puts his plumbing skills to great use by installing a makeshift toilet and Amy is his “first customer”.
“It’s working,” she shouts out.
“But there’s no paper.”
“Have you been on the asparagus,” says Stu after throwing her a roll.
Never a dull TV moment with these two on The Block, which continues tonight on TV3.
