Budget Battlers ★★★
Wednesday, Nine, 8.30pm
It’s the elephant in the room in so many renovation shows. Yes, all this gussying up of old houses and sculpting of pre-loved dwellings into modern masterpieces is lovely and gorgeous, but let’s be honest: the amounts of cash required to pull it off are so far beyond the reach of most people that they might as well be DIY space program shows.
Five days, $10,000: Jess Eva and Norm Hogan are here to help out in Budget Battlers.
Well, as an antidote, here is Budget Battlers, a show that proclaims an intention to undertake a top-notch reno on a tiny budget. But can it put its lack of money where its mouth is?
The show is hosted by Jess Eva and Norm Hogan, veterans of The Block chosen for their TV-ready rough-around-the-edges quality and broad ocker accents. Jess does most of the talking, handling the narration duties while Norm, in classic Aussie bloke style, displays strong, masculine silence until things go wrong on the reno and it’s time to start swearing. There’s actually quite a lot of swearing on Budget Battlers – all bleeped out, of course, as this is still a family show. It’s clear the producers want to foreground the willingness of all involved to indulge in profanity to better establish their battler credentials.
Jess and Norm themselves, we are told, grew up as battlers. “There’s nothing wrong with being a battler,” Jess assures us, which is a slightly odd thing to say, as it would be difficult to find anyone who reckons there is. In fact, in modern-day Australia, there are few greater compliments you could pay someone – just look at how hard the prime minister works to convince everyone of his battler status. The implication that there is some kind of stigma attached to battlerdom is a little questionable, but in its quest to provide quick-fire transformations for people who don’t have a hell of a lot, Budget Battlers definitely delivers on the heart-warming front.
The setup is classic manufactured-jeopardy reality TV: pick out a little Aussie battler struggling to make ends meet and in possession of a run-down ramshackle house, and with a budget of just $10,000 and a deadline of just five days, beautify and transmogrify that house into something far more desirable. To help stay within the budget, the show ropes in an army of family and friends of the lucky battler and grabs some cheap supplies from network sponsors. As a result, we prove that anyone can pull off a major renovation, as long as they have 10 grand, heaps of family and friends with five days to spare doing unpaid labour, and a major television company behind them. “It’s all about who you know!” chirrups Jess, and if you happen to know a major appliance company looking for free advertising, even better.
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Of course, it’s easy to be cynical about a show like Budget Battlers. As with most reality shows, such cynicism is not entirely unjustified: apart from the shakiness of the “anyone can do this” facade, one might observe that all the budgetary and logistical restrictions are self-inflicted. One might even question why, if we want to reward an honest Aussie battler, we don’t just splash out, give them half a million and let them sit back and watch the professionals change their lives. But then, I guess, they wouldn’t be battlers any more.
In any case, this is not a show to think about, it’s a show to make you feel. And on this score, Budget Battlers delivers. In episode one, a thoroughly decent farmer and dad of four by the name of Tim is surprised by the arrival of the BB crew and the news that after a lifetime of work for others, he’s getting his just deserts. The joy of the reveal and the emotion on Tim’s face is enough to melt, if not the hardest heart, at least any heart harbouring little affection for reality-TV heartstring-pulling. Its other big asset is Jess – awkward sponsor-plugging and over-egging of the ocker pudding and all. Her clear love of the job and palpable joy at inhabiting the spotlight are infectious. In a genre dominated by schadenfreude and fuel-injected conflict, Budget Battlers is a little relief.
