We’ve had bake offs, sewing bees, apprenticing, throw downs and Robot Wars, but Channel 4 is about to trump them all with its new competition show LEGO Masters. The name probably tells you everything you need to know about the new series, which will see amateur builders competing against each other in a series of block stacking challenges that will blow your mind.
Eight pairs of hopeful brickies have made it through to the series and they’ll be put through their paces by host Melvin Odoom in a bid to find the 2017 master builders. The challenges will test their creative flare, constructive capabilities and incrementalist imagination with challenges ranging from the fun and funny to more technical and outlandish efforts.
Melvin currently hosts Kiss 100’s breakfast show, however, his career had an all-time low when he was first to leave Strictly Come Dancing in 2016, so LEGO Masters is a pretty good opportunity to get back a little credibility. You can see more from him and his block building new show on his Twitter page.
Judging will be overseen by LEGO Group vice president of design Matthew Ashton, who has spent years helping to come up with the blueprints for the radical LEGO sets that make the brand such a much-loved organisation. Each round he’ll be joined by a guest expert judge from the fields of engineering, art and design, along with a guest celebrity LEGO officionado to ensure it’s not all too serious.
Richard Osman, Bill Bailey and Dara O’Briain have already been confirmed, so it’s got some good names attached to it, but that does make it a little male centric. Hopefully, there will be a few XX celebrity LEGO fans too. Our money’s on Claudia Winkleman, Susie Wolff, Rachel Riley and/or Katherine Parkinson, but we’ll have to wait and see.
The eight pairs of contestants are a pretty random mix of ages, backgrounds and LEGO experience, so there’s going to be a lot of difference in their creative output for LEGO Masters. One of the teams is made up of 9 year old best friends who are relative newcomers to the creative wonders of the brick compared to the oldest team in the competition, who are in their 40s with decades of block stacking experience.
As ever with this kind of show, each week will see one of the teams eliminated and one crowned the best builders running up to the final. There will only be four 60-minute episodes, so that will leave five teams of two left to compete in the final for the ultimate LEGO accolade of master builders, which is just one step up from anyone that has managed to build the 4,016-piece Death Star single-handedly.
Episode one of Channel 4’s LEGO Masters competition will air on Thursday the 24th August 2017 at 8pm, so it’s just a matter of weeks away. We’re not massively impressed with the boar’s head and goblet effort in the picture above, but there’s bound to be some very cool constructions built during the show itself.
