Building the Lego Masters franchise, brick by brick
Hamish Blake, Ryan 'Brickman' McNaught, and Lego Masters executive producer David McDonald talk to Mumbrella about the unlikely longevity of a show about a toy, aimed at the entire family.
In late 2017, Hamish Blake received a random call from Nine’s director of TV Michael Healy asking if he likes Lego.
“I was like, ‘oh, my God, I think we’re getting a Christmas present from the network’, Blake recalls. “I like really expensive sets – why do you ask?”
Turns out he was getting a different present: the offer of a five-year contract to host a new show built around the legendary Danish toy. He demurred, reasoning that being locked into a half-decade agreement for an untested TV format wasn’t the smartest idea. Nine came back with a three-year deal, which he also turned down.
“I was like: Guys, I love the feeling of this show, but if it doesn’t turn out the way we want it to, like, we’ll probably just shake hands after one season and say, ‘well, we had a go.'”
Blake eventually agreed to a one-year deal.
Hamish Blake on the Lego Masters set.
“I remember at the time being like, there’s no universe in which we could get five years out of this,” he tells Mumbrella.
“But here we are, seven years later. I think that’s how all good, different, interesting ideas feel at the start: like it’s definitely not going to work. And then, somehow, you bumble your way through and it makes sense as you’re doing it.”
Lego Masters is still making sense for Nine. Season seven launched earlier this month to a national audience of 2.2 million viewers, with an ambitious building challenge featuring massive mechanical Lego birds, all of which were launched into flight from a ten-metre tower.
Although the ratings have been strong for seven straight seasons, Blake knows the show has a natural expiration date.
“I don’t think it’s infinite. I mean, there’s infinite things you can do with Lego, but we don’t want it to ever feel like it’s the same thing.”
A Lego eagle, from the season seven opener of Lego Masters.
At the end of each season, Blake assumes they’ve exhausted every possible build idea.
“Then you go away for a little while and then you start having ideas, and everyone’s texting each other in the off-season going, ‘Do you reckon this would be a fun challenge?’ And then before you know it, you have a thought of another season.”
Turns out this panic isn’t exclusive to Blake. The show’s executive producer David McDonald tells Mumbrella that the same thing. “You think ‘is there anything left in the tank?’ We’ve done everything.”
He says that pressure comes, because he feels the show’s longevity comes down to “keeping the challenges interesting.”
This season, they introduced ‘Grandmasters of the Galaxy’, an Olympic-style format that allows them to bring in the top Lego builders from six different nations to battle previous winners of the Australian version.
“It means that some of the challenges that sometimes we might park and go, ‘You know what? That’s a bit too difficult’, they suddenly come back into play and that makes it more interesting,” McDonald says.
“I think that’s how we keep it fresh and exciting for us, and hopefully that translates when people get to see the show.”
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Blake says he knows the show is succeeding when it leans into doing things that “you could only do if you had a TV show about Lego.”
“The bigger, crazier, more ridiculous stuff is really fun because we have cameras and the ability and budgets to do bigger things.
“I think we feel like we’re in the right zone when we’re like: This is stuff you could only do on TV.”
The other main challenge each season comes with aiming at children and adults alike, without tipping too far into each demographic. If the builds get too technical, the kids zone out. Too simple, and adults aren’t sufficiently awed. The original UK version of the show, on which the Australian version is based, features children as contestants and is aimed squarely at kids.
“That’s the challenge, trying to maintain that balance,” McDonald agrees.
“Lego very cleverly have widened their demographic out year after year after year. They’re seeing how they can go after a much broader demographic. There are kits now specifically designed for adults. So in the show, I guess, we try and keep that balance.
“Not that I am in any way implying that we measure up to this — but I think a good Pixar film has got enough stuff in there that the kids want to go and see it, but enough jokes that the adults with them are enjoying the film as well.
Bird construction: episode one of Lego Masters
“That’s a great yardstick for how we try and approach the show. If it got too kiddy, I wouldn’t want to watch it, and if it got too adult, the kids wouldn’t want to watch it.”
It also helps that both he and Blake have what McDonald calls “arrested development.”
“It is a balancing act, but I think we’re sort of making the show for us. If we’re excited about it, we think that’s the demographic, because we’re kind of like big kids anyway.
“I don’t know if much more scrutiny and thought goes into it than just are we finding it entertaining? Are we engaged with it? That’s probably the first measure of anything that we do. Just us.”
It’s been a good yardstick. And while the scale and ambition of the Lego challenges has increased over the years, the rate of Lego theft on set has definitely slowed.
“Look, there was a peak theft zone,” Blake admits of his kleptomaniac past on set. “Obviously, the novelty of the brick pit being new, it overwhelmed me, and I could just see how poor the security was. And I just knew that since I was the host, no one was going to stop me.
“They say power corrupts, and ultimate power corrupts absolutely. And I got corrupted pretty fast and I stole a lot.”
He said running out of storage space at home slowed the theft rate. As did the need to set a good parental example as his two children grew up over the seasons.
“Now as they’re older, I realised there is a more of an ethical dilemma with dad stealing so much,” he says. “And I also don’t want them to think that it’s just an unlimited Lego tap. So now I’m really pinching it to teach them about scarcity.”
Lego is slowly shifting back to being for birthdays and special occasions.
“Although when I leave the house, they do just yell out orders like, ‘More purple teddy bears!”
Hamish and Ryan ‘Brickman’ McNaught in front of the brick pit, in 2020.
Not short of purple teddy bears is Lego Masters’ resident genius builder Ryan McNaught, better known to Australians of all ages as ‘Brickman’.
He is the only Lego Certified Professional in the Southern Hemisphere, and one of only 23 globally. He is responsible for the Lego Star Wars exhibition currently showing at Melbourne museum, which uses eight million bricks to recreate the film’s universe in meticulous detail. He is a deity to Lego fans, and a natural on camera.
Rumours are McNaught has a warehouse space housing five million pieces of Lego; he confirms to Mumbrella it’s closer to 12 million pieces, with the Star Wars job the perfect excuse to expand his brick count.
McNaught with Lego C-3PO.
He came to the attention of the Lego company after tinkering with their Mindstorms product.
Introduced in 1998 as a series of educational kits for building programmable robots based on Lego bricks, Mindstorms were aimed at children interested in science and programming, but soon became corrupted by adult hobbyists who developed operating systems that hack the ‘smart brick’ in the set, increasing the abilities of the robots.
“It’s pretty much a mini computer that sends instructions to sensors, and can pick up like temperature sensors or colour sensors to move motors and all sorts of things,” McNaught says.
In 2007, McNaught started tinkering with Mindstorms and attempted to built a Lego contraption that could get him a beer from the fridge.
He found the coding of the smart brick inscrutable. “You pretty much had to be a Danish mathematician to figure this thing out,” he says.
He soon found forums of fellow Mindstorms hackers on the internet, and slowly learned how to break the encryption and program it to be more intuitive.
He then used his IT background to write a piece of programming that allowed him to control Mindstorms using the touchscreen of the recently released iPad.
He shared his code online, and six months later received a threatening legal letter from Lego.
“And about two weeks after that, I got another letter from the Lego marketing department saying, ‘This is really awesome what you’re doing. Let’s do some stuff. Let’s get together.’ And so that kind of opened the door. I’m like, ‘well you need to call the lawyers off …'”
When production company Endemol Shine approached McNaught about appearing in the show, he wasn’t interested. He’d seen the UK version, and the idea of reality TV aimed at children wasn’t appealing.
They twisted his arm enough to meet Blake for lunch in their shared neighbourhood of Ascot Park, Melbourne. Neither knew anything about the other.
“Then we met for lunch and it was like, ‘Yeah, this will be awesome.’ And away we went.”
Blake recalls thinking a professional Lego builder might not have the required chemistry for a TV show.
“And then I met Ryan. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s absolutely not what I thought he would be like.’ I recognise I’m not a complete natural at TV – but he is. I think the hardest thing to capture on TV, the thing that everyone’s trying to do, is to just be authentic, and just be able to speak from the heart, be engaged, be interested, be present.
“And it’s effortless for Ryan. I’m largely replaceable on the show, but I don’t think you can do the show without Brickman.”
Blake and McNaught
Blake said the pair have discussed bowing out when the magic fades.
“It’s the way our brains work. We don’t want to see it run into the ground just for the sake of it. I don’t want to ever get in a situation where someone’s like you, ‘We’ll sign you for five years and we’ll figure out the show later.’ That’s just not a recipe for fun. And it’s not good for viewers. It’s not good for anyone involved.
“So, I think every year you need to sort of sit back and go, ‘What have we done with the show so far? Is there something else we want to do?’ And if all the stars align, then you go again.
“Down the track, the day might come and it looks like, ‘All right, I think we’ve done it’, which would be totally fine. It happens all the time in TV – because seven years is six more than we thought we were going to get.
“It will have a natural end at some point, but the decision to keep going is always based on like, ‘is there more stuff we want to do?’ And if that answer is ‘yes’, and the network is still keen to make it, then everyone gets to go again.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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