This week on The Block, it’s all too much for Tess. Under enormous stress, she finally walks off.
The drama erupts when host Scott Cam turns up and tells Luke that he and Tess are nearly out of money. They’ll need to send their tradies home.
“I’m ready to go,” Tess declares. “I want to leave. I want to go. I just think I’m done.”
The 28-year-old contestant from Cairns in far north Queensland tells TV WEEK she needed to get away from the cameras.
“I was sick of being filmed, I was sick of being made to feel like we weren’t doing enough, and I was sick of looking like the poor ones,” she says.
“The renovation’s hard enough – I don’t need to feel like I’m getting picked on the whole time.”
Tess was sick of being filmed.
Tess was worried she was going to have a panic attack, as she’s had in the past.
“I just went, ‘I need a break,’ because I could feel like a panic attack coming. I was like, ‘I don’t need to share that with Australia.'”
In the episode, Tess leaves the site, clearly upset. “This is literally destroying us,” she says. “Luke and I f***ing hate each other.”
She says she found she and Luke were arguing a lot.
“This show was almost turning us against each other,” she says. “We were getting no sleep and we were stressed and were anxious. My marriage is more important to me than making a TV show.”
Scott checks in on Tess.
Ever-present cameras didn’t help the newlyweds either, Tess says.
“He could see how upset I was and I could see how angry he was, but we never had time to talk because we were never alone,” she explains. “I just really wanted that space for Luke and me.”
Foreman Keith says Tess and Luke are “very nice people”, but they were struggling.
“Tess was basically ready to walk,” he tells TV WEEK. “They were obviously struggling with the whole situation of being contestants on The Block and we didn’t want that to happen.”
Will Tess be able to carry on, or is the pressure too much?
The Block airs Monday to Wednesday, 7.30pm, and Sunday, 7pm, on Nine Network.
READ NEXT: Everything new coming to Channel Nine in 2020
