Blak Ball
Wednesday 29 May 9.00pm
Indigenous athletes share stories from their careers with help from the funniest blakfullas in the country.
A chorus of First Nations comedians regale us with this country’s greatest and most memorable Indigenous sporting moments, and placed directly in the middle of this twisted adulation are the sporting stars themselves.
A young Tony Armstrong infiltrates his way onto Adam Gilchrist’s bar tab, Donnell Wallam stuns the netball world with a game winning layup and Shane Phillips leads the first all Indigenous crew to finish the Sydney to Hobart.
Production credit: An ABC Indigenous Original Production. Director: Yaraman Thorne
Restoration Australia
Series 6, Episode 2
Thursday 30 May 8.00pm
Host Anthony Burke meets a King Islander returning home to one of Australia’s most remote and weatherbeaten outposts to reclaim and restore a derelict farmhouse.
King Island can be sun kissed and beautiful one minute and storm-ravaged the next. It takes a particularly stoic individual to deal with the unpredictable forces rolling in and over the remote island hunkering off the north-west coast of Tasmania, let alone one prepared to wax wistful and nostalgic about an idyllic life there.
But father of three Gordon, long settled across the Tasman in New Zealand, remains a proud King Islander to his core and when an opportunity arises to acquire an old weatherbeaten farmhouse once owned by his uncle, Gordon can’t resist the siren call of his childhood home.
He cajoles his sister into a minority partnership and buys the cottage and farmlet on King Island’s wind-smashed north, then proceeds to hatch one of the most terrifying, white-knuckle restoration plans we’ve ever witnessed.
Gordon declares he will bring the dishevelled timber house back to its upstanding original shape in just 6 weeks. He assembles a FIFO flashmob of NZ tradies, summons local friends, helpers and barrackers, conjures Public Service flow chart management systems, builds a chaotic work camp and prays to his King Island ancestors for clement weather. What could possibly go wrong?
Well as the fate of many seafarers and passengers can attest in and around Australia’s biggest shipwreck graveyard, a lot can go wrong. And fast.
Host Professor Anthony Burke joins Gordon and his ragtag army working against the clock, the elements and dreadful malodorous forces to save an authentic slice of King Island’s heritage. There’s a pocket of King Island called Pearshape. It doesn’t need another.
Production credit: A Fremantle production for the ABC. Supervising Executive Producer: Brooke Bayvel. Executive Producer: Michael Collett. ABC Executive Producers: Madeleine Hawcroft and Jo Chichester.
Grand Designs UK
Season 21 Episode 2
Thursday 30 May 9.00pm
Devoted dad Danny wants to build a sustainable but affordable house with bedroom pods on stilts up among the trees. But with no self-build experience and spiralling costs, can he do it on ambition alone?
North Lincolnshire born and bred, Deputy Principal Danny wants to build his three children a stylish, sustainable, but affordable, four-bedroom house amongst the trees in the garden of his current bungalow.
Set right on the edge of a fishing pond, it’ll include dramatic bedroom pods raised on steel stilts to give his children a new life up in the canopy. He wants to connect them to nature, for the house to embrace the innocence of childhood.
Danny clearly has plenty of ambition, but also no experience as a self-builder and a £ 300,000 budget which seems mismatched to the challenges of his project.
After selling the bungalow and squeezing into his mum’s terraced house for the duration, it’s not long before engineering puzzles, rampant inflation and the overall stress of construction weigh heavily on Danny.
His quest to provide a house that captures innocence is proving far from child’s play. So, can this devoted father find the stamina, and the money, to complete a house that inspires his children and that he can be truly proud of?