When season three of Nine’s Lego Masters hits screens on Monday, April 19th, eight new teams will battle it out to win the title of Lego Masters and the $100,000 prize.
The teams all come with different skills, ideas, and personalities, including a young couple, best mates, and a hilarious pair of mothers. Lego Masters Australia will push them to their creative limits with all sorts of builds of different themes and sizes.
See More: Lego Masters season three: Meet the eight new teams
See More: Lego Masters season three: Everything you need to know
See More: How Nine is making Lego Masters bigger and better
Overseeing all of the madness will be Hamish Blake and Ryan “Brickman” McNaught.
Hamish Blake (Host)
Hamish Blake and his close friend and collaborator Andy Lee have been among Australia’s most popular entertainers for close to two decades. Hamish is a versatile performer, excelling in radio, television, and film. In 2012, he was awarded the Gold Logie as the most popular talent on Australian television.
Hamish commenced his radio career with Andy in the early 2000s, rising to success on the highest rating radio program in Australian history. Their national Drive show reached around 2.5 million listeners each week and held that audience for an extraordinary four years, before they took a break from radio in 2011 to pursue other media ambitions.
With a desire to establish their careers on TV, the duo continued to captivate audiences with a stream of seasons of their global Gap Year expeditions on the Nine Network. The show featured the boys’ escapades in New York, the UK, Asia, South America, India, New Zealand, and Europe, earning three Silver Logies and a Silver and Gold Logie for Hamish personally.
Together with radio and TV, they’ve also held comedy reign with their podcasts, having topped the iTunes charts as the #1 Australian radio podcast.
In 2008, Hamish and Andy released their Unessential Listening CD which went platinum, selling well over 100,000 copies. In 2010, they released a second CD to great acclaim, Celebrating Over 50 Glorious Years.
In 2015, Hamish and Andy made their highly anticipated return to the HIT Radio network, once again hosting the top-rating weekday national Drive show. After a farewell tour at the end of 2017 they moved to broadcasting purely as podcasters, launching their own show for the Podcast One network in 2018.
In 2017, they returned to the Nine Network with the debut of True Story with Hamish and Andy, which was nominated for the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards and the Logies, and continued its success with a second season in 2018.
In 2019, grown-up Hamish got to live out eight-year-old Hamish’s dreams – going to work with Lego every day as the host of the first Lego Masters Australia. An unabashed Lego fan, Hamish not only oversaw proceedings but was also looking to pocket as much Lego as possible without raising alarm.
Later in 2019, Hamish and Andy again paired up on Nine, setting off on another adventure – with a twist – in Hamish and Andy’s Perfect Holiday.
As a television actor, Hamish has featured in the ABC comedy Twenty Something and the Seven Network’s Molly. He co-starred in his first feature film with Bret McKenzie (Flight of the Concords) in Two Little Boys, which was shot in New Zealand. In 2015, he played alongside Portia de Rossi in Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope’s feature film Now Add Honey. Most recently, he featured as a voiced role in the sequel of the animation movie Wreck-It Ralph called Ralph Breaks the Internet.
Hamish has appeared as a guest on a variety of Australian television series, including Have You Been Paying Attention, Spicks and Specks, Thank God You’re Here, Open Slather, Australia’s Brainiest Comedian, The Librarians, The Panel, Rove, Talkin’ ‘bout your Generation, The Project, and The Footy Show. He has also featured in the British version of
Thank God You’re Here and been a guest on The Graham Norton Show. In the United States he made a guest appearance on the Jay Leno Show.
As an ambassador for the charitable organisation Soldier On, in 2015 Hamish, with Cadel Evans, joined a group of military veterans in Italy for an intense three-day cycling challenge in the Trois Etapes Giro. Hamish was also an ambassador for the 2018 Invictus Games.
In 2020-21, Hamish and his wife Zoë were tasked with fronting the Holiday Here This Year campaign as ambassadors for Tourism Australia, which saw them travel extensively to promote the wonders of the country, big and small.
Ryan “Brickman” McNaught (Judge)
As a chief information officer in the corporate world, Ryan McNaught often found his creativity constrained by the nature of his work.
A Lego fan as a child – winning awards for his building at the age of five – he returned to his hobby when he became a father, and his mother gave him back his childhood Lego collection.
When Lego Mindstorms was released, a hardware and software platform for programmable robots based on Lego bricks, Ryan began to combine his IT know-how and Lego building skills.
Relishing the chance to express and create, in 2009 he made a model of an Airbus A380 incorporating Mindstorms robotics, which enabled the cockpit controls to be activated remotely by a touchscreen computer for the aircraft’s wing flaps, landing gear and cargo doors. It won Best in Show at Melbourne’s Brickvention before he displayed it at the Brickworld event in Chicago. There it caught the eye of a team member responsible for Lego Mindstorms who was highly impressed, and Ryan was asked to consider becoming a Lego Certified Professional.
Six months and many interviews later, Ryan became the only person in the Southern Hemisphere to hold this role. Whilst not a Lego employee, he does a lot of work for the company, even building Lego models for its offices around the world.
After launching his Brickman business in 2010, Ryan now has a team of passionate craftsmen and women who have built some of the world’s largest and most detailed Lego models.
Specialising in interactive models and cutaways as well as record-breaking creations like life-sized cars, motorcycles and the tallest Lego model in the Southern Hemisphere, Ryan and his team take great pleasure in sharing their work with others.
Having produced five global touring exhibitions and hundreds of models for museums, galleries and shopping centres around the world, the Brickman team have proven that there really isn’t anything they cannot make out of Lego.
Based in Melbourne, the team have won many awards for their work and maintain a unique style which makes their creations some of the most recognisable in the world. Ryan is thrilled to be back for the third series as judge of Lego Masters and looks forward to marvelling at the creations and being a firm but fair assessor of true Lego talent.
Father to 13-year-old twin sons (who also love Lego), in his downtime Ryan enjoys running marathons in unusual places around the world and is always dreaming up his next latest and greatest Lego creation.
