Colin Hogg: Finale best way to knock The Block off

Winners Alex and Corban Walls surprisingly gifted $30,000 of their winnings to the least successful contestants.

Skipping season’s repetitive ad-filled episodes makes great sense.

It was the moment we'd all been waiting for, according to the television, though I had some initial trouble whipping up much excitement for the grand final of The Block NZ. After all, I'd missed the previous 48 episodes.

But I missed them confident in the belief that the two-hour final (TV3, Friday, 7.30pm) of the third series would be stuffed full of all the highlights from those earlier shows.

And so it was and that's really the best way to watch something like The Block NZ, which does go on forever, forever repeating itself, plugging its products and squeezing the contestants like lemons.

TV3 could in future save the nation an awful lot of time and anxiety by skipping the series itself and simply screening only the grand final of The Block NZ, which was terrific viewing, so long as you like that sort of thing.

That sort of thing being a light-touch DIY show featuring four competing couples building their dream houses on tiny sections in a previously innocent inner Auckland suburb.

The completed houses all looked a bit the same, but then so did the contestants, who spent a great deal of Friday's show standing around being endlessly asked by presenter Mark Richardson how they felt.

The words "awesome", "cool" and "amazing" featured heavily, as they do, but Richardson's small talk was very small indeed at times and the show did sag a bit.

Still, the big deal in Friday's final was the live auctioning of the four finished houses and by far the best performances of the night came from the four featured auctioneers, some of them seemingly quite crazy.

The first house up was heatedly described as "an adult pinata, stuffed with goodies" and things notched up from there.

That first house sold for a jaw dropping $1.5 million-plus, setting the night's highest price right at the start and netting its couple, Alex and Corban, more than $300,000 to take home.

In a surprise heart-warming moment right at the end of the show, the winners gifted $30,000 to the contest's least lucky couple Quinn and Ben, who'd netted only $10,000 for all their trouble.

Not that I'm saying my heart was particularly warmed. But it might have been if someone hadn't mentioned there was a fourth series of The Block NZ coming.

A much better way to mention products was Monday's Fair Go Ad Awards (TV One, 8pm), now in its 30th year, encouraging the viewers to vote for the year's best and worst TV ads.

Presenters Pippa Wetzell and Gordon Harcourt, looking geekily adorable in frock and tux, did the business, live and casual with a studio audience of finalists and ad agency types.

The winner of the worst - the Cigna funeral ad - was absent and there were some technical glitches, with the winner of the best ad of all time (the Dear John one from some time last century) being prematurely revealed, but none of that mattered.

The show was fun and full of action, the best ad - the Specsavers aerobics one - was the funniest and there was a generous serving of clips from Fair Go's long and illustrious past.

All that and it was over in half an hour.