Elle Ferguson & Joel Patfull’s Shock Exit From The Block Explained

The Block always drills down on heavy drama, but this year's season, The Block: Tree Change, takes it to another level. It's been revealed entrepreneur and influencer Elle Ferguson and her AFL star fiancé Joel Patfull is the couple who walk out of the competition after just two days.

The pair departed the set early after Patfull's mum, Trish, fractured her neck during a fall at her Adelaide home. She reportedly broke her coccyx and fractured her wrist.

There's been quite a lot of talk about their shock exit from the show, not just because it happened so early on in the season, but because of the way in which it occurred.

Host Scott Cam has claimed the couple provided "no explanation" prior to leaving.

"They never spoke to us, they just left in the middle of the night,” Cam told news.com.au this week. "I still don’t know why they left. They never mentioned their sick mother in the 48 hours before they left, or after they left. The executive producer spoke to them (after they left) and they didn’t mention their sick mother then either."

He said Channel 9 had also flown the pair to Adelaide for a week-long stay in a hotel before filming began so they could see Patfull's mother, "and they came back and said everything’s fine".

Cam, who has been hosting the renovations reality show since 2010, said production has been halted in the past for similar reasons and that arrangements could've been made to accomodate for Ferguson and Patfull had they communicated earlier.

"As we’ve done in the past, we shut the whole show down for a sick family," he said. "If they’d mentioned their sick mother, of course we would have allowed them to go home. I certainly wouldn’t be holding someone back from seeing their sick mother, that’s outrageous."

The 59-year-old Gold Logie winner's comments come after some harsh remarks he made in June to TV Tonight, saying "45,000 people applied to be on The Block and win life-changing money. These guys got on and they just couldn’t handle the pace after 48 hours… Which to me is a bit unAustralian! Have a go! It’s p*ss poor."

He later told journalists: "Obviously I wish Joel and Elle success in the future. It’s just that they created a fair bit of chaos for us here in the first 48 hours.

“The show… we put a lot of time and money into the start of our show and then we had to rejig the whole thing… the whole promos had to be re-shot. It just was a lot of angst on our part when they just departed the way they did.

"When I say those words, that’s just Scott Cam speaking from the heart."

It's since been reported that Ferguson and Patfull have bought a $4 million home in the Byron Bay hinterland after their shock exit from the show. The couple are one of five pairs competing on the show's 18th season in Gisborne South in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges. The other teams are Ankur and Sharon Johal, Sarah-Jane and Tom, Dylan and Jenny, and Omar and Osman.