Scott Cam has brushed off retirement rumours and said he is not leaving television next year, even as he takes on a new role on Channel 9's Shark. The 63-year-old presenter said he would be the first to tell viewers when the time comes.
For viewers searching for what happens to one of Channel 9's best-known faces, the answer is simple: Cam is still on board. He has hosted The Block since 2010, and now he is fronting Shark, a sharp turn from his usual building-site territory into open water and shark cages.
Cam said the retirement talk has followed him for a decade. “Over the last 10 years, everyone's been saying this is my last year,” he said, calling the rumours “clickbait.” His message was blunt. “I’m not retiring next year either. Tell you what, I'll be the first to let you know when I'm going to retire.”
The new show gave him a very different kind of pressure. Cam said he had “a lot of anxiety the whole time when I was above the water, waiting to see what was going to happen,” especially on the boat rides out before a night dive through a shipwreck. He said his torch only lit one metre in front of him, and that he was far calmer once he was in the water.
That calm did not come from comfort. Cam said he and the other contestants began with “really small sharks and stingrays,” then worked up to sharks as long as 4.5 metres. He said there were times when as many as 30 sharks were around them, and recalled warning that if there are 10 sharks around a boat, “you're never going to jump in - but we did.”
Cam's latest appearance matters because it answers a question that has trailed him for years while he remains central to one of Australian television's most familiar franchises. He has spent 16 years on The Block, won the Gold Logie in 2014, and now appears on a series that tests him far from the comfort of a renovation set. He said Australians will be amazed at what “the six of us” did, but he left no doubt about the bigger headline: retirement is not next year's story.
