Joe Hildebrand: Neighbours snuffed out by its caretaker Channel 10

Neighbours, which served as the backdrop to adolescent struggles and launched questionable musical careers, has fallen foul of Ten’s instinct towards self-harm, Joe Hildebrand argues.

In the John Steinbeck classic Of Mice and Men, the simple-minded character Lennie has such an affection for small furry animals that he inevitably pets them to death.

Australia takes a similar approach in tending to its icons, and Channel 10 in tending to its TV shows, and so it is perhaps no surprise that the one thing that is both is biting the dust this week.

For the past three and a half decades Neighbours has been part of the fabric of Australian society as well as one of our most successful exports.

Generations of Australians grew up with its characters, and coachloads of British tourists once travelled from the other side of the world just to see the dull suburban cul-de-sac masquerading as Ramsay Street.

Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan reprise their roles as Scott and Charlene for the Neighbours finale.

By rights it should have been the first TV show to be heritage listed — and it ran for so long that it virtually was — yet even this remarkable pedigree and dogged survival skills was unable to protect it from Network Ten’s relentless instinct towards self-harm.

In 2011, the third commercial broadcaster relegated Neighbours to what is now 10 Peach while it embarked upon a Quixotic and eye-wateringly costly mission to replace it with a two and a half-hour news and current affairs marathon that would test the resolve of even the most hardened news junkie.

That project was then quickly and expensively aborted while Neighbours was left to wither on the vine on the secondary channel. When the financially bust Ten later sold itself to a major US network, the fate of this quaint but quintessential Australian show was all but sealed.

And this is the great shame in all of this, not just for the cast and crew of the show who are by now already looking for other jobs, but for all of us as a nation. The show that served as the backdrop to millions of adolescent struggles and launched countless questionable musical careers has been snuffed out by its own caretaker.

Neighbours became the rabbit to Channel 10’s Lennie and, as the readers of this sorry tale, there is not much we can do but turn the last page on the final chapter and sigh.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Neighbours snuffed out by its caretaker Channel 10