The end of the road for Neighbours
More than three decades and 8903 episodes later, Australia’s great soapie Neighbours is approaching its grand finale. How did something critically regarded as trash survive this long?
It has been more than three decades and 8903 episodes, with countless marriages, first kisses, dirty secrets, cheating husbands, steamy affairs, fairytale romances, mental breakdowns, mysterious disappearances, murders, deaths, births and disasters – and now Australia’s great soapie Neighbours is finally coming to its own closing night. The history-making last episode of Australia’s longest-running drama will be simulcast on 10 and 10 Peach on July 28 at 7.30pm, in what’s being described as “a gripping and emotional 90-minute finale”.
Since it started in 1985, Neighbours has been an extraordinary – epic, really – stretch of serial storytelling from its writers, storyliners, producers and directors. And exhausting for its fans, many of whom are probably into their second or third marriages by now.
One can only imagine the burnouts along the way, especially with serials regarded as so much trash by so many critics and TV reviewers, though Neighbours managed to outlast nearly all of them.
The soap has always seemed to critics the epitome of the low, and was once known in America as “serialised drool”. The term soap opera itself, as the writer Robert C. Allen suggested, marked out the serial’s ironic relationship both with high art and the dirt soap is bought to eliminate. But for decades Neighbours was a pleasurable conduit for melodrama, so-called women’s issues, humour and social criticism – as well as for countless well-crafted stories that took their own sweet time to play out.
Neighbours offered ritual pleasures to countless viewers as they grew up. Fans became friends and neighbours, too, immersed in the lore of a large and complex community of characters and their fraught domestic histories.
They related to the characters as they did to their own families, exercising patience and tolerance in the face of the seemingly never-ending misfortunes that afflicted the on-screen families as they were expected to do with their own. This created some anxiety, the viewers never really knowing where all these coincidental encounters, odd happenings and accidental events would lead – with no real answers forthcoming.
Watching soap opera can take a toll on you. As the critic A. A. Gill wrote, all drama asks for something, some involvement, some cerebral graft, but only soap operas insist you hock such a huge amount of your life. He said he had a horror of lying on his deathbed and imagining he had “spent five years watching soap operas, which included 64 marriages, 84 unnatural deaths, 16 births, 500 infidelities, a billion gallons of unfinished beer and an infinite number of people saying: ‘I hate you Trevor’.”
Neighbours was created by the pioneering Reg Watson, a kind of genius figure in commercial TV, after he had changed British culture with his hugely successful Crossroads in 1964, the first five-days-a-week British television soap. Viewers loved it with up to 15 million avidly tuning in during Watson’s tenure as producer, despite the lack of approbation from critics, something that never worried Watson. “It’s a form of drama that 20 million viewers love and a few critics love to hate,” he once said. “It serves a need in the community. It gives them some form of involvement in the lives of these people and they accept the fact that it goes over the top occasionally.”
Before Neighbours he had already created successful shows The Young Doctors, Sons and Daughters and the long-running Prisoner.
With Neighbours, originally for the Seven network, he wanted a show about family life, its good things, the way it offers moral and spiritual support when the world is indifferent, with warm-hearted storylines and empathetic character arcs, celebrating the way young people and adults could work together to sort out their problems and issues. Many titles were discussed including People like Us, No Through Road and Living Together before Neighbours was selected, and the great Barry Crocker, himself one of TV’s most familiar friends, was first to sing the renowned song.
The series was centred on the residents of Ramsay Street, the Ramsays, the Robinsons and the Clarkes. Their cul-de-sac in the fictional Melbourne suburb of Erinsborough was the background to episodes each running about half an hour with commercial breaks.
According to Anthony Haywood in his obituary of Watson, who died in 2019, he “baffled his scriptwriters” by not allowing the central characters in the families “to swear, smoke, drink excessively, take drugs or commit violence”. Neighbours was to be a non-threatening kind of soap, not charged with suburban realism, but a rather prosaic version, as it turned out, of Australian life.
Initially the show was successful everywhere but Sydney and after 170 episodes it was axed but almost immediately sold to the Ten Network. Several of the original characters were replaced and new ones added, including Kylie Minogue’s Charlene, Jason Donovan’s Scott and Guy Pearce’s Mike, bringing teenagers to the core of the cast.
The rest of course is history, Neighbours quickly becoming not only a hit in this country but the first Australian program to dominate ratings in Britain, at one point reaching more than 19 million viewers daily. (It’s reported that Neighbours was sold into more than 60 countries.) When Minogue’s Charlene married Donovan’s Scott it’s said that more than 80 per cent of the available viewing audience watched the ceremony in the UK. Critic Mark Lawson tagged it as a broadcasting peculiarity: a show more successful abroad than in its mother country – “the televisual equivalent of those wines which the French make for nations with no palate”.
But TV and its audience have changed. In the past decade, we have turned our backs on the slick, faceless veneer of free-to-air TV, and on an antiquated broadcasting system obsessed with the voyeurism and schadenfreude of so-called reality.
Our increasingly choosy fingers took control of what are now called “smart” TV sets, streaming on demand hundreds of programs to an increasingly fractured audience. And the era of the long-running soap started to come to an end.
In Australia, Neighbours by now had a small if loyal audience, the program largely paid for by the UK’s Channel 5, as it was no longer commercially viable for Ten to fund it alone. Even there, it started losing viewers, down to 1.2 million. In February, Channel 5 announced it was dropping Neighbours from the network, and the show’s cancellation was confirmed the following month.
I was never all that fond of the show. I found its banality somewhat mind-numbing, though as an old actor I understood just how demanding it might be for the regular cast. It’s not really about the acting, it’s about the schedule. The actors have to stay in character under much pressure and duress to get those screen minutes in the can and not hold up the process. This kind of TV drama is a very intimate form of television, heavy on close-ups, dramatic pauses and deliberate pacing. The actor usually has to settle for the same choices, the same posture and the same delivery each time; it is about subdued and monotonous repetition, a kind of substitute naturalism, and not plumbing the depths of obsession. There isn’t time to reshoot if you make a mistake.
It’s a medium in which the script is still more important than the director’s shaping of it. Direction tends to be of the grim, slow kind, which never shows a car without following it to the horizon, or lets a character leave one room for another without a prolonged study of the opening and closing of the door. Though that may all have changed in recent years with younger directors.
So what might we expect this week as an era comes to a close and the narrative express grinds to a halt?
We’re promised appearances from Minogue and Donovan who seem to have already filmed their scenes, and a return from Guy Pearce. For a moment there were even rumours the producers planned to blow Ramsay Street up. I can’t help but think of another of the great critic Adrian Gill’s lines, “Soap operas are like endless foreplay: you begin by being titillated and excited, then too late you realise they have no intention of going the whole way.”
Neighbours Finale, Thursday, July 28, 10, 10 Peach and 10 Play, 7.30pm.
Margot Robbie in the 6000th episode
The wedding of Toadie and Dee Bliss
Kylie and Jason back for the finale
Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue wed as Scott and Charlene
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