Neighbours is an institution: don’t write it off yet

Actress Margot Robbie prepares to film the 6000th episode of Neighbours in 2010.

So it looks as if Neighbours might finally bite the dust. That great Australian soap focused on the people of Ramsay Street, an attractive but recognisable suburban bit of Melbourne, looks as if it’s lost its UK backer, Channel 5, and the Ten Network here is unwilling to carry the show by itself. Does this matter and does it represent a loss or is it just a good-riddance-to-bad-rubbish situation?

It does matter because Neighbours provided upper-level entertainment to generations of Australians and has become synonymous with the dreams of a lot of people growing up and settling down. It’s perfectly understandable that Rob Mills, one-time cast member, should call on Scott Morrison to help. Whether the Prime Minister should or not, it might be a better look than botched religious discrimination bills, accusations his political opponents are soft on China or blatantly opportunistic schemes to rush the deportation of non-citizens who have committed petty crimes. You could think the sunnier side of Morrison might have found the dreams and tranquilities of Neighbours up his alley: wedding bells for Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, the pathos of poor old Harold lost at sea with only his glasses as evidence that he had lived.

Neighbours is an Australian institution and it’s worth emphasising now that we look like losing it how significant it was. This was, after all, not only the show that gave us those leisurely and intimate surveys of Kylie and Jason, of Delta Goodrem and Natalie Bassingthwaighte, it introduced to the world the Russell Crowes and Guy Pearces. It’s where we got our first glimpse of Crowe – fleetingly and growlingly but still – as well as Pearce. Nothing could be less characteristic of their careers but it gave them a place to start that was coherent and dramatic and utterly professional. It also produced Margot Robbie, Natalie Imbruglia, Brooke Satchwell and Craig McLachlan.

Guy Pearce, Annie Jones, Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue in a scene from Neighbours in 1987. Picture: Network Ten

One of the things about Neighbours not widely enough acknowledged is how well done it was. As a sometime TV critic I used to watch a whole week of Neighbours every so often, at a stretch, and I was consistently struck by the quality of the scripts and acting. The kind of interplay you would get between Alan Fletcher as Dr Karl Kennedy and Jackie Woodburne as his headmistress wife, Susan, was done with an easy brilliance that drew absolutely no attention to itself but was steady as the day was long and truer to the spirit of what you might want in a production of a Chekhov play than a lot of classy state theatre company attempts to do the classics.

There is a real sense in which Neighbours is a classic. I once had lunch with Ian McKellen when he was playing King Lear in Melbourne. What were the rest of the very distinguished cast doing? Off on a bus tour of Ramsay Street because they wanted to visit the site of the most comprehensive image of Australia they knew.

Of course, an intricately ongoing and involving TV soap is not art, but it is craft and without a high level of craft – of precisely the kind Neighbours has exemplified since its inception in 1985 – no art is going to be possible anyway.

And the particular sort of self-confidence that comes with being able to act in a popular and engrossing bit of storytelling in which the lives of intimately known people cross and intertwine is the best grounding an actor can have. Jesse Spencer, to take just one example, went from Neighbours to filming Swimming Up Stream with Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis. And Neighbours was also the necessary preparation for his stint in House. When we look back on some of the mountains of Australian TV – Tangle with Ben Mendelsohn in the first series, Tony Ayres’s version of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, the television revisiting of The Devil’s Playground – the example of the success of shows such as Neighbours and Home And Away stands behind them.

In the wake of Covid, Australian acting and drama are at risk. Recently on the streamers there have been some bright lights. The Newsreader with Anna Torv and Sam Reid and a cast including Marg Downey was a winner that recapitulated the 1980s. Love Me with a cast led by Hugo Weaving and Bojana Novakovic took the premises of a soap plotline and transfigured it into a thing of wonder. If you look in your mind’s eye for whatever bit of Australian television tickled your fancy, whether you thrilled to Sigrid Thornton in SeaChange or loved the down and dirtiness of Underbelly with Kat Stewart as Roberta Williams, spare a thought for the mighty reign of Neighbours, which in its unassuming way helped to make it all possible.

For better or worse, we have a middle-of-the-road culture. When it comes to a longstanding cultural venture such as Neighbours, you have to think of the sheer professionalism of people such as Kate Kendall – sometime Stingers star and one of the best Beatrices I’ve ever seen in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing – first starring in, then directing and finally producing Neighbours, day after day, week after week, and bringing to the screen a show that is literate, engaging and believable. Let’s try to keep it alive and if we can’t let’s honour its demise.

Peter Craven is a Melbourne journalist and critic.