When I was about 7 or 8, our next-door neighbours moved to Australia. They were a mother and her grown-up son: she was widowed and he’d been offered an excellent new job in Brisbane. The older lady was like a substitute grandmother figure to me, and I was sad when they moved away. She and I used to write to one another every 4-6 weeks, and it used to be so exciting to see those sky blue aerogram letters appearing through the letterbox. Once or twice, she sent some photos of her house- I remember marvelling that they had orange trees in the garden. It made me curious about Australia and, when I was a teenager, when Neighbours began, I just simply had to watch it.
I watched Neighbours for roughly its first year on air, but when my Mum, who matched Mrs Mangel for strictness, noticed me using some Australian English slang (including erroneous preposition structures!), she barred me from watching it, just as, a few years earlier, she’d banned Grange Hill!
I started to watch Neighbours again, as soon as I got to university. There was a striking weekday ritual for so many students: have lunch in the College dining hall, scuttle off to your room to get a mug of coffee, then watch Neighbours in a big group in the TV room and discuss it in some detail afterwards. I can remember watching it even through the hell-on-earth of Finals, at lunchtime or teatime depending on my exam schedule. When things got really bad, I sometimes even watched it twice a day! I remember friends in College even leaving notes on the notepads we all had on our doors, making a TV date to watch Neighbours together- one friend often calling it Nachbarn, while I often used the cryptic Neighbourhood Watch, 1.35? in my own scribbled notes. Some friends in a nearby student house even had a life-sized poster of Jason Donovan in their living room- it assumed almost iconic status, with late night conversations often including him: ‘What do you think, Scott?’ or sometimes ‘What Would Jason Do?’ My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I’m pretty sure that one of the various food trucks in Oxford was called Jason Doner Van… from the sublime to the rather indigestible…
Once I moved into my first flat, as my teaching career began, and my Dad bought me a small portable TV as a moving-in present, I was able to glory in watching Neighbours in complete comfort- coffee to hand. I incorporated it into my teaching: I would ask my students to watch an episode of the soap opera of their choice- preferably Neighbours- for homework, and then we’d discuss the structure, settings, characters and tropes, and create our own soap (outline plan and one short episode) over the next few lessons. I have especially fond memories of a series of GCSE English Literature lessons: we were studying Far From The Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy. I’d explained the episodic structure of the novel, which had initially been serialised in a literary magazine, and had said the cliffhanger structure was best paralleled today in the soaps. I got the Librarian to video a couple of episodes of Neighbours for me; I wheeled the English Department TV-on-stilts into my classroom and we watched, and discussed, and then the students rewrote their favourite climactic chapter of the novel in the style of a Neighbours episode. I’ve never forgotten hearing Farmer Boldwood called a ‘bogan’ and Sergeant Troy being called a ‘drongo’ by Gabriel Oak. I think one group even replaced a more authentically Hardyesque social event with throwing some snags on a barbie…
Of course, I found teachers to admire on Neighbours: Dorothy Burke was legendary, all those years ago; then there was the wonderful Susan Kennedy. I was delighted when the Plain Jane Superbrain, to whom I’d related as a teenager, returned to Erinsborough High School as a teacher. Let’s not mention Libby Kennedy having a 'thing' with a student, the whole Finn Kelly saga, or the final year mystery of whatever happened to Curtis Perkins. I can only imagine teaching at Erinsborough High School: a place that seems to have only about five classrooms, where the lessons last about three minutes, where the uniforms couldn’t be much further removed from those of Northern Ireland, and where dramas are constant- affairs, bullying (among teachers as well as pupils!), explosions, fires, poisoning through the air vents and oh yes, that teacher who turned out to be a psychopath. Almost on a parallel was Erinsborough Hospital, where Dr Karl seemed to be at once GP, consultant, and surgeon- to say nothing of his Right Prescription music career. There were always other doctors- there was always at least one nurse with a gripping backstory- but Erinsborough Hospital was Dr Karl Kennedy.
You can’t think of Karl and Susan without mentioning Karl’s affair with Izzy and the years when he and Susan were divorced, and she married someone else, adding the Kinski family to the ever-widening range of young people who stayed in the Kennedy house’s seemingly limitless bedrooms. The relationships, the love and the families- the enmity and hatred too, at times- were what made Neighbours so gripping. Right from the years of Jane and Mike, Daphne and Des, Madge and Lou then Madge and Harold, Lou and Cheryl, Paul and… oh so many: Neighbours has always told a good love story. It featured Australia’s first gay marriage after legalisation: David and Aaron. It featured the gloriously improbable Lassiter’s wedding expo, just a few years ago, which included five weddings. It featured Mark Brennan arresting his fiancée, Paige Smith, on their wedding day- what a relief that they did eventually get married, handcuff-free, a few years later. There were the various marriages of Jarrod (Toadie) Rebechhi- at least two of which ended in tragedy- and the latest of which is the centrepiece of the final episode. Poor Toadie: his first wife died (and then turned up alive but with a malevolent identical twin), his second wife... eventually died, and now he's getting married again and it's finishing off the whole show. And there’s Paul: I’ve lost count of his wives, but he must be a rival to Henry VIII, though thankfully without any decapitation. I’m trying to avoid spoilers ahead of watching the finale, but I get the feeling that he’ll end up back together with Terese, and I think that’s how it should be. Maybe they can run a hotel together in New York… But I can’t mention Neighbours love stories without the original and best: Scott and Charlene. Jason and Kylie. My teenage heart skipped several beats, watching that famous episode in 1987 (I’d petitioned my Mum to let me watch it just that once, if I watched my language afterwards) and I still think that ‘Especially For You’ is such a touching love song. Don’t judge me, but I may have had something in my eye when Kylie and Jason performed it together on stage in Hyde Park, London, several years ago. I always dreamed of a similarly beautiful wedding for Jane and Mike, but somehow, it hasn’t quite worked out. Yet. Maybe they’ll still have their own ‘now we’re back together’ moment.
I could name so many more couples- so many more heart-softening, focus-softening moments, over all the years. Donna and Ringo. Bridget and Declan. Chloe and Elly. Chloe and Nicolette. Chloe and Pierce. Pierce and Dipi. Jane and Clive. Sheila and Clive. Skye and Lana. Mal and Catherine. Libby and Drew. Billy and Anne. Beth and Brad. Brad and Lauren. Brad and Terese. Lance and Amy. Amy and both Levi and Ned at the same time. I could go on all day. But it would be wrong not to mention this year’s glorious and moving storyline of Mackenzie and Hendrix: Mackenzie, the street’s first transgender character, finds her happy ever after with Hendrix, only to have it ripped away, a day or two after their wedding, when he dies, following a lung transplant required by his pulmonary fibrosis. Mackenzie was an inspirational character, beautifully played by a wonderful actress who not only had an input into Mackenzie’s story arc, but even initially wrote to Neighbours to suggest the idea of having a trans character! Neighbours has become more and more inclusive, over the years, and, I think, more representative of Australian society. It’s had Pride episodes and offered alternatives to the conventional Australia Day, introducing some increase of diversity of identity in its cast. I’ve loved watching that aspect of the show’s own story arc: it evolved to better represent the audience it wanted to entertain.
And entertainment was just what it offered. In often cold, rainy and windswept Northern Ireland, it felt wonderful to welcome 25 minutes of Australian sunshine into my home each day. At home, it was cold and raining; in Erinsborough, families were sitting around their pools. At home, we roll our eyes when it rains yet again; in Erinsborough, the fact that it’s raining is actually a storyline. The show offered escapism from the dreary and the everyday. It offered hope. It offered smiles, and sunshine for days. And whatever problems there were, always seemed to get sorted out by the end of the week. There were tragedies, of course- deaths of iconic characters such as Helen, Madge, Sonya, Hendrix, Josh, Doug- so many more. But somehow those left behind recovered, offering hope that losing a loved one isn’t always the end of everything for you, too. There was an escapism too in the portrayal of family life: family units which weren’t perfect, but were strong enough to welcome newcomers gladly, and who had pets who felt like characters in their own right (who could forget Bouncer, Bossy, Casserole, Clancy, Dahl, Audrey…?). Sibling loyalty inspired me, as an only child, to admire the Robinson, Ramsay, Mitchell, Carpenter, Bishop, Scully, Rebecchi, Willis, Canning, Kapoor, Cammeniti, Alessi, Kennedy, Napier, Fitzgerald, Stark, Turner, Brennan, Kinski, Mangel families- and so many others that I could continue the list all day. I envied and admired the kind of family bonds to which I could mostly only aspire. And the friendship bonds were better still: aspirational role modelling for a socially awkward, book-loving nerd like me.
At the heart of Neighbours is Harold Bishop, who dispenses grandfatherly, benign advice and chronicles the history of the street. He’s returned for the final few weeks, and I think that his return is the most fitting element of those final episodes. Harold is the touchstone of the show: the forgiving, wise, understanding and broad-minded elder statesman who’s endured endless family tragedies and even survived being lost at sea. He sets aside his own, straight-laced and conventional beliefs in order to understand and embrace the people around him: to be a good listener, a good neighbour, a good friend. And that’s the magic of Neighbours, right there, and that’s why I’m going to miss it so much. As that simple, 25-minute episode soap opera, about which so many people have been snobbish and disapproving over the 37 years of its lifetime, Neighbours has offered much more than it’s been given credit for. It’s escapism from a world where anxiety, increasingly, is pushed to dominate. It’s finding reasonable solutions to small dramas in a world of meltdown, global crisis and almost universal disarray. It’s friendship in an era when people are often almost too busy to say hello. It’s the ‘little understanding’ between people, which we all need. Just like Harold, it’s been resilient and generous and good.
Neighbours was the mainstay of my tv viewing for most of my life. It was just a daytime soap opera, but what it did, it did well. It ended up winning my heart and offering me the completion of the story which started in those sky blue aerograms, received all those years ago from the former neighbour whom I thought of as family: a view into life on the other side of the world. It really did create ‘the perfect blend.’
Thank you to everyone who wrote, directed, filmed, acted in, worked backstage on, and produced Neighbours for 37 years. May your work never be underestimated: Neighbours really did become iconic. I’m going to miss it so much, because, with a little imagination, the characters you invite onto your tv screen each day, really can end up feeling like old friends.
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