Neighbours in Our Minds

When I was a kid, the Swedish TV network TV3 used to air episodes of the Australian soap Neighbours. I think they did it from the start of the network (in early 1988) until 1994 when they decided that the show was too expensive. Like a drug addict I had to get used to the idea that there was a world outside of Neighbours… but I also learned not to fall for similar soaps, such as The Bold and the Beautiful and Emmerdale. It’s fascinating to study the phenomenon of the half-hour long soaps; in the U.S. they are usually about the superrich, in Britain about the working class, and in Australia about the middle class. When Neighbours started in Australia in 1985, the show portrayed the lives of three suburban families; the Robinsons, the Ramsays and the Clarkes.

Current fans of Neighbours will hardly recognize these names, because they are mostly distant memories. When I stopped watching the show in 1994, Jim Robinson (Alan Dale) had just died from a heart attack and you could sense that the show was about to go through changes. Nine years had passed since its inception and it was bound to adapt to modern audiences. I have a feeling that I will barely recognize the show if I were to watch it today. The YouTube clip above shows several deaths over the past 20 years that user VoyagerFan has put together.

The above clip shows Ian Smith praising his former co-stars. It is somewhat comforting to remember Neighbours as it was in the beginning and middle of the 90s. All the actors are vivid in my memory; Alan Dale (who has since gone on to a relatively successful Hollywood career where he usually plays middle-aged men of power), Anne Haddy (who died in 1999, two years after she left the show), Anne Charleston (who played Madge Ramsay for 11 years), Stefan Dennis and Ian Smith (who remain on the show, even after leaving it for several years and then returning). Then we have all the famous actors who once appeared on the show and then went on to greater things, such as Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan (the Minogue-Donovan romance is the original key to success for Neighbours) and Natalie Imbruglia. Still, being an original fan I have to say that watching Dennis back on the show after several years worth of trying to do something different in London doesn’t mean that I think less of him; his performance as Paul Robinson has given depth to this character who could simply be described as a villain but deserves more than that.

It should also be mentioned that Heath Ledger and Naomi Watts appeared on Home and Away, not Neighbours. You know, just to clarify things.

I also grew up in a suburban neighborhood just like the one on Neighbours, which is probably one reason why I was hooked on the show. Everybody loved the dramatic highlights of Dallas and other shows, and so did I, but there was something very attractive about tuning in every day to watch a new episode of Neighbours and just enjoy the quiet, not terribly upsetting, storylines of the day.

This last clip is fascinating because Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and David Walliams make cameo appearances in one episode. I guess they got a nice trip to Australia out of it.