I have an almost irrationally fond affection for Neighbours, but then you have to remember that I’m English and therefore grew up with British soaps which usually involved a group of people knitted out of itchy grey wool muttering curses under 100% cloud cover. There’d be an argument about a scotch egg. A close-up of a puddle. Cue credits. No wonder Neighbours became some sort of exotic religion.
Three decades and five Harold Bishop resurrections later and the antics of those in Erinsborough show little sign of abating. Having not tuned into the show for at least 12 years, I was worried I’d be confronted by total strangers, rather than those familiar faces who were there for me in my chilly student days when my diet consisted of cheesy beans on toast and twice-daily Neighbours analysis.
But no, like some sort of soap opera Rivendell, Ramsay Street is home to an eternal and apparently unageing race. Lou, Paul, Harold, Toadfish. They were all there. Even Madge Obi-Wan Bishop reappeared for the anniversary week, offering advice to her beloved in ghost form. It was all quite comforting. Good neighbours had become ... mildly better acquaintances.
The longevity of its cast members is really quite remarkable, given that Erinsborough is obviously cursed. By my calculations, Neighbours has already wiped out several Australias’ worth of people as the Ramsay Street residents fall victim to every fatal accident and illness on the block.
Lou must go to sleep every night wondering how it is that, once again, he’s evaded the writers’ unappeasable bloodlust. No wonder ghosts are coming back to tell Harold to get the hell out of there. If you move into Ramsay Street, you’re either going to die or suffer amnesia so powerful so you can’t remember how long you’ve been there. Sometimes both.
Of course, Neighbours is more than a macabre, purgatorial cul-de-sac. To guide us through some of the show’s more memorable moments was Channel Ten’s well put-together restrospective. If you’re not or never have been a devotee there are better ways to spend your time, but for those of us who grew up with the show, there are some great insights from cast members past and present.
Guy Pearce suggests that Neighbours was one of our first brushes with reality TV, and I get his point. Now that we regularly tune in to watch people doing nothing more than sit on their sofas watching television, there’s a clearer appeal in perving on an entire neighbourhood that regularly collapses, explodes, marries, cheats and procreates its own future cast. Yes, that right: Scott and Charlene’s son is one of the current Neighbours line-up.
Somehow, a show I used to watch semi-ironically has, simply by staying true to itself, become better than the human centipede that makes up the rest of TV.
As for the 30th anniversary week of episodes, they were typical Erinsborough fare. Paul Robinson’s still being devious, Lou cantankerous. There’s a wedding that’s not going to plan (when have they ever in this blighted neighbourhood?). Harold’s gone from being one of the dead to conversing with them, and Nina has returned to deal with her issues – how to write a song in 30 seconds by opening up the Garage Band app and mumbling lyrics into a napkin. No wait, that’s Delta Goodrem.
I feel confident Neighbours will still be going in another 30 years. I’ll be checking back in with it when I’m an old man, by which time a still-youthful Toadfish will have died three times over and everyone in the street will have swapped organs with each other after a variety of life-saving transplants. The ghost cast will now outnumber the flesh cast. The preposterous storylines will roll on. And, ironically, I’ll feel a little safer in the real world knowing it’s still there.
