It has been twenty-six years and 6000-odd episodes since Danny Ramsay first rode his Malvern Star along Ramsay Street marking the beginning of the soap phenomenon Neighbours.
That first episode, eager to impress, showed Danny experiencing a nightmare, with homoerotic and incestuous overtones, about his brother Shane (in Speedos) diving to his death. Sweaty Danny thrashes around in his bed to the sounds of the decadent bucks’ party next door.
Neighbours would later launch the Hollywood career of Guy Pearce and turn Kylie the talking budgie into a singing one but for me that first instalment has been a rare highlight.
I have never been a fan of soaps and their replication of ordinary domestic life. Why people would want to watch on TV exactly what was happening around them while they were watching it, is a mystery.
Teenage squabbling and the petty concerns of Harold Bishop, co-owner of the impossibly neat General Store (the place for milky grey flat whites and much of the show’s tedious gravitas), were far too insipid to hold my interest.
There have been villains, of course, to break up all that chit-chat, and the gratifying elimination (by fire, plane crash, or a blow to the head) of those characters who outwore their welcome.
The wobbly cheeked Bishop was one of those characters who after twelve years had gone well beyond his use-by date. He was disposed of under the pretext of having terminal cancer but the real reason was he had bored the audience and even the actor playing him, Ian Smith, to death.
Smith was also fed up with the late-night hooligans who would stand outside his house shouting obscenities.
The English comic actor Kenneth Williams had a similar experience:-
“About 12 o’clock (midnight) youths shouted outside the building ‘Kenny is a poof!’ and kept that up for quite a bit. To DIE would be a release from people as well as pain!”
Not long after leaving, however, Smith realised he had been typecast into permanent unemployment. He also found out that being anonymous is worse than copping public abuse.
So just when we thought a tumour had done the trick we learn Harold is to return “temporarily” next month. When asked if this will be his last appearance on the show, Smith replied: “Look, I’d never say never”.
You could try Ian, you could try.
I should be more fond of Neighbours. My brother worked in its art department for several years and there is a framed photograph in our family home of he and Kimberley Davies nibbling on the same pineapple doughnut.
He would regale us with accounts of the tantrums thrown by cast members and got Clive James to sign my copy of Unreliable Memoirs, that wonderful depiction of an Australian suburban childhood, when James made a brief appearance on the show in 1996.
For the exterior Ramsay Street scenes, shot each Thursday, the real life occupants were paid to disappear. It was on one such Thursday that James arrived, dressed for his cameo as a postman. Les Murray once remarked that he’d never seen a decent poet who looked like one. James doesn’t look like an intellectual, or even a writer, but he does look like a postman.
I’m sure he would rather have been the dunny man; the one in his memoirs who with a full pan teetering on his shoulder tripped over the bicycle young Clive had left lying in the driveway, emptying the container’s entire contents over himself.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood inspired people across the United States to drive hundreds of miles to ogle an old farmhouse on the plains of western Kansas.
Unreliable Memoirs inspired me, on a trip to Sydney many years ago, to visit a plain suburban house at No.6 Margaret Street Kogarah, James’s childhood home. I’m still not sure what I expected to find there although I do remember looking for the unfortunate dunny man’s stain in the driveway.
Seeing James standing there next to the letterbox brought to mind his essay Approximately In The Vicinity Of Barry Humphries and the reason I can no longer eat liqueur cherries:-
“Every Australian, even if he lives in Sydney’s Point Piper or Melbourne’s Toorak has at some time or other found snails in the letterbox. When you step outside on a dark and dewy night, the snails crunch under your slippered feet like liqueur chocolates“.
It would have been good to see Humphries, the most idiosyncratic peruser of Australian suburbia, on Neighbours. But he was more suited to Kath and Kim.
And it was no surprise, considering his bizarre obsession with brand names, to hear that during filming of Da Kath and Kim Code he was seen meticulously examining the contents of the kitchen cupboards; listing his discoveries in Sandy Stone’s fragile (crackling, whistling) drone: “Hoadley Violet Crumble… White Crow Tomato Sauce… Kelloggs Rice Bubbles… Snap… Crackle… Pop”.
Ramsay Street’s real name is Pin Oak Court located in the outer eastern Melbourne suburb of Vermont South near the unneighbourly intersection of Springvale Road and Burwood Highway; home to an industrial estate and the lowly Burvale Hotel.
But to the British tourists passing slowly by – their mesmerised faces pressed against the bus window – it’s an antipodean wonderland.
Like Fosters Lager (another bland Melbourne export) Neighbours is more popular in the UK than in its homeland. Each episode is shown in the morning and again in the early evening.
In Bottom, the cult BBC sitcom about two slovenly and demented flatmates, Eddie (Adrian Edmondson) asks Richie (Rik Mayall) the time. Richie turns on the telly and on hearing the Neighbours theme replies: “It could be any time”.
The soap’s popularity in the UK is due partly to the brick veneers and ghost gums on display, and the bright light their viewers think they’re looking at. I’m not sure they realise the show is based in a city with a climate almost as bad as their own. To me, living only two suburbs away, the light was grey.
In Australia when we say “suburbs”, of course, we’re referring, sneeringly, to the outer suburbs. Those remote places that sprang up after the war with the rise of the motor car; places where you don’t have to see or hear from your neighbours. A good coffee and an imported beer are a long car journey away and the ‘local’ milk bar is too far on foot.
But a happy childhood can be had anywhere and I have fond memories as a young child in a far-flung place among the blackberry bushes and FX Holden wrecks.
It was the 1960′s when Melbourne was trying hard to hang on to its Englishness. By the time Neighbours came around England had already become, to the kids watching, the dowdy aunt they hoped wouldn’t be visiting them soon.
But I was pining for my British heritage. I was drawn to repeats of the English suburban comedy series I had first watched as a child suffering from nightmares caused by seeing the film Earthquake - in Sensurround where the seat would vibrate with low-frequency sound during the quake scenes.
To avoid going to sleep I began watching Love Thy Neighbour and Bless This House. The former’s opening shot of the homes beside the enormous gasometer was accompanied by its soothing theme tune which is not unlike Barry Crocker’s more famous one.
The main character was a slob and a ranting bigot but to me, a boy eager to avoid a haunting bedtime, it was funny. The dreadful opinions of Eddie Booth were matched by the invigorating racist retorts of his West Indian neighbour Bill Reynolds. And underneath it all was an English warmth and charm (immediately lost when the show relocated to Australia).
The English working class soaps like Coronation Street and Eastenders were, like Neighbours, a reflection of their audiences’ dull lives but the comedies gleefully caricatured suburban life with their whining deadbeat occupants in cardigans drinking endless pints of beer or cups of tea.
There was Eddie Booth and his worker mates, of course, as well as the freeloading brother-in-law in On The Buses. The self-centred George Roper, torturer of his poor frisky wife Mildred, was the precursor to Homer Simpson with his bulbous head and thinning hair.
The wonderful awfulness of the mainly working class characters was complimented by the all-English smorgasbord of mismatched decor: tatty curtains, Victorian wallpaper, mod orange furniture, and Royal Albert teasets.
Man About The House was intended to be risqué because the English had a problem with a single man and two women sharing a flat but now it just seems sweet and innocent, set in an era when pubs were homely and a cookery student could afford to live in Earls Court.
The English certainly didn’t have a problem with unsubtle sexual suggestion as evidenced by the enormous success of the Carry On gang. The films, relying as they did on incessant innuendo and the comic facial features of the aforementioned Williams, and Charles Hawtrey , were not everyone’s cup of tea but the smut never spoiled the Angloid charm.
In Carry On Camping Sid Boggle, planning to whisk his unsuspecting girlfriend Esme Crowfoot off to a nudist camp, loads up the car in a street of quaint semi-detached homes. Hawtrey’s Charlie Muggins, pots and pans dangling from his backpack, clattters down country lanes while campers in shorts eat hard-boiled eggs, their breath visible in the frosty English air. In Carry On Loving the blue mist of London hovers enchantingly in the background.
It really has been an awfully long time since I watched an episode of Neighbours. I hear Toadie is still hanging around. I do wish someone from Lite n’ Easy would slip a dodgy prawn into his Fishermans Pie.
