BY CRICKEY! Strike a light! Stick a shrimp on the barbie! There’s not long left before Neighbours, the staple of the average student TV diet, switches from BBC to Five.
But is everyone’s favourite Aussie soap still worth running home for? Neighbours has always been likeably ludicrous and served as a low-demand distraction of sunny antipodean silliness, but lately things seem to be slipping down under. Dare I say: Neighbours is now dull.
Plausible plots have never been high on the agenda but even by normal standards the storylines have been getting ever in recent years. Things change at such a fast rate that only the most avid viewers could hope to make sense of the nonsensical narrative threads. Every so often another cast member is introduced and before they know it they are in a life-affirming crisis situation. The audience is expected to care; but how can they do that when this stranger has only been on the Street for a few short months?
A case in point: Paul Robinson’s amnesia. Paul Robinson is well-known and much loved as the soap’s ultimate villain; a man with no morals and a despicable selfish streak. Now viewers are expected to believe that thanks to a flash of amnesia (hasn’t Harold Bishop has been here before?) he can’t remember twenty years of evil deeds and malicious behaviour. Paul isn’t the only personality transplant; Carmella Cammeniti went from exotic Italian femme fatale to naïve nun to clingy pill-popping drip.
Old favourites like Harold and Lou are left looking disturbingly out of place and even the evergreen appeal of Susan and Dr Karl Kennedy is dimmed by the charm-free kids who seem to always surround them. It’s the ‘out with the old’ policy that the soap’s producers seem to be pushing that is making Neighbours more boring. The kitsch mood that gave the show such a considerable cult-fanbase seems to be being stripped in favour of more bland-but-beautiful young actors, ‘celebrity’ cameos and uninspiring storylines.
The recent departure of Janelle Timmins, a character with actual character, and the fact that Lou’s pub is now a trendy wine bar are further evidence. Fans will flock to Channel Five in droves when the Australian Dream switches sides, but perhaps in the long-term it’s not all bad for the BBC. If Ramsay Street’s insipid decline continues, perhaps Five has done the Beeb a favour.
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