Max Ramsay is the cardboard cutout Ozzie clod who warns his son, Shane, against dating Daphne because she works as a stag-night stripper. His main fear seems to be the effect the newly arrived Daphne might have on the price of his property. (Smurthwaite 1986) As Grahame Griffin notes, “the closing credit sequence . . . is a series of static shots of suburban houses singled out for display in a manner reminiscent of real estate advertisements” (Griffin 1991: 175). Small business abounds in Neighbours: a bar, a boutique, an engineering company, with no corporate sector and no public servants or bureaucrats apart from a headmistress. 10 Writing skills must be acknowledged. It is very hard to make the mundane interesting, and indeed to score multiple short plot lines across a small number of characters (twelve to fifteen), as is appropriate to representing the local, the everyday, the suburban. As Moira Petty remarks, Neighbours is successful because “it’s very simple. The characters are two dimensional and the plots come thick and fast. The storylines don’t last long, so if you don’t like one, another will come along in a few days” (quoted by Harris 1988). These ten textual reasons doubtless contribute, differentially across different export markets, to Neighbours’s success in many countries of the world. Its wholesome neighborliness, its cosy everyday ethos would appear to be eminently exportable. However, lest it be imagined that Neighbours has universal popularity or even comprehensibility, there remain some 150 countries to which it has not been exported, and many in which its notions of kinship systems, gender relations, and cultural spaces would appear most odd. The non-universality of western kinship relations, for example, is clearly evidenced in Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes’s comparison of Israeli and Arab readings of Dallas (Katz and Leibes 1986). And, indeed, there are two familiar territories to be considered later – the USA and France – in which it has been screened and failed. Significantly, the countries screening Neighbours are mostly anglophone and well familiar with British, if not also with Australian soaps. But why does Neighbours appeal so forcibly in the UK? In the UK market, I suggest, five institutional and cultural preconditions enabled Neighbours’s phenomenal success. Some of these considerations are, of course, the sine qua non of Neighbours even being seen on UK television. The first precondition was its price, reportedly A$54,000 per show for two screenings; with EastEnders costing A$80,000 per episode, Neighbours was well worth a gamble (Kingsley 1989: 241). Scheduling, too, was vital to Neighbours’s success. This has two dimensions. Neighbours was the first program on UK television ever to be stripped over five weekdays (Patterson 1992). BBC Daytime Television, taking off under Roger Loughton in 1986, while Michael Grade was Programme Controller, was so bold in this as to incur the chagrin of commercial