media products overseas. Third, the dissolution of apparent differences achieved in Neighbours’s UK success is likewise partly dependent upon conjunctural coincidences of the 1980s, as well as on cross-cultural familiarities bred of histories linked by colonization. Not only can it be claimed that “every next person in Britain has a relative in Australia” (Fowler 1991). It is also arguable that Neighbours’s UK popularity arises because it can reduce almost all cultural specificities to projections of relief from a grey, cramped, class-divided, Thatcherized society (one might remember here that such cultural specificities as Neighbours might have had are already severely etiolated by the program’s anodyne, easily generalizable, and depoliticized ethos). Indeed, there is a remarkable congruence between Neighbours’s introverted, mutually supportive community and Thatcherite anti-welfare doctrines of self-help. Neighbours’s Australia represents a distant home, I suggest, for residents of the “scepter’d isle” long since bereft of Empire apart from Hong Kong and the Falkland Islands, and simultaneously having acute difficulties connecting with Europe. Ruth Brown notes in British responses to Neighbours a twilight gasp of colonial condescension toward a remnant of Commonwealth: “Neighbours seeks to persuade us that middle-class neighbourliness is alive and well and living in Australia, Britannia’s infant arising . . . to glad her parent’s heart by displaying her glories shining more brightly in another sphere” (Brown 1989). Given Britain’s uncertain self-image in the world it once bestrode, an “invasion” of cultural products from a former convict colony can bring out a certain snobbery. In the case of Nancy Banks-Smith’s remarks on Home and Away, cultural snobbery perhaps overlays class snobbery: “One is aware of Home and Away as one is aware of chewing-gum on the sole of one’s shoe” (Banks-Smith 1990). Such views recall the comment of the Australian poet, Les Murray: “Much of the hostility to Australia, and it amounts to that, shown by English people above a certain class line can be traced to the fact that we are, to a large extent, the poor who got away” (Murray 1978: 69). That both major British political parties could take up Neighbours as political football testifies not just to the category of youth as ongoing focus of moral panics in a country deeply prone to such motions, but also to the continuing ubiquity of Neighbours. If Crocodile Dundee supplied Australian tourists with cab-driver conversation around much of the world for at least a year, Neighbours has sustained its impact much longer in Britain. Acknowledged by government, royal family, and Church of England, it has achieved journalistic benchmark status for things Australian. USA: lost in Dallasty Neighbours is probably the most successful international soap opera that’s ever been. (Cristal 1992)