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In France, Neighbours, dubbed as Les voisins, was launched by Antenne 2 in August 1989. Screened twice daily at 11:30 and 5:45, it secured ratings of 24 per cent of the market, in fact Antenne 2’s average for that year. However, for reasons which Antenne 2 is unwilling to disclose, the evening screening was shifted after only ten editions to 6:30. This put it up against stronger competition from others of the then five channels, and its rating dropped to just below 16 percent of market share. A further scheduling change briefly preceded its demise after a total of only seven months’ screening. The 185 episodes purchased only just included the debut of Kylie Minogue at episode 169. According to its French agent, Rolande Cousin, Antenne 2 bought Neighbours exclusively on the basis of its colossal British success (Cousin 1992), a phenomenon mentioned by all six articles heralding Neighbours’s arrival on French screens; its Australian success was referred to by four articles (Baron 1989; Brugière 1989; Lepetit 1989; Pélégrin 1989; Thomann 1989; and A.W. 1989). The Minogue factor also appears significant. Her singing career peaked in 1988–1989, and among the six articles she rated one cover story (Télé 7 jours), an exclusive interview and a cover story with Jason Donovan (in Télé poche), and two other references (Brugière 1989; and Thomann 1989). Cousin identifies five other potential appeals in the program for French viewers: its sun, its “acceptable exoticism,” its lack of blacks (a sensitive topic in France, as witness the racist political career of Jean-Marie Le Pen), its lack of other disturbing social material, and its everyday issues (Cousin 1992). For all this potential appeal, Antenne 2 still delayed transmitting by three months, pushing its opening into August, when most of France goes on holiday, and opted instead for the American Top Models (Baron 1989: 25). This lack of confidence in its purchase instances what Cousin called a “Pavlovian reflex” against non-US serial fiction (Cousin 1992), and points to broader issues than the fame of two of the program’s principals. The French commentaries differ noticeably from the American in their assessment of the ten textual features of Neighbours singled out above. One feature – women as doers – is not mentioned at all. All other features are mentioned at least once. The two most often referred to are the everyday, and the domestic and suburban. But Neighbours’s non-exceptionality, its everyday realism, had a different status for French than for American reviewers. For most of the latter it offered a desirable antidote to the spectacular confections of home-grown soaps. For French reviewers it was treated in one of two ways. While some derogated the program’s perceived banality (Brugière 1989; Pélégrin 1989), others, whether high(er) brow or plugging the Minogue factor, remained curiously non-committal about its everyday realism. There was a similarly curious abstention from either positive or negative evaluation of the program. Commentators’ apparent unease with this centrally distinguishing feature of Neighbours, its everyday realism, suggests that it represented something of a conundrum in the mediascape, in particular the field of television serial fiction screened in France, and may well echo the unease evidently felt by its buyer. The reasons require some clarification.
large audience” (Goldstein 1983: 26); and “Here was an Australian with a wry sense of humor and gruff charm [this was post-Crocodile Dundee], equally alluring to men and women” (Brown 1987: 33). In other words, Robert Scorpio is conveniently – if not tokenistically – played by an Australian. The limits of tolerance of the non-American for the world of network soap are instanced in General Hospital’s casting criteria for an (American) actor to play Robert Scorpio’s long-lost brother, Malcolm. The actor, John J. York, is quoted in the ABC house journal, Episodes, saying: “They didn’t want a strong dialect [sic] . . . . They didn’t want a Paul Hogan type, because that accent is too strong. They were saying ‘just a hint’” (Kump 1991: 29). The Australian is more “exotic” than Peter Pinne may have wished: too exotic. Just the accent, though, if muted, can have an appealing otherness. The second index of the acceptability of the non-American, again Australian, has yet to be tested on the American market place. Called Paradise Beach, it is not a ready-made Australian soap seeking overseas sales, but a co-production between the Australian-based Village Roadshow, Australia’s Channel 9, and the American New World Entertainment, which has secured pre-sales to the CBS network at 7:30 p.m. week-nights (beginning June 14, 1993) and Britain’s Sky Channel as well as in nine other territories worldwide (Gill 1993; Chester 1993; Shohet 1993). As an Australian-based soap directed primarily at a teen audience, it recalls Neighbours and Home and Away. As a youth drama serial set in a beach tourism center, it recalls Baywatch and summer holiday editions of Beverly Hills 90210. And like Melrose Place and the Australian E Street, each episode includes what one report breathily calls “an MTV moment . . . a two-minute montage of sleek shots of beautiful bodies and plenty of sun, surf and sand set to the latest pop music hit” (Shohet 1993: 5). Set in and around Surfers Paradise on Queensland’s Gold Coast, it recalls, for Australian viewers, the 1983 film, Coolangatta Gold, which celebrates Australian beach culture (see Crofts 1990). It is noteworthy indeed that most of the performers are recuited from a model agency, not an actor’s agency. An American actor, Matt Lattanzi, plays an American photographer, and Australian actor, Tiffany Lamb, sports an American accent. There is a concern, understandable in a program sold overseas, to make Australian colloquialisms comprehensible (Gill 1993: 2). In terms of physical geography, the locations are Australian; in terms of cultural geography, Queensland’s Gold Coast is substantially indistinguishable from much of Florida and parts of California and Hawaii. The era of the co-production re-poses the question of the degree of acceptability of non-American material in the American market-place by begging the question of the distinguishability of the two. But given the unequal cultural exchange long obtaining between Australia and the US, with shows like Mission: Impossible being filmed in Australia to take advantage of cheap labor; given the tight money of Paradise Beach’s shooting schedule of 2.5 hours of soap per week; and given New World’s Head’s, James McNamara, ignorance of Australian soaps (“Paradise Beach is the first soap to be skewed at a teen audience” (quoted by Gill 1993: 2)), one might wonder which party is defining the
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
Within this field of serial fiction, American product leads, French ranks second, and British third. This triangular force field explains Neighbours’s anomalous position in the French market. American serial fiction is, in the form of Dallas especially, very well known in France. Such American imports are treated with a culturally characteristic ambivalence: admiration for the narrative drive and polish of American product counterposed by distaste for its spectacularization and superficiality. As seen with reference to the American market, a serial fiction market dominated by Dallas and Santa Barbara offers a less than congenial soil for a Neighbours to take root. French serial fiction production offers few more televisual referents to make Neighbours accessible/familiar/popular on French screens. Crucial here is a long history of French distaste for continuous television serial fiction: “you might say that French serial fiction quickly runs out of steam” (Bianchi 1990: 92). One French forte in this field is the series, the sequence of narratively discrete stories engaging the same characters (more or less) across (usually) weekly transmissions for some months. The best known examples are Les cinq dernières minutes, dating from 1958, Commissaire Moulin, and Maigret. Besides the series, the other forte of French television serial production is the mini-series. And the reasons underpinning the dominance of these two modes, especially the mini-series, will explain both the limited field of the French soapscape and the difficulties for a Neighbours. First, a cultural snobbery attaches to the mini-series, indicated by one critic’s sneering at the genre as representing “a serial of interminable insipidity, the television equivalent of the photo-novel or romance, destined above all to housewives [sic]” (Oppenheim 1990: 43; the sexism of this account may further point to certain assumptions about soaps among French television executives). High(er) cultural literature, in other words, commonly supplies the mini-series’ source material and cultural cachet. Second, then, French television scriptwriters have long traditions of the skills of literary compression and visualization of the psychological, skills which would be seen as wasted on scripting soaps. A further occupational/industrial factor working against the imminent success of soaps focuses on the reluctance of directors of mini-series and longer series to cede the dominant creative role to scriptwriters, the major creative force in continuous serials. And finally, actors in a country with vibrant film and theater industries are loath to commit themselves to the lengths of term required by soaps (Bianchi 1990: 96). These factors militate against the continuous fictional serial which involves a large number of characters engaged by multiple, interweaving plot strands of indeterminate duration and with limited resolution at the end of any given episode (usually 30 minutes long, and often stripped across three–five days weekly). Thus there were, at the time of Neighbours’s launch on French television, only four home-grown French soaps, of which the longest-running, Voisin, voisine, launched by La Cinq in September 1988, ran to only 360 episodes; contrast the British Coronation Street which started in 1960 and is still going! French soaps, then, “were far from proven successes” (A.W. 1989: 7). “The French have been uneasy about soaps” (Pélégrin
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)
television, constrained at the time from such a move by Independent Broadcasting Association regulations (Willock 1992). Coronation Street and Crossroads had been stripped across three evenings, and EastEnders across two. Stripping across five days/nights had long been common in Australian television. This was first done for Number 96 (1972–1977) by Ian Holmes, later the Grundy Organisation’s president. So successful was the stripping of Neighbours across five days that the same principle has since been adopted in the UK for Home and Away. David Liddiment, Head of Entertainment at Granada, which produces Coronation Street and Families, both Neighbours competitors, went so far as to say: “In future, no-one will contemplate running a daytime serial in the UK except as a strip. It’s inevitable that you build success more quickly when you strip a soap” (Liddiment 1989: 20). Second, on scheduling, Loughton made the schedules more cost-effective by repeating each edition daily (Patterson 1992). “The time-slots chosen by the BBC were 1.30 pm, with a repeat the following morning at 9.05. It attracted a typical audience of housewives, shift workers, the unemployed, people home sick” (Oram 1988: 48). After the unexpected success of Neighbours’ first year, it was decided to reschedule the next morning repeat for the same evening, at 5:35 p.m. This was to cater for working mothers, but most of all for schoolchildren who had previously played truant to watch the series. The most famous story attributes the schedule change to the representations made to no less than Michael Grade himself by his daughter. Rescheduled in January 1988, Neighbours nearly doubled its audience to 16.25 million within six weeks. By Christmas 1988, audiences topped 20 million. Five-day stripping and repeat screenings, then, offered a regularity and familiarity significant in capturing such huge audiences, representing one-third of the UK population. The third precondition was the UK “mediascape.” This included a very broad familiarity with Australian soaps. When Neighbours was launched on October 27, 1986, The Sullivans, A Country Practice, Young Doctors, Flying Doctors, Richmond Hills, Prisoner: Cell Block H, and others had broadened the paths already beaten by many Australian films released in the UK. Michael Collins, executive in charge of production at JNP, producers of A Country Practice, maintains that the serial, screened in the UK since 1983, “was a forerunner in getting audiences used to Australian drama” (Collins 1991). And one factor contributing to Neighbours’s topping the ratings late in 1988 would have been the demise of Crossroads, the British soap created by Reg Watson, in spring 1988 after a twenty-four-year run. Fourth, tabloids, television, and un(der)employment. Under Thatcher and Murdoch, the tabloid press in Britain expanded in the mid-1980s, producing what one television executive described, albeit parodically, as “one page of news, one page of sex, and twenty-two pages of television and sport” (Patterson 1992). So when Neighbours was stripped over five days, “the papers really noticed it” (Willock 1992). Together with Woman, Woman’s Day, Jackie, Scoop, and other teen magazines, the tabloids ran myriad stories on Kylie, Jason, Peter O’Brien, and so on, as is indicated by the three sample headlines from three successive days: