Ricky

Istill remember where I was on the day of Scott and Charlene’s wedding: swimming at the beach at Pukerua Bay near Wellington, where I grew up. It wasn’t the actual day of the wedding of course. While the Australian broadcast of that famous episode of Neighbours was in July 1987, episodes turned up in New Zealand a couple of years later. So I was probably nine or 10 years old when I insisted the family pack up the beach towels early so I could get home to watch the wedding of the century.

After 37 years and more than 8800 episodes, it appears the long-running soap is being washed down the drain for good, cancelled – in the traditional, rather than modern sense – by Channel 5 in the UK (who pay a lot of the costs). Oh well. I haven’t watched the wretched show in decades, but for a year or so in my pre-adolescence it was an unedifying obsession. Soaps are addictive, and the dramas and romances of Ramsay Street were like heroin for me. My family mocked me for watching the show (and rightly, too) but I didn’t care. I modelled my look on Jason Donovan, took photos of him to the hairdresser and said: “Make it look like this.” More embarrassingly, I loved his music. It must have been an excruciating period for my family, and I’d like to take this moment to offer my wholehearted apology for everything I put them through.

As in the UK, Neighbours was huge in New Zealand. The fictional suburb of Erinsborough was an enchanted land, depicting Australia as a warm, sun-kissed, happy (and entirely white) place. Well, mostly happy. The constant dramas, fights and unlikely love interests that kept the show moving seemed like an exhausting way to live, but it gave my friends and I something to talk about at lunchtime.

Some school holidays I would visit my dad in Australia and watch Neighbours at his house. The episodes were light years ahead. Returning to school in New Zealand, my friends would mob me as I foretold the future like an oracle. I was the keeper of information that was somehow powerful, maybe even dangerous.

Incredibly, in 1990 our primary school was visited by two of the stars themselves: Stefan Dennis and Fiona Corke (or Paul and Gail). They were most definitely B-list stars as far as the Neighbours cast goes, but I’m sure I would have lost my shit if Kylie and Jason had walked into our classroom.

The actors were in town to open the new mall. That the town couldn’t find New Zealand actors with the same celebrity pull is maybe some indication of how big Neighbours was over there. Or maybe they were just cheaper than getting All Blacks?

My obsession didn’t last, thankfully. New Zealand developed its own terrible soap opera, Shortland Street, of which I became a devotee for a short and equally cringeworthy time.

But Neighbours wasn’t to slip out of my life so easily. When I moved to Melbourne in my early twenties, I had a job delivering hire equipment to the Neighbours set. I wandered around the almost cartoon construction of Lassiters Hotel, saw the facade of the mechanic’s garage where Charlene used to work. And of course I visited Pin Oak Court in Vermont South, known to millions of people around the world as Ramsay Street.

I’m not sure how I feel about Neighbours ending, probably because I didn’t realise it was still on. I feel like I should tune in again, to see if I can get hooked one last time. I did love seeing that lively neighbourhood every evening, a place where stuff was always happening. Maybe I should invite the neighbours round to watch the final episode? I would, except I don’t know their names.

Ricky is a writer and musician who wrote this column Especially for You.