‘Don’t take my daily Neighbours fix away!’
As a schoolgirl, Judy Silkoff fell in love with an Australian soap… how will she cope if it’s axed?
IF I could pinpoint the precise moment that my now-husband, then fiancé, discovered that his wife-tobe was a complete geek, this would be it. Picture the scene — several months before our wedding, in an attempt to make a bit of extra cash, we decide to sell our respective record collections. Off we trot to a trendy music shop in Notting Hill. The guy behind the counter rifles through my husband’s very respectable pile of U2 and The Clash LPs, when suddenly he starts to snigger. He pulls out a lone 7” from the pile, hands it back to us and says “Sorry, I can’t sell this one.” The single in question? Madge and Harold’s Christmas Song, released in 1989 at the peak of Aussie soap Neighbours’ fame, and purchased, apparently, by very few people besides me.
I first discovered Neighbours when I was in bed with a cold for a few days sometime in 1987. I was 13. Utterly hooked from the start, I briefly considered never returning to school at all so as not to miss an episode — fortunately, Neighbours was shown at 1.30pm and then repeated at 5.35pm daily, so an indefinite truancy was not necessary.
Such was my passion that I began writing regular letters to the cast in my spare time. I quickly discovered that sending missives to the big guns — Kylie, Jason et al — would yield little more than a fan card with a photocopied autograph on the side. But if I focused my attentions on the older, less popular cast members, I would often get long, chatty responses in return — I still remember the thrill of arriving home from school to find an envelope postmarked Australia waiting for me on the doormat.
My first proper letter came from the late Ann Haddy, who played the matriarch of the Robinson family. I had poured out my heart to her about the difficulties of watching Neighbours on a Friday afternoon in the winter when Shabbat came in early — I had, I explained, got my dad to agree to record it for me on our prototype Betamax machine on a weekly basis. “Thank goodness for video players!” she replied. I’m quite sure that there weren’t many other teenagers with large, glossy photographs of men and women in their 60s and 70s on their bedroom walls, but I pinned them up with pride.
Of course, I was far from alone with my Neighbours obsession in the late 80s and early 90s. Nearly 20 million people in the UK alone tuned in to watch Scott and Charlene (played by Jason Donovan and Kyle Minogue) tie the knot on screen in November 1988. Several Hasmonean schoolgirls (it goes without saying that I was one of them) tried to sneak onto the stage at the back of the hall during lunchbreak, to catch the episode on the dusty old TV set that lived behind the curtains in the wings. I can’t remember if we got caught, or just couldn’t get the TV to pick
I watched the episode when Kerry Mangel got shot by duck poachers when I should have been Pesach cleaning
Therapist Sam Feldman set up camp in a Succah on the banks of Lassiters Lake
up BBC1, but either way, our gratification was delayed. There was definitely a rousing rendition of siman tov umazal tov warbled on the school bus on the way home though, as our excitement reached fever pitch in the run up to 5.35pm.
Some months later, when the young actress who played the first Lucy Robinson left the show (in true soap style, she was eventually played by three different people over the years), the rumours at
Hasmo that she had quit to focus on preparations for her batmitzvah reached fever pitch. A quick google reveals that the actress actually is Jewish so perhaps it was true. Jewish fans eventually got their Harry Potter equivalent of Anthony Goldstein in a cringeworthy storyline a few years back, in the shape of the therapist Sam Feldman, who came to Erinsborough to set up camp in a Succah on the banks of Lassiters Lake for unexplained reasons.
Between 1987 and 1992 I did not miss a single episode of Neighbours — quite a feat in the age before catch up TV and streaming. During my gap year, I kept up with the goings on in Ramsay Street thanks to a combination of plot summaries from the Radio Times and occasional “key” episodes recorded by my parents —I clearly remember watching the one where Kerry Mangel got shot by duck poachers when I came home for Pesach and should have been helping my mum with the cleaning.
Neighbours has now been going for over 37 years and the news earlier this week that it faces the axe after being dropped by Channel 5, hit me hard. Because the thing about Neighbours is that although its storylines are preposterous (the unfortunate residents of Ramsay Street have survived far too many tornadoes, kidnappings, plane crashes and serial killers for one small cul de sac) it has represented sunshine, escapism and a very real stability to millions of people over the years. It still pulls in well over a million viewers daily in the UK on a channel, frankly, that no-one tunes into for much of anything else. In the early months after my first child was born, when I thought I was losing my mind to sleeplessness and anxiety, that 25 minutes each day was what kept me going.
And in recent years, when I was experiencing some of the most difficult times of my life, it was only my daily dose of Neighbours that helped me wind down each day, get some sleep, and ultimately stay grounded.
Over the past week, numerous former cast members and fans from around the world have spoken out to try to #saveNeighbours and more than 35,000 people have signed a petition urging Channel 5 to reconsider their decision. The hope is that another TV channel will decide to pick up the show and we’ll get to enjoy at least another few years of Neighbours joy. But whatever happens, Ramsay Street and its imaginary residents will always occupy a very special place in my heart. As the famous theme song says, it really does help to make a better day.