Wouldn’t it be nice to get on with me neighbours

NEIGHBOUrS, everybody needs good NAY-BErS! The Aussie soap opera became popular in the late Eighties and early Nineties peddling an idealised version of a world where everybody left their backdoor open and knew each other’s business.

The show’s success in Britain was put down to the fact it harked back to a gentler age of surburban homogeneity and harmony. Whether that blissful state ever really existed is debatable.

Certainly some of the most toxic feuds have always involved those who live in the closest proximity. Barely a day goes by without some dispute or another between neighbours ending up in court. The past week has been no exception.

Some of these cases make the territorial disputes between Israel and the Palestinians look like a teddy bears’ picnic.

Take 63-year-old Terry Simou, who emerged from his house to be arrested by armed police. He was driven to the nearest nick, in Hastings, East Sussex, and locked in a cell for seven hours before being interviewed and, eventually, released ten minutes later.

Mr Simou was accused of making death threats against his neighbours, Michael and Hazel Salliss. His ‘crime’ was to be overheard singing the Jimi Hendrix song Hey Joe, which contains the line: ‘I’m going down to shoot my old lady.’

The acupuncturist and part-time musician was rehearsing for an upcoming performance at a local pub. Quite why the Old Bill thought this warranted an armed response team and a seven-hour incarceration is a matter for the judges of this year’s Mind How You Go Awards.

Come to think of it, though, this isn’t the only occasion a pop song has led to someone getting their collar felt.

regular readers may remember the singer on the Isle of Wight who was accused of racial harassment against the Chinese because he was performing Kung Fu Fighting in a beach bar.

JUST as well Mr Simou wasn’t practising Delilah: ‘I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more.’ Plod would have taken it as a confession. You are not obliged to sing anything, but anything you do sing will be taken down . . .

This wasn’t the first time Mr Simou had suffered the wrath of Mr and Mrs Salliss, whom he accuses of persistently bullying him over a boundary dispute. He’s not the only one, either. Another neighbour, Christie Greenfield, said the couple have repeatedly threatened her and encroached on her land.

Together with Mr Simou, she took them to court and a judge ruled they had unlawfully harassed both neighbours. Last week, the Sallisses’ appeal was dismissed, and they are facing a final legal bill likely to top £500,000.

I’m always amazed at the amount people spend in pursuit of petty grievances against their neighbours. They’re prepared to bankrupt themselves over a few inches of driveway or an overgrown hedge.

Much of the time these incidents revolve around Jack And The Beanstalk-style leylandii blocking out the light, a squabble about parking places, or a fence sited a fraction over the property line.

Sometimes they end with one party in hospital and the other getting a criminal record.

A court in Bournemouth heard last week that 81-year-old pensioner Peter Lane hit his neighbour Garry Prince with a rounders bat in a row over a concrete pillar separating the entrance to their driveways in Poole, Dorset.

Lane’s defence was that Prince had made a derogatory remark about his wife. But there was a history of animosity. An earlier dispute about fence posts went to civil court, which ordered Prince, 57, to pay £6,500 in damages.

Matters didn’t cease there, though, and last week Lane was given a 12-month conditional discharge after pleading guilty to threatening behaviour.

The judge expressed astonishment that two grown men could behave so appallingly. As always, the devil is in the detail.

I love the fact that Peter Lane’s weapon of choice was a ‘rounders bat’. How very Middle England.

In the inner cities, it would have been a baseball bat. And presumably in posher parts of the country, such as the Cotswolds, a hickory croquet mallet or, possibly, a horsewhip.

Over the past 40-odd years I’ve lived in eight different houses, so I understand how tensions between neighbours can arise. Our first marital home was a turn-of-thecentury two-up, two-down, next door to an elderly couple who were both hard of hearing.

As Les Dawson once remarked: ‘I wouldn’t say the walls were thin, but at dinner time we could dip our bread in their gravy.’ They had their TV turned up so loud every night that we could set our clock by the theme to Coronation Street. In the end, we learned to live with it.

We did have one nightmare neighbour who pushed a piano up against the party wall of our terrace houses and insisted on playing loudly at all hours, refusing pleas to shift it to the other side of the room. To stay sane, we had to install an acoustically insulated false wall to deaden the sound.

We’ve also had some smashing neighbours, too, but I sympathise with those who haven’t been so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky — as one famous former member of the Neighbours cast might have put it.

Incidentally, it was reported last week that Neighbours, which latterly has been running on Channel 5, may disappear from British screens for good.

Unless it brings its storylines up to date, to include people attacking each other with rounders bats and being arrested by SWAT teams for singing old rock songs, it’s probably for the best.