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Love Thy Neighbour

NOWADAYS THIS is shorthand for everything that was shit about the 1970s, but in reality there was worse to be had in the likes of IT AIN’T ‘ALF HOT MUM and SOME MOTHERS DO ‘AVE ‘EM; at least this didn’t pretend it was anything other than bombastic bar-room bigotry. JACK SMETHURST and KATE WILLIAMS lived next door to RUDOLPH WALKER and NINA BADEN-SEMPER for 56 episodes. Offensive misunderstandings ensued. Biggest crime was that it just wasn’t fucking funny.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Lee James Turnock

    May 1, 2010 at 12:19 pm

    The first series wasn’t so bad, certainly better than Curry and Chips anyway.

  2. Scott McPhee

    November 1, 2014 at 1:17 am

    In Australia, Love Thy Neighbour is back on television for the first time since the 1980s. I forecast letters of complaint being written to TV guides around the nation.

    Love Thy Neighbour was a popular show here back in the 1970s, but since then, Australia has become a multiracial society.

  3. Tom Ronson

    March 30, 2022 at 2:07 am

    I watched the whole lot of this during the first Covid-19 lockdown, and the series neatly divides into three distinct eras…
    1) The first four series, though patchy, are the best for straightforward laughs. The cast seem to be enjoying themselves, and the fourth series actually has a story arc – Joan and Barbie become pregnant at the same time, which leads to them giving birth on the same day… and a memorable closing shot of Jack Smethurst (RIP) and Rudolph Walker in baby clothes, playing their own sons.
    2) Series five and six went for a more Rentaghost / Chuckle Brothers style, with broader laughs, pantomime antics, and enough credibility-stretching nonsense to suggest the game was surely up? Unfortunately, it wasn’t, which brings us on to…
    3) Series seven and eight. The pits. No idea why Thames kept it going for this long, especially as series creator Vince Powell had buggered off by then (and his partner, Harry Driver, had died at the end of the fourth series), leaving several hired hands to take up the slack. Everyone’s just going through the motions, and it came as a blessed relief when James ‘outboard motors?’ Cossins turned up in the very last episode as an even nastier bigot than Eddie and put some real effort into his performance, which convinced the regulars to up their game.
    In short, this series wasn’t as awful as some people would have you believe, but it wasn’t exactly a classic either.

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