EVERYBODY NEEDS good ones. It helps to make the perfect blend. And just a friendly wave each morning, or in our case each lunchtime and teatime, can turn them from mere NEIGHBOURS into, ahem, good friends.
The whole world knows about who used to be in this show, so instead here are ten choice historic Ramsay Street escapades:
1) DR CLIVE GIBBONS PERFORMS A TRACHEOTOMY
It was the Montague and Capulet romantic sparring betwixt Scott Robinson and “Lenny” Ramsay that, according to received wisdom, propelled Neighbours into the hearts of a nation’s teens and caused Alison Grade to miss double biology. But this unforgivable piece of Stalinist revisionism shamefully erases the unparalleled contribution of Dr Clive Gibbons. Thanks to his freewheeling attitude and Simon Parkin hair, it was Clive who the kids tuned into see, long before Scott fretted about flunking his HSC. He called his car Bertha. He raised the ire of Max Ramsay with his zany gorillagram agency (although practically everything somehow aggravated Max, whose contract specified he had to storm around in a vest at least once in every episode). He organised a pancake contest at the coffee shop. And he joined forces with Max’s son Shane to form RAGGS – the Ramsay And Gibbons Gardening Service. They didn’t just fling these scripts together, you know. But Clive’s finest 25 minutes arrived when Lucy got stung by a wasp and couldn’t breathe. Armed with just a ballpoint pen, Clive performed an emergency tracheotomy on the Robinson kitchen table to save her life. Don’t hold it against him.
2) LUCY ROBINSON FALLS DOWN A DRAIN
The original Kylie Flinker issue Lucy clearly endured numerous scrapes in the early days, not least when she plunged down a sewer in pursuit of her missing terrier Basil. Robinson Jnr remained trapped in this chasm for days, the outside world oblivious to her adenoidal pleas for help. Eventually freed, Lucy nevertheless temporarily lost her sight as a result of her subterranean ordeal. However, once it returned, Lucy duplicitously pretended to be still blind, as a ruse to distract father Jim from a blossoming relationship with one of his many “lady friends”. Lucy’s comeuppance came when the unfortunate Basil later drowned at the beach, despite Mike’s best efforts to rescue him. Lucy was later packed off on some kind of finishing school grand tour of Europe while the character was being recast, an event that provided plentiful ammunition for the likes of Tina Baker and Alison Graham to make endless remarks about “but why hasn’t anyone noticed her face has changed?”
3) DAPHNE CLARKE BREATHES HER LAST
First spied cavorting in her scanties as a stripper at a Ramsay Street “bucks party”, Daphne Lawrence soon became a reformed character and flitted between the duelling lotharios, Des and Shane. Ensnaring the affable bank manager with her patented recipe for lemon chicken, she agreed to marry Des, only for their nuptials to be halted as a bank robber hijacked her car. Fortunately, the couple did belatedly make it down the aisle, only for Des to strain his back carrying her over the threshold. She ran the coffee shop at Lassiter’s, became a mother figure to brooding leather-jacketed pin-up Mike and even befriended Des’s scatterbrained mother and all-time greatest Neighbours character Eileen Clarke. But the tao of Grundy ensures that no character can be afforded prolonged happiness before the melodramatic incidental music kicks in sooner or later. Left in a coma after a car crash, Daphne opened her eyes one final time to utter a final “I love you, Clarkey” to Des, before suffering a cardiac arrest and dying. The nation wept over its Crispy Pancakes.
4) JANE HARRIS TAKES OFF HER GLASSES
One of the great legends of celluloid states that there are only seven stories, told and retold through the generations. Nobody’s quite sure what the other six are, but we do know that one of them involves a plain, bespectacled, bookish female removing her spectacles to be transformed, swan-like, into a ravishing beauty. Right from the moment Plain Jane Superbrain moved into Ramsay Street to lodge with interfering nan Mrs Mangel, we could see that at some point this plain, bespectacled, bookish figure would, at some point, be removing her spectacles and, well, you get the picture. So it transpired that, with her heart set on a tryst with “spunk” Mike at the annual Erinsborough High shindig, the neighbourhood “dag” underwent a makeover at the deft hands of Daphne and Helen and, yes, took off her glasses. From that moment there was no stopping Jane, as the blonde temptress embarked on a career with the Daniels Corporation and even had a brief fling with Scott, the minx. The quiet ones are always the worst.
5) HENRY RAMSAY FALLS IN THE SWIMMING POOL
Every Neighbours obsessive knows that the show began on Channel Seven in Australia before being axed, only to be audaciously revived by the Ten network a few months later, prompting a whole new set of opening titles. The original sequence had been a primitive reel of footage featuring Max looking over his fence and Paul Robinson dressed as a baby. The new era brought a complete overhaul, each episode now heralded by a whimsical tableau involving a Robinson family cricket match that ended in Paul hitting the ball through Madge’s window. Now, as characters came and went, they re-edited the titles to keep pace with the cast, even Bouncer getting in on the act eventually. But the best was yet to come when the cricket was replaced by a poolside Ramsay Street barbecue. Scott and Charlene now hurled a beach ball at shaggy loafer and resident comic foil Henry Ramsay, who promptly fell backwards into the pool. The combination of Andy Crane’s teatime introductions (“Now it’s time to meet those antipodean… Neeeeeigh-bours!”) and this iconic image came to somehow represent imperial phase Neighbours. It even survived the departures of Minogue and Donovan, the beach ball lobbing duties now falling to Bronwyn and the annoying Sharon. But shamefully, when Craig McLachlan jumped ship for Summer Bay, they kept the falling in the pool bit, but now with Matt Robinson. Things, it was clear, would never be the same again.
6) PAUL ROBINSON MARRIES GAIL TO IMPRESS MR UDAGAWA
The hub of the Erinsborough business community was the shadowy Daniels Corporation, a blue-chip international conglomerate boasting financial interests in Hong Kong, New York and a small-scale chauffeur operation, operating from a cramped office in a suburb of Melbourne. Led by the thrusting, unscrupulous, double-dealing tycoon Paul Robinson, it had frequent dealings with mysterious Japanese businessman Mr Udagawa. They used to go on about him a lot. It seemed that, with a crucial deal hanging in the balance, Mr Udagawa prized family values and favoured doing business with married men. Enter Gail Lewis, secretary and old flame of Paul, who married him in a shock ceremony that amazed their unsuspecting friends and family, not least Gail’s dad Rob Lewis, Erinsborough’s leading jalopy-racing mechanic. Impressed by Paul and Gail’s charade, Mr Udagawa signed on the dotted line and inevitably Paul and Gail’s marriage of convenience became the real thing. Perhaps the couple’s finest moment came during the cast’s ensemble performance at the 1988 ROYAL VARIETY SHOW, where Paul greeted Gail’s entrance with the immortal line, “I didn’t hear a Gail warning!” Oh, and Fiona Corke’s wardrobe was by Kamizole. That’s very important, that.
7) THE FAMILIES FEUD OVER THE STREET’S NAME
The eternal jousting between the ancestral houses of Robinson and Ramsay fuelled plenty of storylines in the early years of Neighbours, the infuriatingly righteous Jim Robinson clashing frequently with the laidback Max Ramsay and his clan. The feud ignited once more when Scott discovered that it wasn’t Erinsborough pioneer “Black” Jack Ramsay after whom the street should have been named, but Jim’s grandfather, who had been cheated out of the honour in a card game. Todd and Katie escalated the hostilities by changing the street sign to Robinson Street. Scott and Henry resolved to settle the dispute in another game of cards, Henry upholding the Ramsay family’s honour by winning, thanks mainly to Charlene fiddling the cards.
8) MRS MANGEL MURDERS LEN
Mrs Mangel’s husband Len was one of the great unseen characters of soap, until Neighbours ruined everything and he turned up during the nineties. But on one occasion, a bizarre chain of events led to the Erinsborough super snoop mistakenly believing that he had died, resulting in her attempting to commune with him via a rosebush, as a rumour swept Ramsay Street that she had killed him. Mrs Mangel had fallen off a ladder and lost her memory, forgetting that she had been divorced from Len. Jane tried to avoid upsetting her nan and told her he had gone away on business, but things got out of hand when Mrs Mangel noticed all of Len’s clothes had gone and insisted he must have died. Meanwhile, Bouncer had unearthed a bone at Lassiters, prompting the residents to suspect her of murder. Mrs Mangel then said she had to see Len’s grave, so Jane continued to play along and told her that he’d been cremated and his ashes scattered under the rosebush in the garden. Inevitably, Mrs Mangel started chatting to the plant, to the bemusement of her suspicious neighbours.
9) BOUNCER HAS A DREAM
Neighbours has a rich tradition of dream sequences. The first was the surreal Christmas fantasy that Clive envisaged after he was accidentally knocked unconscious while refereeing a boxing match between Mike and Shane, in which Charlene became some kind of clockwork doll, Paul was an evil moustache-twirling baddie and Mike and Shane became Tweedledum and Tweedledee, while Clive himself was Santa Claus. But nothing before or since could quite match the genius of the episode when the screen gradually dissolved into Bouncer’s dream, in which Ramsay Street’s super intelligent mascot hound imagined himself in a bow-tie marrying Rosie, the dog owned by Dorothy Burke’s alcoholic father, before the happy couple were depicted in a kennel surrounded by lots of little Bouncers.
10) CHRIS LOWE ASKS FOR DIRECTIONS
The tradition of pop star cameos in soaps is not a glorious one. Robbie Williams in EASTENDERS. Noddy Holder in CORONATION STREET. It’s a story littered with embarrassment and discomfort for everyone involved. The omens then were not auspicious when Sir Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys agreed to appear in Neighbours in 1995. Essaying the natural brand of acting he’d exhibited in It Couldn’t Happen Here, Chris screeched into Ramsay Street in a white Porsche convertible, perhaps in homage to the BBC video for I Should Be So Lucky he’d enthusiastically endorsed years before. “I’m a little lost,” he informed Helen Daniels and Marlene Kratz, “I’m looking for a recording studio which is round here somewhere.” Exactly why Neil hadn’t told him where it was isn’t clear, but Marlene soon put him right, not before Helen had perceptively deduced he was from England and in a band. “Yeah, the Pet Shop Boys.” “I’m sure you’re destined for big things one of these days,” replied Marlene. Chris drove off in search of the studio, as Annalise scampered into the street to discover the identity of their star visitor. “Some band from England, er, the Pet People,” replied Marlene, obeying the law of soap which decrees that anyone over the age of about 30 must be totally confused by pop culture to “humorous” effect.
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annoyingmouse
August 30, 2009 at 9:41 pm
As the only person who still watches Neighbours, I’ve recently been hoping that they’d reintroduce your #7 following the recent introduction of new Ramsay children (Grandchildren of Max and the other great unseen character Anne Daniels Robinson.) At the moment they may not know the fine dynasty from which they came but when they do it’ll be about time for a wee game of cards with Paul.
As far as best moments go, I always like to bring up the Ramsay Street olympics episode. All the Neighbours coming together to do what they do best, compete with each other. Perfect blend really.
Glenn Aylett
August 31, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Err you’re not alone, Mouse, I know one person that still watches it. However, the low ratings suggest that it’s best days are behind it, same as Home and Away sometimes struggles to get into Channel 5’s top ten( the televisual ratings equivalent of being mid table in the Blue Square Premiership, not much of an achievement).
Adrian
September 1, 2009 at 10:31 am
Isn’t Five buying a BBC soap normally a sign that said soap has ‘jumped the shark’? I can’t believe Neighbours has had a genuine mass audience since about 1991.
Re #4, I was once told there are only really 2 storyline templates: ‘a journey’, and ‘a stranger comes to town’.
gerard wiley
September 1, 2009 at 11:59 am
Further to #9), let’s not forget Harold’s “Earl of Doon” dream. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVvA7pweyc It’s not great- what was Reg Grundy thinking?
David Pascoe
September 1, 2009 at 12:04 pm
This really was compulsive viewing in the late 80s. So many memories, most of which have cropped up here: Helen being kidnapped by some deranged religous maniac, mooted trips to the Bungle-Bungles, Madge and Harold getting randy and being interrupted by the local vicar, Harold’s son, David, informing Mike that he would fight him for the honour of being Jane’s boyfriend, The demon child, Bradley being passed off as Des’s son, Daphne giving birth outdoors without taking her knickers off (as mentioned on Points of View), Joe Mangel inheriting the Max Ramsay “bear with a sore head” attitude, Scott nearly cheating on Charlene with Poppy(?), Poppy teaching Bronwyn to belly dance (a major moment in most boys’ pubescent experiences at the time) , Jim and Des attempting to outdo one another in a cross country run interrupted by Jim facing down some trouble makers who were vandalising a phone box – they got revenge by nearly running him down in a car. Sharon trying to buy a house at auction to prevent Hillary getting it, while dressed as the world’s least convincing pensioner, Mrs Mangel’s portrait, The Bronwyn-Henry-Mike love triangle, Angry Anderson etc….
I remember a break time at school where my mates and I attempted to recreate the opening titles. The piece of action that most provoked debate was who would do the dive-bomb at the end of it.
The names of the crew were always exotic too: Joe Battaglia, Lindy Lane, Sue Birjak and my personal favourite, Paul Pozzobon (the 2nd most famous videotape editor in the world after our own Chris Wadsworth).
Glenn Aylett
September 1, 2009 at 11:17 pm
I was at university when Neighbours mania started in the winter of 1987/88. The two television rooms were packed for the 5.35 repeat as a lot of students had missed the earlier edition due to lectures and those with televisions in their rooms often had people asking to come in and watch. I being part of the small resistance to the show typically would eat at 5.40 in the refectory when, apart from avoiding the inevitable knock at the door, knew this was its quietest time. Fridays were easier as a lot of students had gone home at the weekend and I could sit listening to the PM programme smoking my pipe in peace.
Chris Hughes
September 1, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Now that’s a superb list, David. Spot on about the “bear with sore head” – of course, they briefly replaced Max with some sort of relation (his brother?), Tom Ramsay.
One thing I’d love to see again is the ‘meet the Neighbours’ segment they did on BBC1 on the Saturday night before the show moved to 5.35pm, which was basically Madge introducing all the characters in character, in the time-honoured ‘I’ve a special do coming up and my schoolboy son isn’t much use’ tradition.
Adrian
September 2, 2009 at 10:39 am
Wasn’t Michael Grade’s daughter instrumental in having Neighbours repeated at 1735 every day?
Matthew Rudd
September 2, 2009 at 1:20 pm
The token coloured character who was good at hurdles, Tom Ramsay proposing to an ex who was then promptly killed by Shane in a car crash, Alex the barman being a convicted thief yet convincing Paul he was totally upstanding, Beverley Robinson being shit at cooking, Des going out with Penny after Daphne’s death but being unable to take it further, Mike and Scott sending a demo to a record company who expressed interest but were assumed to be a wind-up, Henry wandering naked around Bronwyn’s garden when Aunt Edie unexpectedly turns up, Nick the graffiti artist moving into the Robinson house without any intervention from fostering authorities etc, Madge’s wily old dad constantly calling her Maggie, Clive telling Max his massive heart attack was really severe indigestion, two Willis children buggering off a week before the other two turned up, Todd being more concerned about his bike than Melissa when she crashes it…
Matthew Rudd
September 2, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I’ve just remembered – the death of Myra “Eileen Clarke” de Groot was announced moments before Jason “pre-pop career” Donovan appeared on some daytime talk show on his first visit to the UK, and he said on air he taught her everything he knew (ie, how to say “rack off!” very loudly). He then answered viewers’ questions about what the HSC was and whether Stefan Dennis was a cunt in real life.
Eileen Clarke once poisoned the cafe’s entire clientele with her home made salmon mousse, and tried to get Des and Daphne to call their son Winston Kingsley Clarke.
I could do this for hours. Someone stop me.
Applemask
September 2, 2009 at 8:06 pm
My mother watched it for the first few years when I was a tiny kid. My abiding memory of those early days, apart from Harold Bishop’s mere presence, is of Mark Little diving, distraught, into the mud after his wife gets shot in the head by a duck hunter.
David Pascoe
September 2, 2009 at 8:06 pm
No Matt, I remember one of the staple questions asked of Kylie or Jason whenever they turned up on “Going Live” was what Mrs Mangel was like in real life.
And to follow on from your other post….Lucy’s brain haemorrage, the battle of wills between Paul and Scott when Jim left Paul in charge of the house while he was away, the three ages of Lucy (from annoying adolescent to dumpy teenager to hot sexpot), Harold and Mrs Mangel both working as agony aunts for the local paper….
And to finish, David Baddiel’s unforgettable observation: “Those two (Alessi) twins they’ve got in it are supposed to provide a glamour element, but one of them’s got a bit of a wonky mouth. And I’d never be able to get that out of my mind, even if I was doing it with the nicer one of the two.”
Matthew Rudd
September 5, 2009 at 10:35 am
The Alessi twins were the beginning of the end, really.
Andrew Barton
July 8, 2020 at 10:25 pm
Matthew Rudd, not long after that, the other Alessi family members turned up.
The parents – the dad, Benito, was played by George Spartels, who played Blackfinger in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, alongside Tina Turner and Mel Gibson, and the mother, Cathy, was played by the only original cast member of Prisoner Cell Block H to last the entire run, Elspeth Ballantyne.
In fact ITV regions were still airing Prisoner when Elspeth was in Neighbours, and both Neighbours and Prisoner taped in the same studios.
Not to mention Cathy Alessi was Meg Morris transplanted to Ramsay Street.
Glenn A
September 25, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Matthew
It peaked with 18 million viewers in 1989 and then began a slow decline in the ratings as the novelty wore off and people realised it was a badly made, cheap import and I noticed it stopped being a conversation point around 1996 when ratings had more than halved from its eighties peak. However, it does have a tiny but devoted audience on Five.
1989
September 25, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Not in my name.
Glenn A
October 10, 2009 at 11:15 am
The peak years were 1988-90 when audience figures averaged 17 million. Then the decline started in 1991 as the novelty wore off as people preferred the comings and goings in Albert Square and Weatherfield, or maybe viewers saw Neighbours for what it was a cheap daytime soap on a par with offerings on ITV in the afternoon. I did read an article in What’s on TV in 1996 that charted its ratings decline, from a peak of 18 million in 1988 to 7 million in 1996, the writer citing overkill with episodes, poor acting, weak and stupid plots and the fact British soaps were better. Actually the overkill with episodes has also spilled over into British soaps: Corrie, for example, is shown five times a week and is repeated ad infinitum on ITV2. and ratings for this have halved in the last 10 years.
Scott McPhee
February 23, 2015 at 12:22 am
The popularity of Neighbours in the UK was often a discussion point in the TV press here.
For one thing, kids across the UK were reported to be skipping school in order to watch Neighbours. This was why it got repeated each day.
Richard16378
February 23, 2015 at 1:11 pm
Originally Neighbours was show at 13:30 each afternoon, with a repeat of the previous day’s episode at about 10:30.
Once it became popular with school age children the 5:35 slot was cleared for the 2nd showing & the morning repeats ended.
David
June 13, 2016 at 9:39 pm
I watch neighbours and home and away every lunch time still amazing shows Home and away is much better of to always has been come on tv cream where’s the entry
Glenn Aylett
August 14, 2016 at 11:25 am
David, you must be one of a very small band now, particularly for Home and Away, which the soap columns have ignored since it left ITV and most people have forgotten about. It’s odd to think that both shows were as big as the British soaps in the late eighties and Neighbours in particular seemed to appeal to everyone from children to the elderly. However, the bubble burst in the mid nineties as viewers realised Neighbours and Home and Away were really just cheap schedule filler in the same way A Country Practice was and the British soaps were better acted and better made( though not much).
David
September 2, 2016 at 1:59 pm
But home and away is properly acted unlike say the awful holly oaks and it does well for Chanel 5
Glenn A
April 2, 2017 at 1:50 pm
Apparently Channel 5 are considering cancelling Neighbours, which will probably see it cancelled in Australia as ratings are so low and the show only survives because it makes money as an export. I know ratings are about a tenth of what they were in its heyday, but wouldn’t Channel 5 be better off cancelling Big Brother, whose ratings are even lower and no one except Daily Star journalists are bothered about.
Scott McPhee
March 8, 2021 at 5:58 am
Australian magazines like TV Week and TV Hits were full of stories about how popular Neighbours was in Britain. Apparently Neighbours was nicknamed ‘Cobber Nation Street’.
Another reason why Neighbours is still on in Australia is because of broadcast regulations. Australian TV networks have local content quotas.
Glenn Aylett
February 20, 2022 at 4:29 pm
Channel 5 are cancelling Neighbours, citing the cost and low ratings as a reason, and I doubt anyone is willing to spend £ 21 million on a show with only a million viewers. Amazing to think the wedding episode had 21 million viewers and regular episodes had 18 million viewers in 1988. While I never liked it, Neighbours was the only soap that appealed to all parts of the country and people as diverse as students and pensioners and my brother considered it part of his growing up.
Richardpd
February 20, 2022 at 10:08 pm
I remember at it’s peak it was often said that the UK audience for Neighbours was higher than the entire Australian population at the time.
I can remember it was a much watch among my peer group from 1988 to about 1992, when I started to lose interest as I was busy studying for my GCSEs.
It seemed to part of a bigger interest in Australian culture for most of the 1980s, which stretched into the 1990s. The Simpsons managed to point this out when they did the episode where The Simpsons visit Australia.