Love Thy Neighbours
by Dominic Pettman

Does anyone know if there are any houses for sale in Ramsay Street? Because if there are, I think I've reached the point where I'd at least consider moving into the diegetic world of a sanitized soap community. Sick of junkies collapsing on the bonnet of my car, and the relentless grind of inner-city living, some infantile part of my psyche welcomes the notion of having a barbecue around a suburban pool with a group of people who think "alienation" is nothing more than a new release video. Granted, that compared to Aaron Spelling's soap factory Neighbours looks like an early Ken Loach movie, however it still manages to swerve away from all harsh geo-specific realities.

While Toady and his mates are a little less-than-airbrushed, and the lighting is that kind of queasy tan-yellow associated with tight-budgets, the Neighbours formula must be pressing some of the right buttons to be on our screens for more than a decade. Not only has it been the incubator of some of our most successful exports (or should that be ex-pats?), it also seems to funnel directly into the wider phenomenon of cross-cultural media pollination.

The fact that our 6:30 special is staple viewing for a whole generation of pasty-Brits has been an article of both pride and bemusement for a long time now, at least on my part. I must admit that the thought of Jill and Jack in East Anglia, glued to the set and distractedly doodling over their homework while Karl tries to bury the hatchet with Susan, the smell of mercilessly boiled turnips assaulting their sniffly nostrils, is one of the more tangible images that makes me proud to be Australian.

No matter how "crap" twenty-something English lads and lasses think our soaps are, there is definitely a strong element of penal-envy: the nagging resentment toward their ancestors for not being caught nicking a loaf and bread and being transported to sunnier climes. You can witness this phenomenon every morning along the beaches of Byron Bay or Bondi, as bleached Poms carry their surfboards back to the combie, stretching their vowels and generally trying to live out some cathode-inspired Australian Dream. Along with Home and Away, Neighbours is a fantasy factory for the colonially-challenged, creating a generation severely prone to bouts of "reverse peripheral mimesis." And this resentment is not reserved exclusively for their 18th century relatives, but also for the golden boys and girls who they regard with a covetous contempt for whipping them at sport and generally not suffering the stigma of actually being English.

But here lies the rub. To compensate for every Kimberley Davies and Kylie Minogue that sends the laddish press into a jealous lather, there is the sinister secret-weapon of an Alzheimer-inflicted empire: monarchism. Like a rusting nuclear weapon in the back of a frost-bitten silo in the Ukraine, the monarchy is trundled out as an all-purpose foil to the upstart presumptions of a renegade territory. No matter that they have the relevance and vitality of Madame Tussaud's off-cuts, Buckingham Palace still casts a long shadow over the Pacific.

During the Ashes series of 1998/99, the English supporters known as The Barmy Army drove most Australian spectators spare by singing "God Save Your Gracious Queen." Even those with reservations about a republic saw these flabby oafs - looking for all the world like a clan of frozen turkeys, defrosted and reanimated via warm, flat Fosters - as harbingers of ill-will toward the sovereign seedlings of our State. No matter that we flogged the bastards 4-1, this obnoxious folk-song was a big black blowie in our ointment.

This is why Sylvania Waters was such a hit back in Blighty. Not because they become automatically addicted to any Aussie soap we decide to churn out, "real" or not, but because it exposed the grotesque underbelly of those perky, well-nourished neighbours. It confirmed what they always suspected went on in Madge's and Harold's basement. Raw Australians. Hysterical Australians. Uncouth Australians, who allow a camera to squeeze their everyday lives like a sebum-filled pimple. This was a world of constipated tomato-sauce bottles and overflowing ash-trays and claustrophobia and despair. In short, it was a world they could relate to. (At this point I should just admit to the shaky foundation of my "us and theming," - always a dodgy demarcation dispute at the best of times - since I myself have dual-citizenship, and no qualms about using my English passport to enjoy any future fruits of the E.U.)

Unlike the jewel in Grundy's crown - which make the English crave an Australian life-style like porn before switching off in regretful disgust - Sylvania Waters allowed them to laugh in horror at the descendents of all those wretched bread-bandits. And yet this waterlogged slice of reality-TV acted like a Trojan horse, smuggling pro-Australia propaganda through the telly in a more subliminal fashion than Neighbours. "If I can relate to this existence in some distant-yet-disturbing sense," reasoned the English viewer, "then how come I am the ones stuck in Milton Keynes?" Stripped of soap-opera artifice, there is not even enough space between viewer and viewed to grow a bunch of sour grapes. "What bliss," they conclude, "to be miserable in Australia!"

In contrast, the French favour our more gritty production, Heartbreak High, with it's more demographically-correct reflection of a multicultural society. Ramsay Street seems to be the counter-factual wish-fulfillment vision of the White Australia immigration policy, whereas Alex Dimitriades and his inner-city chums at least acknowledge an alternative to anglo-adolescent angst. Breakers - channel 10's home-brand version of Neighbours - is the first soap, at least to my knowledge, to feature an aboriginal character: Reuben (played by Heath Bergerson). It remains to be seen whether this will intrigue or alienate the English punters who dream of a utopian Southern Land without the grime, the crime, and the dead-weight of leather-bound prejudices.

* * * * * *

The most obvious thing to say about Neighbours, however - and this can't really be reiterated enough - is it's fundamental falsity. Who the hell has good neighbours? Pyromaniacs, schizophrenics, Mafia middlemen, wife-beaters, hounds of Hades, scientologists, even convicted murders, I've had the lot living over the fence (and don't think for a second that I'm exaggerating). While this may come as a shock to our English cousins, the girl next door never looks anything like Natalie Imbruglia.

While I'm sure that the healthy, sculpted adolescents of Ramsay Street have done more for the Australian tourist industry than several species of marsupial, there is no denying the fact that it has no analogue in reality. When I first moved into a grey-cladding bunker in Brunswick, I was not greeted with scones and smiles, but by a disturbed child holding a cat in a headlock and insisting that it say "fuck." His behaviour deteriorated over the years from this relatively normal plateau to hurling most of his mother's vegetable patch at our window and setting fire to our mail.

Not that the other side was any more "neighbourly." This abode was pure concrete, and fortified by broken glass and razor-wire in order to protect god knows what. They had painted the words "we do not want bible people" three times directly onto the wall of their house in three different colours. While I admit part of Brooke Satchwell's appeal lies in the perverse erotic fascination of a slightly in-bred elf, this particular family had spent way too much time ensconced in their reinforced shelter. Shuffling mono-browed "cousins" would occasionally check the mail-box or grunt at the police through the fly-screen door, making me crave the glamour of Sylvania Waters. Certainly not the kind of people you would consider borrowing sugar from.

Needless to say, everyone has experienced nightmare neighbours - the kind that rifle through your recycling bin and then dob you into the council for mixing soy-milk containers with regular milk-containers. The ones that play Celine Dion at full volume on monday mornings, or try to break through your window in a drunken stupor, thinking it's their house. Even now, despite having moved into a flat a little closer to the leafy suburbs of soapland, the racket from below suggests that the guy beneath me seems to spend most of his spare time mating wardrobes. (Although to be fair, I'm sure he often curses the day that Hitachi approved "loudness" buttons for all new amplifiers.) Yes indeed, everybody needs good neighbours, but nobody gets them.

* * * * * *

Just this morning I was flipping through Melbourne's TV bible, The Green Guide, and was struck by the fact that the reviewer of tonight's episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch felt it necessary to note that "there is a reference to Australia in the dialogue." Checking the date to reassure myself that it was indeed the 1990s, I became nonplussed at this piece of naked, unapologetic information. Was I to take it as mere trivia or existential reassurance? Are we really at the stage where American acknowledgement, no matter how trite, equals ontological solace? Judging by the pathetic parade of "international stars" for the Logies (Joey from Friends, the butler from the Nanny, etc.) then the answer can only be a resounding Yes. Indeed, who can forget that immortal moment in the 1970s when a "tired and emotional" Hollywood starlet told Norman Gunston that the Logies "sound like a disease"?

There is, however, at least some evidence that the tide is turning against this kind of insecurity, especially against the imperialist intentions of Baywatch to relocate its shooting to either Australia or Mexico (both GATT-approved offshore exploitation zones). A full 10 percent of Avalon's 9,000 residents attended "a near-riotous" town hall meeting in which they voiced concerns over Baywatch's request to use their beach for filming. One resident, a Mr. Alex McTaggart, told the producers of the most-watched TV show in the world to "just get out and never come back." They responded by saying that "we will not go where we are clearly not wanted."

During trial-shooting of Baywatch in Avalon last year, security guards blocked off part of the swimming area, frog-marched a surfer off the beach and told skateboarders to be quiet while the show's stars took afternoon naps. "After that, television stars just don't do it for me," said 17-year-old Ian Stone. Between the symbolic summer poles of Bondi and Venice beach, the ability to live in harmony with our "neighbours" becomes increasingly remote in the context of a global or virtual village.

* * * * * *

The Thonglines are not only inscribed onto the surface of this over-salinated earth. They also tread a popular path through the small screen and along fibre-optic cables, before bouncing off commercial satellites and beaming back into our lounge-rooms. Our real-life neighbours watch the people in Neighbours talking to their neighbours while sitting in their lounge-room watching TV (probably Neighbours). As a consequence, Australian TV becomes a filter for an imaginary community partially glimpsed on the far end of a remote-control. And this situation allows "our Asian neighbours" to become both mantra and mandate for enforcing government rhetoric. We have a foreign policy based on the diplomatic strains of Barry Crocker.

For over ten years now, Neighbours has doggedly done its job, come hell or high ratings. It's newest star, Brooke Satchwell, is currently selling everything from liquid paper to mental health, and, of course (in a more subtle fashion) the ups and downs of middle-Australian life. We have learned to preach "love thy neighbour," while strictly policing its definition in order to control who we can hate, ignore or exclude. Like the 1970s English sitcom of the same name, loving thy neighbour is a gesture surrounded by envy, suspicion and racial panic. It is indeed worth pondering whether the first sentence uttered by the indigenous people of Australia upon seeing Captain Cook's sail was, "there goes the neighbourhood."