Neighbours is almost without doubt the Australian program with the highest international profile since the 1980s. Well over 2,000 episodes into production, it still commands worldwide audiences of more than 50 million and has helped transform its production company, the Grundy Organisation, into one of the world’s most successful television production groups.

The program’s success, both in Australia and overseas, has always been attributable to a mix of textual and industry factors. This success lies both in its qualities as a well-developed and well-executed Australian soap opera and in the ways it has been scheduled both in Australia and in the United Kingdom. The premise for the show is the daily interactions of the people living in a middle-class street in a suburb of Melbourne. It is simple in design, yet allows for any number of narrative possibilities. Significantly, it is the limiting of these possibilities to the realms of the ordinary, the unexceptional, and non-melodramatic that has ensured Neighbours’ success for so long.

Stephen Crofts’s detailed analysis of program form and content identifies several key aspects that support these general speculations. These include Neighbours’ focus on the everyday, the domestic, and the suburban; its portrayal of women as doers; its reliance on teen sex appeal and unrebellious youth; its “feel-good” characters and wholesome neighborliness. Social tension and values conflicts are always resolved, dissolved, or repressed, and the overall ideological tone is of depoliticized middle-class citizenship.

Ramsay Street and its suburb of Erinsborough have provided a pool of characters drawn from the ranks of home owners and small-business people, school kids, and pensioners. Textually, the program firmly roots itself in the domestic—in the family and the home, friends and acquaintances, and the immediate social contexts in which they are located. The mundane nature of the domestic storylines extends to the geographical reach of the show. Erinsborough is a fictional suburb, which constructs the family homes as its hub and the local shops, hotel, surgery, and school as the domain of its characters. While it has been known to send its characters overseas, Neighbours has also become notorious for sending its popular players off into the far reaches of Brisbane or the Gold Coast (indeed, it seems that “overseas” is a place from which it is easier to retrieve its characters than from the depths of Queensland). In keeping with the show’s philosophy of “the everyday,” it is the impact that the characters’ interactions with such places produces on other characters that is important to the narrative.

Initially based around three families, the Robinsons, the Ramsays, and the Clarkes, with other local residents thrown in for romance and a touch of conflict, the narrative structures of the program were sufficiently loose to allow for a considerable turnover of characters. In this respect, while the idea of the series is simple, the specifics of the houses in Ramsay Street and the families that inhabit them necessarily change and adapt. The element of continuity lies in the central institutions of the house and home and supporting institutions like small business and public education, and in the performance of small-scale romance and tragedy.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the show is its foundations in the “neighborliness” of (albeit select segments of) the local community. This means that the households and the living and working arrangements of the residents of Ramsay Street take precedence over the establishment of any strict boundaries that mark out the “family” and the roles of family members. Intergenerational con flict abounds and, while resolution is almost unfailingly the order of the day, the show provides an interesting mix of the nuclear and the non-nuclear family. In its current form, there is not one complete nuclear family unit—a significant reflection on the boundaries for the exploration of the “social” within the program’s narrative framework.

These characteristics intertwine with the TV-industry features of the program’s success. When the Seven Network axed the show in the second half of 1985—one of the monumental mistakes of Australian network programming—Grundy’s managing director, Ian Holmes, offered it to the Ten Network. Ten was able to revive the show with new, sexier characters, and shining, enviable domestic sets. The focus on family and community life continued, this time with a little more glamour and in a later time slot—shifting the program from 5:30 P.M. to 7:00 P.M., Monday to Friday. When the show again ran into trouble in 1986, the new network embarked on a massive selling campaign aimed at reviving flagging Sydney ratings. It worked: ratings in Australia soared along with the developing relationship of its stars, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. This in turn led the program into the period of its phenomenal success in the United Kingdom.

Clearly, the amiable middle-class “struggles” of the Ramsay Street residents make for a markedly different narrative to those of the EastEnders or the residents of Coronation Street. Neighbours was the first television program in Britain to be screened twice daily and across all five weekdays by the BBC, which had been commanded into greater economic accountability by the Thatcher government of the 1980s. This strategy, followed soon after by another Australian soap opera export, Home and Away, was to transform the nature of the program as its cast became international stars: in Australia the already popular Minogue and Donovan, as well as Craig McLachlan and Guy Pierce, were constructed as cultural exports, with the pop-music careers of the first two building a star status unknown by Australian television actors. Morally unproblematic, the program fit well into a conservative U.K. government agenda that sought a new degree of competitiveness from the BBC at the same time that it valorized conservative themes. The BBC found that this product provided a counterpoint to other television drama such as EastEnders and Coronation Street—and it did so at far less expense. A week’s worth of Neighbours could be acquired for around £27,000, compared to £40,000 per half-hour episode of EastEnders.

While Neighbours was winning U.K. audiences of 20 million by the end of 1988 and consistently challenging the two home-grown soaps for the position of highest-rating drama on British television, it was also criticized for its bland representation of life in a sunny, relatively trouble-free, seemingly egalitarian Australian suburb. EastEnders, particularly, was attracting commendation for the range of its social and ethnic representation, and, while Neighbours had always had its share of strong female characters, it casually over-looked multiculturalism (a phenomenon fundamental to both Australian and British society), as well as other important social subjects such as unemployment. With the U.K.’s growing list of Australian film and television imports, Australian television became the target of arguments addressing issues of British cultural maintenance. And while some of these criticisms may be well-deserved, Neighbours, along with Home and Away, was in turn important to an Australian film and television industry that was itself accustomed to being seen as an import culture dominated by American and British products. Neighbours was the leader in a new wave of audiovisual export successes from the 1980s onward that has invigorated and redirected the local industry.

Finally, the program remains a popular domestic soap opera. Neighbours fits well with the Ten Network broadcasting ethos based around the appeal of a global “youth culture.” Ten has worked at building a sizeable teen demographic based strictly on ratings, and its success in this respect has contributed to a turn-around in the network’s profits—Ten’s level of returns to expenditure exceeds that of its long-term rival, the Seven Network. With another cast of sexier young stars, including Blair McDonough (the runner-up in the Ten Network’s version of Big Brother), and well-chosen older, more experienced actors, Neighbours continues as Australia’s longest-running soap and one of its most successful television exports.