Laura Slattery: Neighbours 2.0 is the good vibe television needs right now

The countdown to its big mid-September return is on, the publicity machine has stepped up a notch and all eyes will be on its first episode after an eventful spell off-screen.

Can this historic, long-running television programme ever hope to match the resonance of its once nation-unifying past?

Was it a wise idea to keep the show alive or would it perhaps have been smarter to just let it die so its fans can cherish the memory of its peak years?

The answers to these questions will reveal themselves on September 15th, at 9.35pm, when the Late Late Show shuffles back on to the RTÉ One schedule.

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Then three days later, it’s the turn of Neighbours. You know, the good ones that everybody needs.

They’re still in that Erinsborough cul-de-sac, as they have been all along, only since last April the television cameras have been in situ again, too, with the production bills paid by new funders Amazon for at least two more years.

Even as the credits were rolling on its star-packed 8,903rd and ‘final’ episode in the summer of 2022, whispers abounded that the producers were close to agreeing a new deal

This is marvellous for several reasons, but mainly because Susan Kennedy (Jackie Woodburne) has suffered enough and deserves better than to be unceremoniously dumped by Channel 5.

A quick recap of the production backstory here: With Australian interest cooling and the BBC unwilling to pony up the cash that producers Fremantle wanted, the honour fell to Channel 5 in 2008 to become both the UK broadcaster and main funder of Ramsay Street shenanigans.

Alas, it pulled the plug early last year, sending Fremantle on a search for alternative backers. The company’s March 2022 statement confirming that Neighbours would “cease production” looks carefully worded in retrospect, with talk of having no option but to “rest” the show and bring an end to “this chapter” of the soap.

Even as the credits were rolling on its star-packed 8,903rd and “final” episode in the summer of 2022, whispers abounded that the producers were close to agreeing a new deal, with the announcement of the Amazon-financed reprieve coming just four months later.

Neighbours will duly return on September 18th, the action picking up two years after the events of the much-watched finale. And it will remain a daily soap: new episodes will drop Monday to Thursday on Amazon’s free, ad-supported streamer Freevee in the show’s key UK market.

Here, however, it will be on RTÉ One and the RTÉ Player, as well as (later) on subscription streaming service Prime Video, while in Australia, its original broadcaster, Network 10, will resume showing the soap one week ahead of Prime Video.

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This is a small piece of good news for RTÉ, not least because imported soaps are a relatively cheap source of programming and they are popular, both on linear schedules and on-demand. In 2022, Neighbours was the eighth most-viewed programme on the RTÉ Player despite coming off air in early August.

In its last full year, the finale hype-free 2021, it garnered 1.2 million streams for RTÉ, which while lower than the tallies for Home and Away, EastEnders and RTÉ's own Fair City, is not an audience to be sniffed at.

Amazon has been talking up the arrival to the cast of former The OC star Mischa Barton, who will feature alongside many of the old regulars. More notably, Neighbours 2.0 is set to start where Neighbours 1.0 finished: with a fully dialled-in guest star turn from Guy Pearce. That’s because Pearce’s character Mike moved back to Ramsay Street in the finale and the Hollywood actor is too nice and too loyal to just do an off-screen disappearing act.

It is not only the old-school aspect ratio of early Neighbours that makes it feel like a curio plucked from a long-buried time capsule. It is the very concept of the show

This “respectful” extricating sums up the good vibes that have been attached to the show since its 1980s beginnings.

I have scant memory of RTÉ's Glenroe and its ability to usher in Sunday Night Fear via a few strategically placed haystacks. But I did watch a lot of Neighbours, which before making it to either RTÉ or teatime BBC One was purely a lunchtime signifier that it was either the school holidays, a precious half-day or a thoroughly enjoyable sick day.

A selection of these early episodes is now on Prime Video, where they will reveal to any child that might not have noticed 37 years ago that Scott Robinson’s granny Helen Daniels (the late Anne Haddy) was, in fact, a glamorous businesswoman with a forward-thinking attitude to office computers and a steely side that tolerated no fools.

But it is not only the old-school aspect ratio of early Neighbours that makes it feel like a curio plucked from a long-buried time capsule. It is the very concept of the show.

For the past two decades, soap opera audiences have been dwindling, which is why Amazon’s move to capitalise on the wave of finale goodwill and revive Neighbours for the age of on-demand is so intriguing. The equation perhaps boils down to the fact that broadcasters have the audiences, but not the money, while streamers have the money and crave the audiences.

I say surprising because Dallas, even more than Neighbours, was a newspaper headline-generating phenomenon in Ireland

That it is almost impossible now to convey to younger generations just how central certain television shows were to the national conversation occurred to me again last week when Dallas creator David Jacobs died aged 84.

Even accounting for his behind-the-scenes status, Jacobs’s passing attracted surprisingly little attention here. I say surprising because Dallas, even more than Neighbours, was a newspaper headline-generating phenomenon in Ireland.

Just like Australians will race to tell you how uninterested they are in Neighbours, I have met Texans of my generation who claim never to have heard of Ewing Oil. But Dallas was on RTÉ at a time when so many households only had RTÉ. It was huge in a way that no show could be now. The more fragmented the television market becomes, the hazier it all gets, but I’m almost sure I haven’t dreamed that ubiquity, Bobby-in-the-shower or Bouncer-the-dog style.

Inevitably, Dallas was brought back from the dead for three seasons in 2012. Equally inevitably, almost nobody remembers this. Some obsessions are best left in the 1980s, along with shoulder pads and fossil fuels. Neighbours, though, is patently not one of them.