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Supported as they are by these five institutional and cultural factors, the ten general textual factors set out above would seem to encounter no import restrictions to the UK. But there remain four other factors. These constitute apparent points of difference between Australia as represented in Neighbours, and Britain, the importing market. The four features of significant climatic, cultural, and linguistic differences between the two countries put to the test the questions raised earlier: how assimilable are the cross-cultural differences involved? Under what circumstances can such differences be assimilated? First, weather. In the words of Barry Brown, Head of Purchased Programmes at the BBC, “The weather [in Australia] is always hot and the characters are casually dressed. [This] gives the series a freedom and freshness which is new to us” (quoted by Tyrer 1987). Ruth Brown observed that “the cast complain of having to perform in unseasonably thin clothing because the Poms like to think it’s always hot in Oz” (Brown 1989). The production company, Grundy, denies anything of the sort: “We don’t make the show for world consumption, international consumption . . . . What we get back from overseas wouldn’t pay for it” (Fowler 1991). Warm weather can be associated with a casual lifestyle and the singlets and shorts sartorially prominent in Neighbours. Such weather and lifestyle, then, can represent idealized projections for Britons seeking sunny holidays away from grim, grey skies and drear British drabness. The second difference takes off from two aspects of Australian suburbia: higher rates of home-ownership and much lower rates of population density than obtain in the UK. As represented in Neighbours, readily accessible home-ownership can exercise an evident appeal for Britons, especially during the late 1980s property boom, when rapidly rising prices excluded yet more from joining the propertied classes. Moreover, the spacious homes and gardens of Erinsborough are a function of a low population density which enables British viewers to imagine in the Melbourne suburb a comfortable self-distancing from the violent evidence of class and ethnic differences so widespread in a Conservative Britain. Allied to this is the relative affluence enjoyed by the neighbors. A quotation from the 15-year-old Scot, Lucy Janes, brings together differences of weather and suburbia in a comparison of Neighbours with the socially conscious EastEnders: If you turn on a British soap such as EastEnders, you see a pub, dirty houses, dirty streets and the British weather. Neighbours, on the other hand, is set in a clean, bright little street with swimming pools in every garden and SUN. To us Neighbours offers the taste of a world beyond the wet and fog-ridden British Isles. (Janes 1988) A bathetic referential parenthesis: the much-vaunted quarter-acre plot of Australian suburban real estate discourse has in actuality more than its share of loneliness, domestic violence, lack of nearby educational facilities, commercial and social services, and so on. An Australian
DOI link for Supported as they are by these five institutional and cultural factors, the ten general textual factors set out above would seem to encounter no import restrictions to the UK. But there remain four other factors. These constitute apparent points of difference between Australia as represented in Neighbours, and Britain, the importing market. The four features of significant climatic, cultural, and linguistic differences between the two countries put to the test the questions raised earlier: how assimilable are the cross-cultural differences involved? Under what circumstances can such differences be assimilated? First, weather. In the words of Barry Brown, Head of Purchased Programmes at the BBC, “The weather [in Australia] is always hot and the characters are casually dressed. [This] gives the series a freedom and freshness which is new to us” (quoted by Tyrer 1987). Ruth Brown observed that “the cast complain of having to perform in unseasonably thin clothing because the Poms like to think it’s always hot in Oz” (Brown 1989). The production company, Grundy, denies anything of the sort: “We don’t make the show for world consumption, international consumption . . . . What we get back from overseas wouldn’t pay for it” (Fowler 1991). Warm weather can be associated with a casual lifestyle and the singlets and shorts sartorially prominent in Neighbours. Such weather and lifestyle, then, can represent idealized projections for Britons seeking sunny holidays away from grim, grey skies and drear British drabness. The second difference takes off from two aspects of Australian suburbia: higher rates of home-ownership and much lower rates of population density than obtain in the UK. As represented in Neighbours, readily accessible home-ownership can exercise an evident appeal for Britons, especially during the late 1980s property boom, when rapidly rising prices excluded yet more from joining the propertied classes. Moreover, the spacious homes and gardens of Erinsborough are a function of a low population density which enables British viewers to imagine in the Melbourne suburb a comfortable self-distancing from the violent evidence of class and ethnic differences so widespread in a Conservative Britain. Allied to this is the relative affluence enjoyed by the neighbors. A quotation from the 15-year-old Scot, Lucy Janes, brings together differences of weather and suburbia in a comparison of Neighbours with the socially conscious EastEnders: If you turn on a British soap such as EastEnders, you see a pub, dirty houses, dirty streets and the British weather. Neighbours, on the other hand, is set in a clean, bright little street with swimming pools in every garden and SUN. To us Neighbours offers the taste of a world beyond the wet and fog-ridden British Isles. (Janes 1988) A bathetic referential parenthesis: the much-vaunted quarter-acre plot of Australian suburban real estate discourse has in actuality more than its share of loneliness, domestic violence, lack of nearby educational facilities, commercial and social services, and so on. An Australian
Supported as they are by these five institutional and cultural factors, the ten general textual factors set out above would seem to encounter no import restrictions to the UK. But there remain four other factors. These constitute apparent points of difference between Australia as represented in Neighbours, and Britain, the importing market. The four features of significant climatic, cultural, and linguistic differences between the two countries put to the test the questions raised earlier: how assimilable are the cross-cultural differences involved? Under what circumstances can such differences be assimilated? First, weather. In the words of Barry Brown, Head of Purchased Programmes at the BBC, “The weather [in Australia] is always hot and the characters are casually dressed. [This] gives the series a freedom and freshness which is new to us” (quoted by Tyrer 1987). Ruth Brown observed that “the cast complain of having to perform in unseasonably thin clothing because the Poms like to think it’s always hot in Oz” (Brown 1989). The production company, Grundy, denies anything of the sort: “We don’t make the show for world consumption, international consumption . . . . What we get back from overseas wouldn’t pay for it” (Fowler 1991). Warm weather can be associated with a casual lifestyle and the singlets and shorts sartorially prominent in Neighbours. Such weather and lifestyle, then, can represent idealized projections for Britons seeking sunny holidays away from grim, grey skies and drear British drabness. The second difference takes off from two aspects of Australian suburbia: higher rates of home-ownership and much lower rates of population density than obtain in the UK. As represented in Neighbours, readily accessible home-ownership can exercise an evident appeal for Britons, especially during the late 1980s property boom, when rapidly rising prices excluded yet more from joining the propertied classes. Moreover, the spacious homes and gardens of Erinsborough are a function of a low population density which enables British viewers to imagine in the Melbourne suburb a comfortable self-distancing from the violent evidence of class and ethnic differences so widespread in a Conservative Britain. Allied to this is the relative affluence enjoyed by the neighbors. A quotation from the 15-year-old Scot, Lucy Janes, brings together differences of weather and suburbia in a comparison of Neighbours with the socially conscious EastEnders: If you turn on a British soap such as EastEnders, you see a pub, dirty houses, dirty streets and the British weather. Neighbours, on the other hand, is set in a clean, bright little street with swimming pools in every garden and SUN. To us Neighbours offers the taste of a world beyond the wet and fog-ridden British Isles. (Janes 1988) A bathetic referential parenthesis: the much-vaunted quarter-acre plot of Australian suburban real estate discourse has in actuality more than its share of loneliness, domestic violence, lack of nearby educational facilities, commercial and social services, and so on. An Australian
ABSTRACT
GLOBAL NEIGHBOURS?