ABSTRACT

To Be Continued... explores the world's most popular form of television drama; the soap opera. From Denver to Delhi, Moscow to Manchester, audiences eagerly await the next episode of As the World Turns, The Rich Also Weep or Eastenders. But the popularity of soap operas in Britain and the US pales in comparison to the role that they play in media cultures in other parts of the world.

To Be Continued... investigates both the cultural specificity of television soap operas and their reception in other cultures, covering soap production and soap watching in the U.S., Asia, Europe, Australia and Latin America. The contributors consider the nature of soap as a media text, the history of the serial narrative as a form, and the role of the soap opera in the development of feminist media criticism.

To Be Continued... presents the first scholarly examination of soap opera as global media phenomenon.

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Introduction

ByRobert C. Allen

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(the other survivor on that day was another Australian soap, Home and Away). Before treating the institutonal and textual factors which contributed to Neighbours’s success in the UK specifically, I propose ten textual reasons for its success in a range of territories. Several of these factors are noted in British press commentary, which accounted retrospectively for the massive success of Neighbours. Neighbours persisted in its success, similarly to Crocodile Dundee in 1986 in the USA, where it obliged two major film critics, Vincent Canby and Andrew Sarris, to reconsider it after they had farmed out reviews to second stringers on the film’s first appearance (Crofts 1992: 223). 1 The everyday The programme urges identification with profoundly everyday experiences: personal problems, desires, worries, fears, minor misunderstandings, romance, low-key domestic arguments. In negative accounts, the “everyday” becomes “trivial” and “banal” “dog-attackscat” stories, or, in the words of one French journal, “these clumsily intrusive neighbours whose greatest existential anguish consists in having to choose between two colours of wallpaper” (Brugière 1989: 51). Neighbours’s ordinariness and predictability largely shun the melodramatic, the concatenation of incidents, the excessive. In the words of producer, Mark Callan: We try to keep everything as simple as possible and direct it at the ordinary things that occur in every household and within every neighbourhood. We are often tempted to use a sensational story, but we pull back and say: “That’s not likely to happen.” We do best when we portray the mundane in an entertaining way. (quoted by Galvin 1988) Testimony to the success of this strategy is found in the observations of Lucy Janes, a 15-year-old Scot whose age is typical of the program’s principal demographic target. She talks about the plot – predictable, filled with clichés and relatively simple (particularly compared to Dynasty and Dallas where each character has been married to each of the others at least twice). You can play an amusing little game because of the predictability. Try to guess what he/she is going to say next. It’s easier than you think and gives the viewer a feeling of participation and achievement. (Janes 1988) Identification is encouraged by the everyday tempo and rhythm, the invariable use of eye-level camera and a thoroughly utilitarian visual style which draws no attention to itself (even Home and Away appears a little mannered in comparison). (As at July 1992, when research for this section of the chapter was completed, there were signs of Neighbours’s adopting a flashier and more sexually explicit style.)

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decency, compassion. Neighbours resembles the down-home, wholesome populism of a Frank Capra comedy except that its suburban protagonists are saved the trouble of traveling to and from a big city to discover their true values. 8 Differences are resolved, dissolved, or repressed The characters are “almost compulsively articulate about problems and feelings” (Tyrer 1987). Crises are solved quickly, usually amicably. Conflict is thus managed almost psychotherapeutically by and within the inner circle of family, and the outer circle of Ramsay Street. Witness the episode broadcast on April 23, 1992 in Australia: after fire destroys much of Gaby’s clothes boutique, three female neighbors remake the lost stock, while three male neighbors clear up the debris from the shop. As the theme song has it: “Neighbours should be there for one another.” Incursions of conflict from the social world beyond these charmed circles are treated tokenistically or spirited away. The program blurs or represses differences of gender politics, sexual preference, age, and ethnicity. Domestic violence and homosexuality, male or female, are unknown. Age differences are subsumed within family love and tolerance. Aboriginal characters manage a two-episode plot line at most (Craven 1989: 18), and Greeks, despite the real Melbourne being the third largest Greek city in the world, figure rarely. Neighbours-watchers could likewise be forgiven for not knowing that Melbourne has the largest Jewish community in Australia. The program elides questions of disability, alcoholism, or religious difference. It displaces drug addiction on to a friend outside immediate family circles (Cousin 1992). Unemployment as a social issue is subordinated to the humanist characterization of Brad, for instance, as dopey, happy-go-lucky surfie. Neighbours counterposes suburban escapism to the high-gloss escapism of Santa Barbara. 9 Depoliticized middle-class citizenship These “cosy parish pump narratives,” as Ian Craven calls them, depoliticize the everyday (Craven 1989: 21). Such good middle-class suburban citizenship is roundly condemned by no less than Germaine Greer: The world of Neighbours is the world of the detergent commercial; everything from the kitchen worktops to the S-bend is squeaky clean. Everyone’s hair and underwear is freshly laundered. No one is shabby or eccentric; no one is poor or any colour but white. Neighbours is the Australian version of the American dream, owner-occupied, White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant paradise. (Greer 1989) In this blithely comfortable middle-class ethos, the characters seem never to have problems with mortgage repayments. Commenting on the opening episodes of Neighbours, a British critic underlines its property-owning values:

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Max Ramsay is the cardboard cutout Ozzie clod who warns his son, Shane, against dating Daphne because she works as a stag-night stripper. His main fear seems to be the effect the newly arrived Daphne might have on the price of his property. (Smurthwaite 1986) As Grahame Griffin notes, “the closing credit sequence . . . is a series of static shots of suburban houses singled out for display in a manner reminiscent of real estate advertisements” (Griffin 1991: 175). Small business abounds in Neighbours: a bar, a boutique, an engineering company, with no corporate sector and no public servants or bureaucrats apart from a headmistress. 10 Writing skills must be acknowledged. It is very hard to make the mundane interesting, and indeed to score multiple short plot lines across a small number of characters (twelve to fifteen), as is appropriate to representing the local, the everyday, the suburban. As Moira Petty remarks, Neighbours is successful because “it’s very simple. The characters are two dimensional and the plots come thick and fast. The storylines don’t last long, so if you don’t like one, another will come along in a few days” (quoted by Harris 1988). These ten textual reasons doubtless contribute, differentially across different export markets, to Neighbours’s success in many countries of the world. Its wholesome neighborliness, its cosy everyday ethos would appear to be eminently exportable. However, lest it be imagined that Neighbours has universal popularity or even comprehensibility, there remain some 150 countries to which it has not been exported, and many in which its notions of kinship systems, gender relations, and cultural spaces would appear most odd. The non-universality of western kinship relations, for example, is clearly evidenced in Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes’s comparison of Israeli and Arab readings of Dallas (Katz and Leibes 1986). And, indeed, there are two familiar territories to be considered later – the USA and France – in which it has been screened and failed. Significantly, the countries screening Neighbours are mostly anglophone and well familiar with British, if not also with Australian soaps. But why does Neighbours appeal so forcibly in the UK? In the UK market, I suggest, five institutional and cultural preconditions enabled Neighbours’s phenomenal success. Some of these considerations are, of course, the sine qua non of Neighbours even being seen on UK television. The first precondition was its price, reportedly A$54,000 per show for two screenings; with EastEnders costing A$80,000 per episode, Neighbours was well worth a gamble (Kingsley 1989: 241). Scheduling, too, was vital to Neighbours’s success. This has two dimensions. Neighbours was the first program on UK television ever to be stripped over five weekdays (Patterson 1992). BBC Daytime Television, taking off under Roger Loughton in 1986, while Michael Grade was Programme Controller, was so bold in this as to incur the chagrin of commercial

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television, constrained at the time from such a move by Independent Broadcasting Association regulations (Willock 1992). Coronation Street and Crossroads had been stripped across three evenings, and EastEnders across two. Stripping across five days/nights had long been common in Australian television. This was first done for Number 96 (1972–1977) by Ian Holmes, later the Grundy Organisation’s president. So successful was the stripping of Neighbours across five days that the same principle has since been adopted in the UK for Home and Away. David Liddiment, Head of Entertainment at Granada, which produces Coronation Street and Families, both Neighbours competitors, went so far as to say: “In future, no-one will contemplate running a daytime serial in the UK except as a strip. It’s inevitable that you build success more quickly when you strip a soap” (Liddiment 1989: 20). Second, on scheduling, Loughton made the schedules more cost-effective by repeating each edition daily (Patterson 1992). “The time-slots chosen by the BBC were 1.30 pm, with a repeat the following morning at 9.05. It attracted a typical audience of housewives, shift workers, the unemployed, people home sick” (Oram 1988: 48). After the unexpected success of Neighbours’ first year, it was decided to reschedule the next morning repeat for the same evening, at 5:35 p.m. This was to cater for working mothers, but most of all for schoolchildren who had previously played truant to watch the series. The most famous story attributes the schedule change to the representations made to no less than Michael Grade himself by his daughter. Rescheduled in January 1988, Neighbours nearly doubled its audience to 16.25 million within six weeks. By Christmas 1988, audiences topped 20 million. Five-day stripping and repeat screenings, then, offered a regularity and familiarity significant in capturing such huge audiences, representing one-third of the UK population. The third precondition was the UK “mediascape.” This included a very broad familiarity with Australian soaps. When Neighbours was launched on October 27, 1986, The Sullivans, A Country Practice, Young Doctors, Flying Doctors, Richmond Hills, Prisoner: Cell Block H, and others had broadened the paths already beaten by many Australian films released in the UK. Michael Collins, executive in charge of production at JNP, producers of A Country Practice, maintains that the serial, screened in the UK since 1983, “was a forerunner in getting audiences used to Australian drama” (Collins 1991). And one factor contributing to Neighbours’s topping the ratings late in 1988 would have been the demise of Crossroads, the British soap created by Reg Watson, in spring 1988 after a twenty-four-year run. Fourth, tabloids, television, and un(der)employment. Under Thatcher and Murdoch, the tabloid press in Britain expanded in the mid-1980s, producing what one television executive described, albeit parodically, as “one page of news, one page of sex, and twenty-two pages of television and sport” (Patterson 1992). So when Neighbours was stripped over five days, “the papers really noticed it” (Willock 1992). Together with Woman, Woman’s Day, Jackie, Scoop, and other teen magazines, the tabloids ran myriad stories on Kylie, Jason, Peter O’Brien, and so on, as is indicated by the three sample headlines from three successive days:

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Floored by Kylie Haymaker: She Wallops like a Kangaroo – How Tiny Kylie Thumped Hunky Jason. (People, August 21, 1988) Heartless Neighbours Jibe That Made Kylie Cry. (Sun, August 22, 1988) Why Kylie’s Driving Me [Jason] Crazy. (Sun, August 23, 1988) Also significant is the contemporaneous Thatcherite swelling of the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed. Writing in the Guardian, Hugh Hebert noted of the “new daytime audience” that there is a huge pool of unemployed and under-employed people and the daytime phenomenon is tapping into that market. Neighbours has been lucky enough to take off as that audience has grown. But it has a lighter touch than EastEnders or Coronation Street – it doesn’t have such deep social problems. (quoted by Harris 1988) Finally, media publicity has continually stoked the boilers of Neighbours’s success in the media in the last four years. Kylie and Jason launched their singing careers, threatening no less than Cliff Richard at the top of the charts in Christmas 1988. As well as the Royal Family, the Archbishop of Canterbury also let it be known that he, too, watched Neighbours. Since 1989, cast members have been invited to Royal Command Performances and to participate in Christmas pantomimes. Neighbours became a political football in 1991, with Michael Fallon, a junior education spokesperson, denouncing it for “making teachers’ jobs even harder” (Independent, May 19, 1991), and Jack Straw, his Labour counterpart, joining the fray in similar terms. It has also spawned a British version, Families, first screened on April 23, 1990. This revolves around two families, one British and one Australian, and the British father’s visiting Australia to find his lover of twenty years ago. In 1992 Neighbours appears to have incited its first murder, or at least manslaughter: LONDON: A man who killed his neighbour over a blaring television says he was driven mad – by the theme tune of Neighbours. Eric Seall, who walked free after being convicted of manslaughter, said: “It was that Neighbours tune that finally did it. That stupid song made my life hell.” A court was told that Seall, 32, came to blows with John Roach, 37, who fell downstairs at their flats in Hampshire and fractured his skull. (West Australian, June 27, 1992)

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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

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television programme, Lost in Space (Channel 2), screened on September 2, 1992, cites a British emigrant relocated, and unemployed, in an outer Brisbane suburb, blaming Neighbours for having misled him to Australia. The third difference pits Australian egalitarianism against British class hierarchies. The myth of Australia as egalitarian circulates widely in the UK as well as in Australia. It readily enables an elision of any working-class or unemployed populations. That elision was literally as well as metaphorically bought by Barry Brown, BBC Head of Purchased Programmes: “There isn’t a class system in Australia – or, if you like, everyone in Australia is middle class” (quoted by Tyrer 1987). In this way, Neighbours can focus British viewers’ notions that there is a safe, middle-class/classless suburban heaven down under. Wholesome neighborliness is highly pertinent here. Peter Pinne, executive producer of Neighbours, is quoted as ascribing its success to the fact that “it provides a vision of something that is lacking in the personal lives of many people in Britain today, particularly a sense of personal commitment and caring in the community” (Solomon 1989). The fourth difference concerns Australian accent and idiom, and their differences from British English. Acceptability of these differences has been facilitated not only by the steady succession of Australian television and film product screened in the UK since the early 1970s, but also within UK television production by the growing recognition of regional and ethnic accents since the early 1960s first moves away from plummy upper-class enunciation. Thus when “bludger” is noted in a Daily Telegraph (February 2, 1988) review as not being understood, it is not a matter of criticism or condescension, as in some reviews of Crocodile Dundee (see Crofts 1992: 210–220). The opening of the review indicates a ready acceptance of difference: “‘I was just goin’ to put the nosebag on. Fancy a bit of tucker yourself?’ This is the essential tone of Neighbours, BBC-1’s usually [sic] successful bought-in Australia soap. It is just quaintly foreign enough to please without confusing” (Marrin 1988). Of these four differences, then, between Australia and Britain, three (concerning the weather, suburbia, and egalitarianism) are virtually dissolved in that they enable the projection of British fantasies on to Neighbours. The last difference functions as a marker of cultural difference so familiar as to present no problems of assimilation. In sum, Neighbours’s huge success in the UK can therefore be traced in the three general categories of explanation set out above. Its ratings suggest beyond doubt that all of the general textual “success factors” of Neighbours apply in the UK; indeed, almost all have been commented on by British reviewers anxious to make sense of the “Neighbours phenomenon.” It is worth noting, second, that the institutional and cultural facilitators of Neighbours’s UK success are both very powerful, and also often historically fortuitous. Recall the opening up of daytime television on BBC1 and the expansion of tabloid coverage of television in 1986. Factors such as these are likely to escape the most assiduous attentions of program producers and buyers, as well as of governmental cultural and trade agencies concerned with promoting

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media products overseas. Third, the dissolution of apparent differences achieved in Neighbours’s UK success is likewise partly dependent upon conjunctural coincidences of the 1980s, as well as on cross-cultural familiarities bred of histories linked by colonization. Not only can it be claimed that “every next person in Britain has a relative in Australia” (Fowler 1991). It is also arguable that Neighbours’s UK popularity arises because it can reduce almost all cultural specificities to projections of relief from a grey, cramped, class-divided, Thatcherized society (one might remember here that such cultural specificities as Neighbours might have had are already severely etiolated by the program’s anodyne, easily generalizable, and depoliticized ethos). Indeed, there is a remarkable congruence between Neighbours’s introverted, mutually supportive community and Thatcherite anti-welfare doctrines of self-help. Neighbours’s Australia represents a distant home, I suggest, for residents of the “scepter’d isle” long since bereft of Empire apart from Hong Kong and the Falkland Islands, and simultaneously having acute difficulties connecting with Europe. Ruth Brown notes in British responses to Neighbours a twilight gasp of colonial condescension toward a remnant of Commonwealth: “Neighbours seeks to persuade us that middle-class neighbourliness is alive and well and living in Australia, Britannia’s infant arising . . . to glad her parent’s heart by displaying her glories shining more brightly in another sphere” (Brown 1989). Given Britain’s uncertain self-image in the world it once bestrode, an “invasion” of cultural products from a former convict colony can bring out a certain snobbery. In the case of Nancy Banks-Smith’s remarks on Home and Away, cultural snobbery perhaps overlays class snobbery: “One is aware of Home and Away as one is aware of chewing-gum on the sole of one’s shoe” (Banks-Smith 1990). Such views recall the comment of the Australian poet, Les Murray: “Much of the hostility to Australia, and it amounts to that, shown by English people above a certain class line can be traced to the fact that we are, to a large extent, the poor who got away” (Murray 1978: 69). That both major British political parties could take up Neighbours as political football testifies not just to the category of youth as ongoing focus of moral panics in a country deeply prone to such motions, but also to the continuing ubiquity of Neighbours. If Crocodile Dundee supplied Australian tourists with cab-driver conversation around much of the world for at least a year, Neighbours has sustained its impact much longer in Britain. Acknowledged by government, royal family, and Church of England, it has achieved journalistic benchmark status for things Australian. USA: lost in Dallasty Neighbours is probably the most successful international soap opera that’s ever been. (Cristal 1992)

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The Americans are probably the most parochial people on earth. (Fowler 1991) Needless to say, they didn’t like it over there [in the USA]. (Harvey 1991) Thus Grundy’s account of the failure in the US of its most successful soap, as voiced respectively by the company’s Senior vice-president of marketing in Los Angeles, its senior vice president of business affairs in Sydney, and its Sydney publicity manager. This tale of failure contrasts starkly with that of Neighbours’s British success. Grundy’s tried out the US market by syndicating the program in a thirteen-week batch, episodes one to sixty-five, to two independent stations, KCOP/13 in Los Angeles and WWOR/9 in New York. In Los Angeles it screened Monday–Friday at 5:30 p.m. from June 3–28, 1991 before being rescheduled at 9:30 a.m. Monday–Friday from July 1–August 30, 1991. In its first and third weeks Neighbours rated 4 per cent of TV sets in the Los Angeles area, which has forty-one channels; in its fifth week, the first at 9:30 a.m. the figure dropped to 1 per cent, and thereafter it never picked up (Inouye 1992). The program was also stripped by WWOR in New York. There it ran at 5: p.m. from June 17 to September 17, 1991, with its audience averaging 228,000 – a poor figure – in its best month, July (Stefko 1992). Plans to extend its screenings to Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, and Phoenix appear to have foundered. Unlike the British case, explanations of Neighbours’s failure in the US market are drawn more from its seller, Grundy, and its buyers, KCOP and WWOR, than from the press, which in Britain sought to account for the program’s colossal success. Press coverage heralded the opening of Neighbours in the US, and subsequently ignored it (the commentaries come from seven dailies and weeklies and Variety in Alexander 1991; Goodspeed 1991; “Gray.” 1991; Kelleher 1991; Kitman 1991; Mann 1991; Rabinowitz 1991; Roush 1991). Belonging mostly to the journalistic genre of announcing a likely new popular cultural success arriving with a remarkable foreign track- record, these commentaries were closer to advertorial than to the customarily more “objective” genre of film reviewing. But since they were not advertisements as such, they did give indicative prognostications of the acceptability of a program such as Neighbours in the US market. The commentaries’ treatment of the ten textual factors contributing to Neighbours’s global successes yield important insights. The last eight categories gave these commentators no pause: women as doers, teen sex appeal, unrebellious youth, wholesome neighborliness, “feelgood” characters, resolution of differences, depoliticized middle-class citizenship, and writing skills. Indeed, all eight are clearly instanced in the highly successful Beverley Hills 90210 with the marginal modifications that their neighborliness is more school- than home-based, “middle class” is defined upwards from petit bourgeois, and writing skills are devoted

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to less prosaic representations. That five of the commentaries are positive in their evaluation of Neighbours, two neutral, and only one negative suggests the broad potential acceptability of the program to the US market (only one publication, the Wall Street Journal, has the kind of highbrow readership which might encourage its television critics to sneer at popular material such as soaps). The two textual features of Neighbours which do draw comment – the everyday, and the domestic and suburban – point to a crucial first feature of the US “mediascape,” in particular its “soapscape,” namely the preference for the exceptional, the non-domestic, the non-suburban. In US soaps, it is well known, the pole of melodrama exercises greater attraction than the pole of realism (cf. Geraghty 1991: 25–38) – in contrast to Australian and British soaps. These two textual aspects of Neighbours are a central theme of the US commentaries, combining under the rubric of the non-exceptional, the “realistic.” All the commentaries bar the sole negative one (Kitman 1991: 23) refer positively to Neighbours’ “realism,” often in contradistinction to the perceived artificiality of US soaps. Peter Pinne, the program’s executive producer, is twice quoted to just this effect (Goodspeed 1991: 22; Mann 1991: 28), while USA Today (Roush 1991: 15) applauds “how close the residents of Ramsey Street seem to our own suburban counterparts,” and notes that “its casual gossip and unexceptional lifestyle [are] closer to the early days of Knots Landing than to any current soap.” The redoubtable Wall Street Journal does not sneer, but praises a television version of middle- and lower-class life that is at ease with itself and singularly lacking in . . . the self-consciousness and discomfort that attends American television’s efforts to portray uneducated white working-class types . . . . [Its] characters . . . ought to be more recognisable to Americans than the peculiar beings that inhabit the worlds of our home-grown TV dramas . . . . [They] actually converse with one another in the way that people do – without declaiming or the rat-a-tat of one-liners, or recitals of a position on the latest hot social theme. If the beat of their daily lives is unhysterical – quiet, in fact – it is also eventful. (Rabinowitz 1991: 17) The Wall Street Journal takes a refreshing distance from the infamous “Greed is good” dictum voiced in Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street! Given Neighbours’s atypicality in the realm of US soaps, its American reference points are either Knots Landing – which one British journalist described as “the nearest the Americans can bear to get to a soap about ordinary people” (Kingsley 1989: 226) – or US sitcoms (Kelleher 1991: 36; Rabinowitz 1991: 17). Buyer and seller agreed that its non-exceptional “realism” was one reason for Neighbours’s failure in the US “soapscape.” KCOP described it as “less raunchy than US soap operas, too wholesome” (Moran 1992). Its seller, Bob Cristal, added that

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Neighbours, as Reg Watson said, was the softest concept he had ever come up with, and he thinks the success of the show worldwide is the softness; whereas in this country when you’re dealing with a foreign accent in a soft premise, you have a tougher row to hoe. (Cristal 1992) Here, Cristal touches on the second, and major, incompatibility between Neighbours and the US mediascape: its foreignness. He elaborates: The real problem . . . is that the American marketplace – and I don’t agree with it, but so be it – is, has been anti-foreign material for as long as I can remember . . . . The one show that broke through – and it was on a network – was Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan. (Cristal 1991) Variety, more hard-nosed in its trade prognostications than the more “newsy,” advertorially-oriented commentaries cited above, frankly notes that “it’s questionable whether [Neighbours] will achieve the level of runaway success it’s found elsewhere . . . . International pop–cultural exchange seems to be one-sided for the US, which is generally xenophobic about embracing fare from other nations” (“Gray.” 1991: 72; this rare acknowledgement of American media ethnocentrism does not, of course, undercut Variety’s servicing role in relation to the US media’s domestic and overseas markets). The Americanization of non-American film and television is big business. Hollywood versions of foreign film successes as varied as The Vanishing and La Cage aux Folles represent a significant proportion of Hollywood production. One sizable company, Don Tafler International, specializes in Americanizing foreign television programs. Till Death Do Us Part is a major example of a foreign program which “had to be remade . . . because the original was not acceptable in this country . . . and yet Archie Bunker, All In The Family . . . which was a direct lift from that show . . . became a classic in our country” (Cristal 1992). Grundy’s themselves supported the sequelling and Americanization of Prisoner: Cell Block H with Dangerous Women, an American production with Peter Pinne as its executive producer. If the Patrick McGoohan Prisoner was exceptional in its status of being foreign material which gained entrance to the fiercely ethnocentric US television networks, few more successes have been registered with independent stations. The bulk of such material – and overall there is precious little of it – finds its way into the US market by way of the more upmarket route of public service television, most of whose imports are British, largely genteel and respectable, though extending to include EastEnders. With this point in mind, Cristal remarked: “I would think that Neighbours, in retrospect, might have been more appropriate to a public broadcaster” (Cristal 1992). In the year of Neighbours’s attempt on the US market, public service television screened The Shiralee and Dolphin Cove, and Bangkok Hilton was shown on cable. This is a

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far, far cry from the broad swathe beaten to the British market by soaps ranging from The Sullivans to Flying Doctors and from Prisoner: Cell Block H to Country Practice which preceded the Neighbours phenomenon there. “The accents” were constantly cited as a crucial point of resistance. KCOP: “People couldn’t understand the Australian accent” (Inouye 1992). WWOR: “We received some complaints about accents, but maybe that’s not the real issue” (Darby 1992). KCOP: “The actors are unknown, and it takes place in a country that few people know about” (Inouye 1992). WWOR: “One problem with anything from out of this country is making the transition from one country to the next. We’re all chauvinists, I guess. We want to see American actors in American stuff” (Leibert 1992). The tenor of these reflections in fact gainsays the New York Daily News’s own report five days prior to Neighbours’s first New York transmission: The program was test-marketed in both cities, and viewers were asked whether they prefer [sic] the original Australian version or the same plots with American actors. “All of them chose the Australian program over the US version,” Pinne said. It won’t hurt, he added, that a program from Australia will be perceived as “a little bit of exotica” without subtitles. (Alexander 1991: 23) The station’s verdict within three months was clearly less sanguine. Australian material did not stay the course, even as exotica. Two additional factors militated against Neighbours’s US success: scheduling, and the length of run required to build up a soap audience. Scheduling was a key factor of the US “mediascape” which contributed to the foundering of Neighbours. Schedule competition tends to squeeze the untried and unknown into the 9–5 time slots. Whatever its British track-record, the Australian soap had no chance of a network sale in the face of the American soaps already locked in mortal combat over the ratings. The best time for Neighbours on US television, between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., could be met no better by the independent stations. For the 6:00–8:00 p.m. period, when the networks run news, are the independents’ most competitive time slots, representing their best opportunity to attract viewers away from the networks – principally by rerunning network sitcoms such as The Cosby Show and Cheers. An untried foreign show, Neighbours simply would not, in executives’ views, have pleased advertisers enough; it was too great a risk. Even the 5:00–6:00 p.m. hour, which well suited Neighbours’s youth audience, was denied it in Los Angeles after its first month, with its ratings dropping from 4 per cent to 1 per cent as a consequence. Cristal lamented most the fourth factor contributing to Neighbours’s demise: the stations’ lack of perseverance with it, giving it only three-month runs either side of the States. This is the crucial respect in which public service broadcasting might have benefited it, by probably giving it a longer run. Until the late 1980s, when networks put on a daytime soap, they would

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normally trial it for two years, both for it to catch on with its audience and, if applicable, to amortize establishment production costs. Shows as famous and successful as Cheers and Cagney and Lacey suffered poor ratings in their first two years, but were persevered with. Recent years of recession and cable’s effect of fragmenting the market have generated what Cristal calls the networks’ “ultra-conservatism.” The expansion of cable meant that by 1991 Los Angeles residents might choose from some forty-one channels, while the figure elsewhere in the country tops sixty. This enables advertisers to diversify their expenditure, spending, for instance, US$30,000 on ten different ads, rather than risk US$300,000 per minute on The Cosby Show, or somewhat less on a Neighbours. Such a situation encourages deep caution among television station executives once ratings fail to measure up. A final factor was mentioned by none of the reviews or interviewees. It is, though, reasonable to speculate that the age of the show – episode one dates from March 1985, pre-Kylie – may have combined with its lack of crisis-a-minute plot lines and strange accents to discourage viewers. For the fashion, interior decor, and casual deportment of Neighbours 1985-model would in 1991 in the US have seemed light years beyond those of daytime soaps such as General Hospital, not to mention those of Dallasty. The sitcom appearance would not have yielded enough jokes to compare with a Roseanne, while its plot lines would have appeared to belong on another planet from those of Days of Our Lives – certainly outside the orbit of the American soapscape. Neighbours’s failure in the US market, then, can be seen to proceed from its non-exceptional realism, its foreignness, the gridlock of US television scheduling for such a soap, the brevity of its run, and, probably, the quaintness of its six-year-old material. The preceding material authorizes some further conclusions, about American acceptance of other countries’ media product. In so far as the Australianness/non-Americanness of Neighbours was the sticking-point for US television executives, there are two significant indices of the degrees of acceptability of Australian/non-American material for American network television. The first is the unashamed (though not broad) Australian accent of Tristan Rogers, who plays leading man and long-time heartthrob, variously police commissioner and secret agent, Robert Scorpio, on the “goliath of daytime soaps” (Twan 1984: 13), the ABC network’s General Hospital. On his 1981 debut on the show, he expressed pride in being “the first leading man who’s been allowed to retain his Australian accent on American television [Rod Taylor had not], and I’m very pleased it’s proving successful” (quoted by Church 1981: 24). In subsequent publicity and advertorial, Rogers’s Australian origin has taken a key position in a discursive set of permutable qualifiers such as “suave,” “handsome,” “charming,” and ‘heartthrob.” Its function as a distinguishing marketing tag is evident from such descriptions as “Robert Scorpio (Tristan Rogers) whose Australian accent and smouldering good look” (Tormey 1982: 119); “Tristan . . . introduced the suave Aussie, Robert Scorpio, to General Hospital’s

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large audience” (Goldstein 1983: 26); and “Here was an Australian with a wry sense of humor and gruff charm [this was post-Crocodile Dundee], equally alluring to men and women” (Brown 1987: 33). In other words, Robert Scorpio is conveniently – if not tokenistically – played by an Australian. The limits of tolerance of the non-American for the world of network soap are instanced in General Hospital’s casting criteria for an (American) actor to play Robert Scorpio’s long-lost brother, Malcolm. The actor, John J. York, is quoted in the ABC house journal, Episodes, saying: “They didn’t want a strong dialect [sic] . . . . They didn’t want a Paul Hogan type, because that accent is too strong. They were saying ‘just a hint’” (Kump 1991: 29). The Australian is more “exotic” than Peter Pinne may have wished: too exotic. Just the accent, though, if muted, can have an appealing otherness. The second index of the acceptability of the non-American, again Australian, has yet to be tested on the American market place. Called Paradise Beach, it is not a ready-made Australian soap seeking overseas sales, but a co-production between the Australian-based Village Roadshow, Australia’s Channel 9, and the American New World Entertainment, which has secured pre-sales to the CBS network at 7:30 p.m. week-nights (beginning June 14, 1993) and Britain’s Sky Channel as well as in nine other territories worldwide (Gill 1993; Chester 1993; Shohet 1993). As an Australian-based soap directed primarily at a teen audience, it recalls Neighbours and Home and Away. As a youth drama serial set in a beach tourism center, it recalls Baywatch and summer holiday editions of Beverly Hills 90210. And like Melrose Place and the Australian E Street, each episode includes what one report breathily calls “an MTV moment . . . a two-minute montage of sleek shots of beautiful bodies and plenty of sun, surf and sand set to the latest pop music hit” (Shohet 1993: 5). Set in and around Surfers Paradise on Queensland’s Gold Coast, it recalls, for Australian viewers, the 1983 film, Coolangatta Gold, which celebrates Australian beach culture (see Crofts 1990). It is noteworthy indeed that most of the performers are recuited from a model agency, not an actor’s agency. An American actor, Matt Lattanzi, plays an American photographer, and Australian actor, Tiffany Lamb, sports an American accent. There is a concern, understandable in a program sold overseas, to make Australian colloquialisms comprehensible (Gill 1993: 2). In terms of physical geography, the locations are Australian; in terms of cultural geography, Queensland’s Gold Coast is substantially indistinguishable from much of Florida and parts of California and Hawaii. The era of the co-production re-poses the question of the degree of acceptability of non-American material in the American market-place by begging the question of the distinguishability of the two. But given the unequal cultural exchange long obtaining between Australia and the US, with shows like Mission: Impossible being filmed in Australia to take advantage of cheap labor; given the tight money of Paradise Beach’s shooting schedule of 2.5 hours of soap per week; and given New World’s Head’s, James McNamara, ignorance of Australian soaps (“Paradise Beach is the first soap to be skewed at a teen audience” (quoted by Gill 1993: 2)), one might wonder which party is defining the

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elimination of cultural difference. McNamara assured an Australian journalist: “The show is Australian through and through” (quoted by Gill 1993: 2). At the time of writing, neither American nor Australian responses are known. However, the summer release in the US – like that of Neighbours – is significant. This is the holiday season, the season when stations introduce material in which they place less market faith. Neighbours’s failure in the American market begs questions about the differential circulation there of Australian televisual and filmic texts. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang have argued the centrality of television to the modern nation-state’s basic reliance on . . . the nuclear family as the basis for social order, as the site of morality and for the organization of desire . . . . Through (modern) television, the nation could be forged into an encompassing imagined community in a way which was both more extensive and intimate than the newspaper – Benedict Anderson’s exemplary medium endowed with this role – was able to achieve. (Stratton and Ang 1994) Television’s homogenizing rhetorical space appears to be particularly resistant in the American case to incursions from outside its boundaries. Film differs somewhat. While both film and television production in the US are safely dominant in their local market, film eludes the familiar and familial domestic space of television. Crocodile Dundee succeeded strikingly in lowering the threshold of recognition of Australian media product in America. Yet, despite the film’s massive success in Australian terms (US$174 million US gross box-office, far above Crocodile Dundee 2, second at US $109 million, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, third at US$36 million), it has made less great waves in US market terms. Among Variety’s “All-Time Champs of the 1980s,” it ranked only twenty-third, sandwiched between Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Fatal Attraction, and earned only 31 percent of the takings of the top film, E.T. (Variety 1993: 10). Neighbours’s failure in the US television market should be measured not only in terms of the fact that US television is more strenuously resistant to foreign imports than is US film distribution–exhibition, but also in terms of the relative lack of success, by American standards, of even Australia’s greatest film export success. France: “Viewers have been bluffed by vandals” Neighbours play a particular role in Australia. In that country of infinite spaces, the sparse population must practise solidarity and good neighbourliness to survive. In an urban environment, however [sic], caring quickly descends to malevolent snooping. Faced with this soap, it is difficult to observe the evangelical precept of loving one’s neighbours as one loves oneself. (A.W. 1989: 7)

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In France, Neighbours, dubbed as Les voisins, was launched by Antenne 2 in August 1989. Screened twice daily at 11:30 and 5:45, it secured ratings of 24 per cent of the market, in fact Antenne 2’s average for that year. However, for reasons which Antenne 2 is unwilling to disclose, the evening screening was shifted after only ten editions to 6:30. This put it up against stronger competition from others of the then five channels, and its rating dropped to just below 16 percent of market share. A further scheduling change briefly preceded its demise after a total of only seven months’ screening. The 185 episodes purchased only just included the debut of Kylie Minogue at episode 169. According to its French agent, Rolande Cousin, Antenne 2 bought Neighbours exclusively on the basis of its colossal British success (Cousin 1992), a phenomenon mentioned by all six articles heralding Neighbours’s arrival on French screens; its Australian success was referred to by four articles (Baron 1989; Brugière 1989; Lepetit 1989; Pélégrin 1989; Thomann 1989; and A.W. 1989). The Minogue factor also appears significant. Her singing career peaked in 1988–1989, and among the six articles she rated one cover story (Télé 7 jours), an exclusive interview and a cover story with Jason Donovan (in Télé poche), and two other references (Brugière 1989; and Thomann 1989). Cousin identifies five other potential appeals in the program for French viewers: its sun, its “acceptable exoticism,” its lack of blacks (a sensitive topic in France, as witness the racist political career of Jean-Marie Le Pen), its lack of other disturbing social material, and its everyday issues (Cousin 1992). For all this potential appeal, Antenne 2 still delayed transmitting by three months, pushing its opening into August, when most of France goes on holiday, and opted instead for the American Top Models (Baron 1989: 25). This lack of confidence in its purchase instances what Cousin called a “Pavlovian reflex” against non-US serial fiction (Cousin 1992), and points to broader issues than the fame of two of the program’s principals. The French commentaries differ noticeably from the American in their assessment of the ten textual features of Neighbours singled out above. One feature – women as doers – is not mentioned at all. All other features are mentioned at least once. The two most often referred to are the everyday, and the domestic and suburban. But Neighbours’s non-exceptionality, its everyday realism, had a different status for French than for American reviewers. For most of the latter it offered a desirable antidote to the spectacular confections of home-grown soaps. For French reviewers it was treated in one of two ways. While some derogated the program’s perceived banality (Brugière 1989; Pélégrin 1989), others, whether high(er) brow or plugging the Minogue factor, remained curiously non-committal about its everyday realism. There was a similarly curious abstention from either positive or negative evaluation of the program. Commentators’ apparent unease with this centrally distinguishing feature of Neighbours, its everyday realism, suggests that it represented something of a conundrum in the mediascape, in particular the field of television serial fiction screened in France, and may well echo the unease evidently felt by its buyer. The reasons require some clarification.

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Within this field of serial fiction, American product leads, French ranks second, and British third. This triangular force field explains Neighbours’s anomalous position in the French market. American serial fiction is, in the form of Dallas especially, very well known in France. Such American imports are treated with a culturally characteristic ambivalence: admiration for the narrative drive and polish of American product counterposed by distaste for its spectacularization and superficiality. As seen with reference to the American market, a serial fiction market dominated by Dallas and Santa Barbara offers a less than congenial soil for a Neighbours to take root. French serial fiction production offers few more televisual referents to make Neighbours accessible/familiar/popular on French screens. Crucial here is a long history of French distaste for continuous television serial fiction: “you might say that French serial fiction quickly runs out of steam” (Bianchi 1990: 92). One French forte in this field is the series, the sequence of narratively discrete stories engaging the same characters (more or less) across (usually) weekly transmissions for some months. The best known examples are Les cinq dernières minutes, dating from 1958, Commissaire Moulin, and Maigret. Besides the series, the other forte of French television serial production is the mini-series. And the reasons underpinning the dominance of these two modes, especially the mini-series, will explain both the limited field of the French soapscape and the difficulties for a Neighbours. First, a cultural snobbery attaches to the mini-series, indicated by one critic’s sneering at the genre as representing “a serial of interminable insipidity, the television equivalent of the photo-novel or romance, destined above all to housewives [sic]” (Oppenheim 1990: 43; the sexism of this account may further point to certain assumptions about soaps among French television executives). High(er) cultural literature, in other words, commonly supplies the mini-series’ source material and cultural cachet. Second, then, French television scriptwriters have long traditions of the skills of literary compression and visualization of the psychological, skills which would be seen as wasted on scripting soaps. A further occupational/industrial factor working against the imminent success of soaps focuses on the reluctance of directors of mini-series and longer series to cede the dominant creative role to scriptwriters, the major creative force in continuous serials. And finally, actors in a country with vibrant film and theater industries are loath to commit themselves to the lengths of term required by soaps (Bianchi 1990: 96). These factors militate against the continuous fictional serial which involves a large number of characters engaged by multiple, interweaving plot strands of indeterminate duration and with limited resolution at the end of any given episode (usually 30 minutes long, and often stripped across three–five days weekly). Thus there were, at the time of Neighbours’s launch on French television, only four home-grown French soaps, of which the longest-running, Voisin, voisine, launched by La Cinq in September 1988, ran to only 360 episodes; contrast the British Coronation Street which started in 1960 and is still going! French soaps, then, “were far from proven successes” (A.W. 1989: 7). “The French have been uneasy about soaps” (Pélégrin

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37). Indeed, rumour had it that one of them, En cas de bonheur, was nicknamed En cas de déprogrammation (In Case of Happiness/In Case of Cutting from the Schedules) (Pélégrin 1989: 37). The third and least powerful element in this force field is the British contribution to French TV serial fiction. As the French preference for the high(er) cultural mini-series might lead one to expect, British production is represented by BBC-style middle-brow costume dramas such as The Forsyte Saga, rather than by such soaps as Coronation Street or EastEnders, neither of which had been screened in France when Neighbours opened. This triangular force field of high-gloss prime-time American soaps and high(er) cultural French and British costume and psychological dramas afforded no familiar televisual footholds for a Neighbours. It landed in a limbo, possibly ahead of its time, but certainly lost in 1989. Whereas its register of the everyday proved readily assimilable to the British aesthetic discourse of social realism exemplified by such community-based soaps as Brookside, EastEnders, and even Coronation Street, such a discourse is in France found less in soaps than in quite another genre, the policier. Simultaneously, Neighbours fails to measure up to two key expectations of French television serial fiction: its psychological characterization with psychologically oriented mise-en-scène, and its polished, articulate dialog involving word-games and verbal topping (Bianchi 1990: 100–101). The second and third factors working against Neighbours’s French success are linguistic and to do with television imports. Both the unfamiliarities of the English language and of other Australian televisual product doubtless played their part in Neighbours’s failure in France. Linguistically, France is more chauvinist than such European countries as Holland, Belgium, and Germany, where Australian and British soap operas and mini-series are much more widely screened. And apart from short runs of Young Doctors, A Country Practice, and a few oddball exports, Australian televisual material is known best through the mini-series All the Rivers Run, The Thornbirds, and Return to Eden (which was successful enough on TF1 in 1989 for La Cinq to rescreen it in 1991). This is a far cry from the legion Australian soaps which paved the way for Neighbours in Britain. All in all, the prospects for Neighbours in France were not promising. In the event, as in the USA, it secured no opportunity to build up its audience. Antenne 2 declined to discuss the brevity of its run or its (too) frequent rescheduling. Catherine Humblot, Le Monde’s television commentator, sees a “French mania for change in television scheduling” as a widespread phenomenon: “if a programme has no immediate success, then they move it” (Humblot 1992). Rolande Cousin, the passionate advocate of Neighbours who had previously sold Santa Barbara and Dallas in France, adds that Antenne 2’s lack of confidence in the Australian soap may have been exacerbated by its employment policy of the time of offering golden handshakes to its experienced management and installing young blood. This would have arisen from Antenne 2’s difficulties finding adequate advertising revenue to support its

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operations following the 1986 deregulation of the French television market. Since the buyers declined to comment, it might be fair to let the selling agent have the last word: “Viewers have been bluffed by vandals . . . . They were not passionate enough” (Cousin 1992). It’s inescapable. Every channel needs to create a regular and loyal audience without spending too much on doing so. There aren’t a thousand different solutions. I’ll bet you that in ten years every channel will run one or two soaps. The question is: will they be French or bought in from other countries? (Cousin, quoted by Pélégrin 1989: 37) Conclusions The major conclusion will already be clear, namely that importing countries’ cultural and televisual norms, especially the contours of their “soapscapes,” constitute the crucial determinant of the success or otherwise of an imported soap. Massive success is predicated, as for Neighbours in Britain, upon the recognizability/acceptability of the textual features described above; upon such favorable – and sometimes fortuitous – cultural and institutional features as Kylie Minogue’s singing career and the expansion of British tabloids; and upon the acceptability of difference across such axes as weather, accent, and home-ownership. Culturally and televisually, Britain is far closer to Australia than are the other two territories. In the USA and France, given the time taken to build a soap audience, Neighbours barely achieved the threshold of visibility which would have enabled its potentially attractive textual features to come into play with viewers. In both countries, executive decisions to cut the program arose from the challenging, deregulationary ethos of the late 1980s. A second conclusion concerns the conceptualization of audiences. In writing of audiences as defined by various nation states I have, of necessity, homogenized hugely diverse audience responses. As I have argued elsewhere, to hypostatize the national is to deny both the subnational and the supranational (Crofts 1993). What is entailed in this essay, on this topic, is the necessity to work at a certain level of abstraction. There is no contradiction between such work and that of Marie Gillespie in this collection (Chapter 18). Methodologically, journalistic commentary and interviews with buyers and sellers are as appropriate to the former as are surveys of, participant and non-participant observation of, and interviews with viewers to Gillespie’s ethnographic research into the social use-value of Neighbours for Punjabi youth in the outer London suburb of Southall. Macro- and micro-levels of research are both valuable and complementary.

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Notes

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