The residents of Ramsay Street have survived almost four decades of affairs, disasters and terrible haircuts – but in the end it might be the popularity of a 1930s Yorkshire vet that finally kills off Neighbours.
The long-running soap opera that launched the careers of Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie faces the axe after Channel 5 confirmed it would stop airing the series this summer. The broadcaster no longer wants to spend millions of pounds a year on the show and is instead looking to use its programme budget to reach upmarket audiences with original British dramas – driven by the success of All Creatures Great And Small, its hit revival of the series about rural life in the Yorkshire Dales.
Neighbours is made in Australia, but its popularity has waned in its homeland. As a result, the cost of making it is largely met by the UK’s Channel 5, which has been the show’s British home since it poached the programme from the BBC in 2008 as part of a £300m deal.
“Neighbours will no longer air on Channel 5 beyond this summer,” said a spokesperson. “We recognise that there will be disappointment about this decision, however our current focus is on increasing our investment in original UK drama, which has strong appeal for our viewers.”
Unless Neighbours’ production company Fremantle can urgently find a new overseas broadcaster to subsidise it, the longest-running drama in Australian television history will end this summer after 37 years on screen. It is consistently one of Channel 5’s most watched programmes, attracting roughly a million viewers a day, but it is expensive to make and its cancellation appears to be part of the broadcaster’s efforts to shed its reputation as the television home of “films, football and fucking”.
Channel 5 has reinvented itself over the past decade under its boss, Ben Frow, often going against industry trends and embracing older regional audiences who still watch broadcast television when its rivals chase younger viewers on streaming services. As a result, it has steadily built its viewing aided by programmes about the royals, steam trains and almost anything with Yorkshire in the title.
Channel 5 used to rely on buying up the rights to US dramas, but it decided to return to commissioning its own original British dramas in 2008. Its breakthrough hit was All Creatures Great and Small, a reboot of the much-loved BBC series of the 1970s and 80s, which launched during the pandemic, It attracted the channel’s highest ratings in five years and has been a critical success.
The Guardian’s review described it as “a sweet, gentle, deliberately mild remake of a programme you can vaguely recollect watching all those years ago” and “the television equivalent of taking your brain out and dunking it into a bucket of warm tea”. It has also reached large audiences in the US, where viewers saw the appeal of watching a vet drive a vintage car across the English countryside before being kicked by a cow.
Although such shows are expensive to make, they can also attract big audiences and the wealthier viewers that advertisers want to reach. Last week Channel 5 aired the original four-part series The Teacher starring Sheridan Smith, which attracted more than 2 million viewers every night – substantially more than were watching Channel 4 in the same time slot. After other hits, including the thriller The Drowning, Channel 5 says it intends to double its spending on original UK drama this year.
Frow, an idiosyncratic industry figure, has already canned other longrunning Channel 5 series including Big Brother to free up budget and airtime for his own commissions. A spokesperson declined to comment on the suggestion that the channel might also want to axe Home and Away, another long-running Australia soap opera that it has aired for two decades.
As for Neighbours, the show’s cast and crew have been warned that filming could stop in June, leaving them months to wrap up all the existing storylines. There is speculation they could try to persuade previous stars – such as Minogue and Donovan – to return to the programme for one last appearance, in the hope that good Neighbours can become good ends.
