The news that Neighbours had been cancelled – after 37 years on air – broke in March. But for those in the industry, the beginning of the end for the long-running soap came a long time ago – back in 2010, when Australia’s Network Ten made a decision that would end up haunting it.
“Ten made a strategic mistake – I think one of the biggest mistakes [it has made] in the last two decades, actually,” says Steve Allen, a longtime media analyst at Pearman Media, a Sydney-based agency that buys TV ad space.
Ten moved Neighbours from the network’s main station to its first digital-only channel, now called 10Peach – but viewers didn’t follow.
“Digital channels were in their infancy then,” Allen says. “Not all televisions could easily tune into them … people weren’t used to it.” As a result Neighbours’ ratings “absolutely plummeted”. (Network Ten did not respond to requests for comment on this piece.)
Audience data provided by the Seven Network shows that Neighbours’ yearly average metro audience fell from 946,000 in 2001 to 337,000 in 2011 (a year after the launch of 10Peach). Over the same time period, Home & Away went from 1.395 million to 1.039 million – a much smaller drop.
“Basically, they killed Neighbours off then and there,” Allen says. “It’s been at half the audience or less, compared to Home & Away, ever since.”
Neighbours and Home & Away, the two giants of Australian soaps, both became huge cultural exports, launched the careers of some of Australia’s biggest stars and kept swathes of the country’s TV industry employed for more than three decades. But only Home & Away – native to Channel Seven – has survived, with the last episode of Neighbours to air in Australia on 28 July.
The cancellation of Neighbours reignited the age-old debate over which soap reigns superior. Was this definitive proof that the shores of Summer Bay were a more appealing setting than Erinsborough, the fictional Melbourne suburb where Neighbours was set? Or did Home & Away simply deliver more exciting storylines and more beach scenes?
incredible that home and away have beaten neighbours to an MH370 storyline
— Tiger Webb (@tfswebb) August 9, 2016
But behind the scenes, the soaps have long been chess pieces amid broader strategies that began to diverge more than a decade ago.
Since 2008 Neighbours had been largely bankrolled by Network Ten’s UK partner station Channel 5, who opted this year to divert that funding to local programming instead. This spelled the end for the show, after its production company Fremantle failed to find a new UK partner and Ten declined to fund the production alone. While Neighbours has been a bigger success in the UK (reportedly reeling in around 1 million viewers a day, compared with Home & Away’s 400,000), Australian audiences have long preferred Home & Away, which films its exterior scenes at Sydney’s Palm Beach.
But Summer Bay’s lead accelerated after Neighbours was moved to 10Peach. For the show to make enough money in ad revenue to pay for itself, Allen says, Ten would have needed to admit it had made the wrong call and move the show back to its main channel. That’s easier said than done.
“Where do they program it? They can’t program it against Home & Away at 7pm. They can’t put it in prior to Home & Away at 6.30pm because they’ve invested so much in The Project [which airs in that slot on Ten], and some of the stars of The Project are on multiyear contracts. So they’re between a rock and a hard place, really.”
Home & Away has sat in Seven’s 7pm time slot for decades. “From a programming point of view, it helps underpin the whole evening,” says David Knox, the editor of industry blog TV Tonight. “Soapie viewers are rusted on – so you can feed them into your next show and promote other content around it.”
Home & Away has been sold to 145 countries across its history. That it has always been owned and produced by Seven alone gives the station “international sales and a very significant financial and emotional incentive” to keep the show running, Knox says.
Another incentive for Seven to keep Home & Away is that it helps the channel meet government-mandated quotas for content made in Australia, which Seven would otherwise struggle to meet. Ten, which has ramped up its amount of local production over the past decade, “wouldn’t have much trouble these days” hitting those quotas, Allen says.
But perhaps the biggest incentive Seven has to keep Home & Away is the demographic it reaches for advertisers. “Both Neighbours and Home & Away have much broader appeal than you might initially think, because for 30 years, people have grown up with these shows [and keep watching them],” Allen says.
Unlike shows such as Married at First Sight, which have a loyal but specific demographic, both soaps span young and middle-aged Australians, with a more even gender split. Neighbours lost much of that in the move to 10Peach, increasing Seven’s percentage of ad revenue and giving it more money to reinvest in other popular shows, helping the broadcaster retain its lead over Ten in the overall network ratings (which saw Seven snag 29.1% of the total audience share in the latest ratings year, ahead of Ten’s 17.8%).
And that, Allen says, is what matters most. “Television is 100% driven by advertising,” he says. “That’s how they get money through the door.”
So when Neighbours airs its final episode on 28 July in Australia, and 1 August in the UK, fans can at least take comfort in the fact that its end has little to do with the content of the show.
“The dynamics at play are quite – I mean, when you stand back from it you go, God, it’s like watching a gladiator [match],” Allen says, laughing. “And it is.”
