Month: July 2022

The End of the Road (or Street, rather)

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1980s, TV

Spoiler warning: Neighbours has ended.

I have to admit, until the recent reports of its impending demise I’d have been hard-pressed to say whether it was still going or not. I don’t know when I stopped watching exactly, although I daresay any Neighbours afficionado could work it out from the fact that I still think of Dr Karl as “the new guy in Des’s house”. Certainly, when I left off the show was in rude health – so too were Jim Robinson and Helen Daniels and, as far as I can remember, Bouncer the Dog.

All these years later I gave into the hype (of course I did!) and watched the final episode. I went in feeling slightly guilty – like those people who vociferously complain about their local bank being closed even though they never actually use it, so I was bemoaning the passing of something that was ending because I’d stopped watching it. (I know, nice of me to take the blame isn’t it.)

Years ago, in what I’m going to call its heyday, Neighbours used to get something like eleven million viewers – and in that long-past golden age it seemed to be the show that everybody watched. When I did my A-Levels there was a girl in my English class, probably the first proper Goth I ever met, and absolutely not the sort of person you’d expect to be interested in sun-soaked perky Aussie melodrama. All these years later I can’t even remember her name, but I do vividly recall that she nipped home at lunchtime to watch Scott and Charlene’s wedding because she couldn’t bear to wait until teatime. (Her verdict, incidentally, was that Kylie was trying to be raunchy during the kissing bit.)

That huge audience has dwindled since then, and at some point passed beyond the Channel 5 ratings event horizon. So I felt a little hypocritical tuning in to watch the final episode, like the spectre at the feast.

Fortunately (or perhaps just very insensitively) my feelings of guilt didn’t last long – initially replaced by confusion as to what was going on, although it’s remarkable how quickly you get back into the swing of it. In fact, it turned out to be just really nice to meet up with old friends one last time; in the same way as half a dozen famous faces I recognised were pleased to come back. No doubt there were at least half a dozen others I didn’t recognise, but which will have similarly delighted fans of the show in the nineties and noughties.

The plot, what there was of it, wasn’t terribly important – it certainly didn’t matter that I entirely missed the appearance of Toadie’s dead wife, or that I didn’t know exactly which number wife Paul Robinson is onto now (going back to those afficionados trying to carbon date my era, I remember him married to the spiky-haired Gail, and then to at least one of a set of twins). Along the way there was something oddly moving about seeing the ghost of Madge momentarily sat alongside Harold; I also spotted Shane Ramsay briefly, not a ghost but very much in the flesh based on the fact that he promptly ended up in bed with somebody I didn’t recognise; and it’s entirely possible that all three Lucy Robinsons were under my nose the whole time.

Of course the main hype was around the return of Scott and his raunchy-kisser of a wife Charlene – from that very golden age which I recall with such affection. True, despite some tremendous work on the part of the editing team, it was sort of obvious that Kylie and Jason were filming on a different day to everybody else, but that didn’t detract from a very cleverly put-together finale. We begin by thinking it’s the end of an era because everybody is selling up and moving away; and by the delightfully-improbable end everybody has decided to stay after all, giving us the definite sense that life in Ramsay Street is still going on.

Except that, in future, nobody will be watching.

(Um, which is pretty much the reason it’s ended of course… Awkward.)

Signing Off

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in BBC, Childhood

Controversial perhaps, but I’m really going to miss him.

Oh I know he’ll be with us until the Autumn, but that’ll soon come round… and then, no more ‘Steve Wright in the Afternoon’ on Radio 2. I know!! If there’s been a more surprising news story in the past week, I’ve yet to hear it.

Radio’s an odd thing. Certainly I know I take it for granted. It’s never ‘appointment listening’, I never make a point of putting it on and giving it my full attention – it’s just there, a convenient soundtrack when I need it. In the car is the obvious example, or in the background at work, or (in the very specific case of Paul Gambaccini’s Pick of the Pops) when I’m mopping the kitchen floor.

But on the other hand, despite my cavalier approach to it, and my treating it as unimportant and disposable; at the same time I definitely do expect it to be there, fixed and unchanging. In every other medium – in film, on TV, books even – we’re always after the next big thing, something new. With radio I think we want, we like, it to stay the same.

Hence why it seems entirely natural that Steve Wright has been doing the same show since before the millennium (and Ken Bruce seems to have been doing likewise since God was a boy). Even relative newcomer Jeremy Vine has been in his lunchtime slot for 19 years – and there’s maybe no better indicator of the seemingly-fixed and unchanging, monumental nature of radio than to point out that, name aside, what Mr Vine is actually presenting is ‘The Jimmy Young show’.

The voice of Jimmy Young, always sounding ever so slightly as if he had a boiled sweet in the corner of his mouth, instantly makes me think of Summer holidays – perhaps wistfully and probably inaccurately, nevertheless I associate his voice with sitting in the back seat hearing him during long car journeys. Just as Terry Wogan was the voice that heralded each school day, during his first stint on the breakfast show when he made Dallas a household name and when he insisted (which is why I still sing it of course) that the opening line to ABBA’s Super Trouper refers to calling “from Tesco.”

And Steve Wright is the voice of teenage days, more specifically the thrilling relief of the bus ride home from college. That was on Radio 1 of course, and yet it seemed entirely right that, years later, when I came back to radio, he had graduated to doing pretty much the same show on Radio 2.

That’s not a complaint or a criticism, and although it’s not actually the same show there’s enough comfortable familiarity to give the sense that he’s been a fixture for even longer than the twenty-three years he’s been there. So the largely-nameless posse of Radio 1 is now Tim Smith, Bobbie Pryor, and Janey Lee Grace (with the sexiest laugh in radio). The Friday Montage is not that distant a relative of the 3 o’clock Non-Stop Oldies. And there’s a very clear line from the ‘Factoids’ of today to the ‘Another True Story’ of yesteryear.

He’s not everybody’s cup of tea, I’ll admit. My colleague at work (who’s a bit younger and a lot less nostalgic) isn’t as keen, but even he has come to accept that Steve Wright on Radio 2 is infinitely preferable to being bombarded by Johnny Vaughan on Radio X. His main bugbear is Friday’s final feature, 45 minutes of “Serious Jockin’” which is basically dance with a heavy beat. I don’t mind the music so much, but the pedant in me struggles with Steve’s claim that taking the ‘g’ off the end of the word is a pun. It’s not clever or witty wordplay, not in my book anyway; on the contrary (and as the apparently never-ending stream of ‘no-g’ messages makes clear) any idiot can do it.

Be all that as it may, I will still very much miss Steve Wright (in the afternoon) when the time comes. Still, I suppose we have to accept that nobody can go on forever.

Not even Prime Ministers…