Neighbours is ending? I haven’t watched it for about 2000 years but this one hit the heart. Although all the shock and awe in the wake of the announcement really reminded me of the social media hand-wringing and tears when Glamour practically folded. ‘But I LOVE Glamour!’ people cried, followed up immediately with ‘I mean, admittedly I haven’t bought it for a few years now, but…’
I have an emotional connection to the show because I worked on it. Briefly, as a publicist in the Sydney office, not its Melbourne HQ. And despite all the promises from my employers at the time, I never once got to visit actual Erinsborough in person. No cheeky schooner at Lassiter’s for Elvin, oh no.
I think I’ve said it somewhere else on this Substack, but does it get any more cliched than to be an Australian who has worked on the show Neighbours? I took the job, as a junior publicist for the show, for a few reasons.
My friend Kimberly already worked at the network, Channel 10, and I liked her.
It was an agreed short-term contract, a six-month stint to help them get more press in the two Sydney papers, the Telegraph Mirror (as The Daily Telegraph was known at the time) and The Sydney Morning Herald. This suited my plans because I had my sights set on travelling and coming to Britain in the second half of the year.
Because I was coming to Britain. I knew you guys were nuts for Neighbours, so I figured that within a week or two of arriving here, someone will have made me the head of the BBC or something.
There isn’t an Aussie alive who isn’t completely mystified by the UK’s rabid devotion to Neighbours, and believe me that includes a lot of the cast. Our press was always full of wonder at your obsession with a soap that most of us could take or leave. It got watched by us because it was on at tea-time and featured unchallenging, amusing enough storylines that would never scandalise anyone’s nana. With dinners on laps we enjoyed Scott and Charlene’s wedding well enough but truthfully, it was far from the main event when it came to the TV we loved. Why anyone would wag school to watch it or, you know, move their whole bloody life to the other side of the world because of it, was baffling to us.
But this Beatlemania-esque love convinced me it would be solid gold on my CV, so in February of 1992, I arrived at Channel 10, ready for Ramsay Street action.
It was one of the least enjoyable jobs I have ever had in my life. I was young and inexperienced and no one had the time to train me in how to be a publicist. I think everyone assumed I’d just know how to do it. Did I assume that too? Maybe, I can’t remember. But here’s what my job entailed: get the show talked about in the newspapers. That was it. As I said, no one in Sydney was that bothered about the show. The Neighbours aficionados amongst you will know that by 1992 Kylie and Jason had long left to pursue their supernova pop careers. The show was still doing well in the UK - and I strongly suspect it would have been axed a long long time ago were it not for the affection it’s enjoyed here - but in Australia, the daily ratings made for depressing reading. It had the reputation of being a bit of a lame duck and as such, do you think any of the showbiz reporters in Sydney would return the calls from the young girl they’d never heard of who was now on the publicity beat for Neighbours?
There was one particularly humiliating day when my boss, the fearsome Amanda Zachariah, a glamorous, well-known media identity in her own right back then, gave me a dressing down in front of the whole team for having secured no publicity for the show in the four or five weeks since I’d joined. The problem as far as I could see it was that there were no new hot cast members for the press to make a story around, and all the storylines seemed to wrap up neatly at the end of every half an hour. A soap needs cliffhangers and at the time it really felt like the biggest drama was things like ‘Helen’s left the iron on’. Amanda took to rolling her eyes at me and making me go and get her lunch every day.
Then, a gift from the universe: An actual god/genius/personal saviour of mine who I’ve never met decided to cast Natalie Imbruglia.
We can all wring our hands at how terribly wrong this is, but when the lead team from Neighbours HQ in Melbourne showed me their first photo session with this absolutely stunning young girl, I was straight on the phone to Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph to say, believe me, you will want to see these pictures. A week later, Natalie flew to Sydney and gave her first interview and we had their magazine’s cover.
(It was during that trip to Sydney that I sat across from Natalie and nearly choked on some calamari. It wasn’t long before I was properly panicking and she was getting up to slap my back, but instead I literally pulled the string of it out of my windpipe. She cried with a mix of disgust and amusement. Sorry Natalie.)
At around the same time, the BBC made my year by deciding to censor a storyline that featured a young couple nearly ‘having relations’, unaware that they were vaguely related. I stayed up all night making phone calls to the BBC in London, spending hours locating the right person who could confirm that they had slashed the incestuous overtones from the episode due to the early viewing hour. (Yet Hollyoaks, aimed at high school viewers would one day become one of the rudest shows I’ve ever seen on TV, but never mind that now). That confirmed, I then spent the night trying to get hold of a prominent journalist at the Telegraph Mirror who loved it. Dependable, wholesome old Neighbours being censored for being too rude? She told me that the only thing that would keep it off the front page was the Harbour Bridge burning down.
After nervously checking that I could still see the Harbour Bridge on my morning train ride, I strode triumphantly into the office. I wasn’t expecting to be carried through the corridors on the shoulders of my colleagues, but I was a little dismayed when, not only was nothing said, but they all traipsed off to some lunchtime party. I was ordered to stay in the office and answer the phones.
But that afternoon, my boss Amanda came back, clearly having had a lunchtime sherry or two and told me that the journalist I’d worked with the night before had made a point of seeking her out to say how great I’d been on helping her confirm all the details for the Neighbours story. She stopped asking me to get her lunch every day. When I did leave the job to come to the UK, she wrote me the most glowing reference I’ve ever had, before or since. She actually said to me on my last day, ‘And I was so horrible to you in the beginning wasn’t I? I’m really sorry.’ Fair play.
When I started the job, I thought it would be hours on end of hanging out with the cast at glamorous photo shoots and parties. There was very very little in the way of that. Occasionally Scott Michaelson, aka Brad Willis - who was always very charming and sweet and remembered me years later when our paths crossed in Britain - would fly up to Sydney. As the resident ‘hunk’ he was in constant demand for photo shoots and it would be my job to make sure he got from A to B. Not particularly taxing, except for the time he needed me to babysit his actual surfboard. Someone should have filmed my Mr Bean-worthy routine of trying to shove it into the back of a taxi.
One thing I used to dread were shopping centre appearances. Sometimes I - all 8 puny stone of me at the time - was not only the publicist but ‘security’ in the face of hoards of screaming teenagers ready to crash the barricade and mount the cavalcade of stars who were standing, defenceless,on a small stage outside a Target somewhere. There was never any plan either, just get on stage and say… something to the crowd. Stefan Dennis (aka Paul Robinson) made me laugh once when he got up and just yelled ‘Neighbours!’ a few times, with a few added fist pumps before saying, ‘Right, that’s the plugs done, I’m off.’
There was the time Kristian Schmid and I were chased down, by about 50 teens, when we couldn’t find our car. They started running at us, so we started running too. I knew they weren’t at all interested in me but the Hunger Games vibes were strong. When we were finally in the safety of the car, someone yelled, ‘KRISTIAN, YOU’RE UGLY!’ and I will always love how hard he immediately laughed.
There were other goings-on that I can’t really talk about because I don’t have lawyer funds. But I will tease you by saying one involves the cast member who was really annoyed with me at a concert - they’d just bought a load of ecstasy pills and were appalled at my lameness when I declined the offer of one. There was also the actor who confided in me about their affair with a co-star. It was such an inappropriate and downright icky situation that I felt burdened by the knowledge and just wished I didn’t know.
I can’t lie, I wasn’t upset when my contract ended. The urge to get to London was strong. I’ve said before that the one thing being a publicist taught me was how much I really loved being a magazine journalist. I knew that when I came to Britain, I wanted to apply for magazine jobs, not publicity jobs. I know brilliant PRs who get a lot of satisfaction from it. But I couldn’t ever get over the feeling that I wasn’t creating anything, or getting to say anything, just facilitating that for others. In short, it just wasn’t for me.
Shock and horror: Having worked in a junior role for a very short time on a huge TV show did not, as I had confidently predicted, have London’s media rolling out the red carpet for me upon my arrival. But to this day, I still love to tell people that I worked for Neighbours.
About 8 years ago, not too long after arriving in WA, I was down in Esperance (700km from Perth) working on a video series for state tourism. Our primary talent was an English guy, Rich Keam, who'd got "the best job in the world," travelling the state for six months eating and drinking (not dissimilar too my actual job now.)
One of the days was spent with a local photographer, Dan Paris, who for the Neighbours superfans was Drew, Libby Kennedy's husband. I think he met his end on the show in a horse riding accident?
Anyway, he's super amiable, a local that everyone knows in this tiny town on the wild Southern Ocean coast. But for me and Rich both being of prime Neighbours fandom age, it's this very weird experience that goes mostly unsaid - even when I bogged the 4WD I was driving and wheels spinning saw Dan running down the beach from his vehicle; opening the door he looked at the gears, and leaned over and put me in 4WD mode. I'd assumed that it was always on - being a useless Pom.
Then, scrabbling over a rock face, Dan in his wet suit about to dive for abalone, Rich and I paused and then burst into laughter. In hushed tones "this is so fucking weird. That's Drew from Neighbours. In a wetsuit. About to dive for our lunch!"
The day ended on one of the impossibly long and beautiful beaches down there with Dan cooking the living shit out of this fresh caught abalone. I was secretly pleased that he got at least one thing wrong that day. Funny that I'd not watched the show for close to 15 years and still I was kind of starstruck by this strange meeting.