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ABSTRACT
This article considers two overlapping phenomena: the huge popularity of the Australian soap opera Neighbours in Britain during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the failure of the Labour Party to mount a successful electoral challenge until the leadership of Tony Blair. It argues that Neighbours’ appeal—community focussed, friendly, classless, unthreatening, a mixed economy, and in some ways small ‘c’ conservative—was precisely the platform that Labour needed to convince voters (particularly women and those living in suburbs) that it failed to reach between 1983 and 1992. Neighbours offered an albeit imagined and fictionalised window into Bob Hawke’s Australia that many of the British electorate found attractive, but until the Labour party tapped into such support, significant numbers of ‘floating voters’ would continue to back the Social Democratic Party and, subsequently, John Major’s Conservatives. There were generational dynamics at play here—with the 8 in 10 12–15 year olds who watched the show in 1990 unable to vote at earlier elections, but joining the franchise in time for the first Blair landslide of 1997. Neighbours was of course not the only influence on such voters, but it was a meaningful one.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to the anonymous referees, those figures interviewed by the author, and to Nick Garland, Rohan McWilliam, Rachel Ryder, and Robert Saunders who read through and commented on early drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. ‘Television ownership in private domestic households, 1956–2019,’ via
https://www.closer.ac.uk/data/television-ownership-in-domestic-households; by the Spring of 1990, there were around 750,000 Sky satellite dishes in Britain as per ‘British Sky Broadcasting Group plc—Company profile’ viahttps://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/41/British-Sky-Broadcasting-Group-plc.html#ixzz6tbPoBUCL
2. Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB), ‘TV since 1981’ via https://www.barb.co.uk/resources/tv-facts/tv-since-1981/1990/top10
3. Indeed, given that 16.7 m watched the semi final on BBC 1, and 8.5 m on ITV, Neighbours topped the BARB ratings for a single programme that year. This is in turn complicated by the BARB figure for Neighbours aggregating lunchtime and teatime audiences (4–5% of viewers claimed to watch both editions)—but also not counting those aged under four years old in its figures. With over 2m of this latter category in late 1980s Britain, and the demographics of general Neighbours’ audience—including a significant number of young parents with said children—the total ‘true’ audience is hard to ascertain.
4. See BARB, “TV since 1981,” above.
5. Ibid.
6. Liverpool Echo, 2 January 1988
7. Liverpool Echo, 27 October 1988
8. ‘Reg Watson obituary,’ Guardian, 13 October 2019 via https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/oct/13/reg-watson-obituary
9. Crofts, “Global Neighbours,” 110.
10. Ward, O’Regan, and Goldsmith, “From Neighbours to Packed to the Rafters,” 167.
11. Cunningham and Jacka, Australian Television and International Mediascapes, 135–40.
12. Los Angeles Times, 3 June 1991
13. Gillespie, “TV Talk in a London Punjabi Peer Culture,” Brunel University PhD thesis (1992), 191
14. It is missing, for example, from Dyrenfurth’s Mateship: A Very Australian History and Butera’s ‘Neo-mateship’ in the 21st century.’
15. Crofts, “Global Neighbours,” 107.
16. Ibid; ‘Television Audience Reaction Report,’ BARB week 3/1990, WAC/R9/1099/1, BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading, UK, placed its location as the least important selling point (42%) compared to it being good escapism (63%) and having the right balance of humour and drama (62%).
17. For an early highlighting of such issues, see Ross McKibbin, ‘Why the Tories Lost.’
18. Evans, Curtice and Norris, “New Labour, New Tactical Voting?” 65–79.
19. See e.g. Alex Marland, ‘The brand image of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in international context,’ Carr, Charlie Chaplin, Hart, Hitler’s American Friends, Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, Street, ‘Celebrity Politicians.’
20. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 299.
21. Ibid, 237.
22. ‘Television Audience Reaction Report,’ BARB week 3/1990, WAC/R91097/2. 83% of 12–15 year olds claimed to watch Neighbours. Of these, 83% watched ‘every’ or ‘most’ days, and a further 6% at least three times a week. Thus 74% of 12–15 year olds all told were watching at least the majority of daily transmissions.
23. See John, ‘UK Rave Culture and the Thatcherite Hegemony, 1988–94,’ and Schaffer, ‘Fighting Thatcher with comedy.’
24. Moran, Armchair Nation, 9 and 11.
25. Cowan, “The Politics of the Past in Britain, 1939–1990,” 209.
26. ‘TOP Summary Report,’ WAC/R9/1938/1, Week 30/1996.
27. See e.g. Widdecombe’s Watching Neighbours Twice A Day…
28. Moores ‘“Thatcher’s troops?”’
29. See, e.g. Garland, ‘Social democracy, the decline of community, and community politics in post-war Britain,’ in Nathan Yeowell (ed), Rethinking Labour’s Past, ch.8 and Payling, ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’.
30. Cockett, Thinking the unthinkable, and, more recently, Jackson, ‘The think tank archipelago.’
31. Carr, March of the Moderates. See also From, The New Democrats and the Return to Power, ch. 18.
32. Bell, Dreamworlds of Race.
33. Important to note here that given Neighbours’ transmission time and family audience, there was certainly nothing to worry Labour’s morally censorious elements (ably chronicled by Bloomfield, ‘Labour’s liberalism’), either.
34. Manwaring, The Search for Democratic Renewal, 5.
35. McKibbin, Democracy and Political Culture, 4—though see the correctives in ch.7.
36. O’Hara and Stewart, ‘The land with the midas touch’.
37. O’Reilly, The New Progressive Dilemma, 19.
38. Pierson, “The Labor Legacy,” 566
39. For a discussion of this, see Kristensen, “In Essence still a British Country.”
40. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000, 202
41. Mattinson, Talking to a Brick Wall, 41.
42. Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? 6.
43. ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s,’ in Neil Kinnock Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, KNNK/2/1/96
44. BARB research for Neighbours drew on around 3,000 responses. Typical ICM polling, e.g. as in Aberdeen Press and Journal, 11 March 1992, was near to half this figure.
45. Mattinson, Talking to a Brick Wall, 337.
46. Ibid, 93.
47. Ibid, 49.
48. Rosalind Shorrocks, ‘In what ways does gender matter for voting behaviour in GE2017?’ (2017) via In what ways does gender matter for voting behaviour in GE2017? | British Politics and Policy at LSE
49. McCarthy, Double Lives, 18, 52, 176.
50. West, ‘This is a Man’s Country’.
51. Hall and Jacques, “Introduction,” 16.
52. Mattinson, Talking to a Brick Wall, 53.
53. Baroness Rebuck and Deborah Mattinson to the author, 22 and 25 June 2021. Correspondence with author reveals Charles Clarke (17 June 2021) and Neil Kinnock (15 June 2021) were also not viewers.
54. Mort, “The Politics of Consumption,” 165.
55. Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,“ 295, 300.
56. They made three gains in the Senate to take them to 30 of 64 seats—broadly enough, given the Liberal-National coalition was reduced to 28, to pass legislation.
57. Specifically Forest Hill, Nunawading, and Vermont South.
58. The Age, 24 June 1987
59. ‘Bob Hawke’s old seat shows why Labour is vulnerable in Victoria,’ Financial Review (2016), via https://www.afr.com/politics/bob-hawkes-old-seat-shows-why-labour-is-vulnerable-in-victoria-20160127-gmetbz
60. This would prove difficult but not impossible. Both aforementioned Melbourne seats would flip back to the Liberals by 1987, though would prove winnable again in the 1990s and 2000s. They were now at least firmly in play.
61. O’Reilly, The New Progressive Dilemma, 23.
62. Pierson, “The Labor Legacy,” 570
63. Ibid, 572
64. Kinnock to author, 15 June 2021.
65. Briefing note, 22 November [undated but presumably 1989], KNNK 19/2/87
66. Pierson, “The Labor Legacy,” 587
67. Humphrys, How Labour Built Neoliberalism, 3.
68. Pierson, “The Labor Legacy,” 568
69. Ibid., 588
70. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 4102.0—Australian Social Trends (2001), via https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/3487ff0af8b51db7ca2570ec000c6b0c!OpenDocument
71. Geoff Paine to the author, 20 June 2021
72. ‘Tony Blair’s Tribute to Bob Hawke,’ (2019) via https://institute.global/tony-blair/tony-blairs-tribute-bob-hawke
73. Albeit, as Kelly argues (The End of Certainty, 61), then leading to problems regarding productivity. Keating’s doubts at 68.
74. Pierson, “The Labor Legacy,” 571
75. Kelly, The End of Certainty, 62
76. Ibid., 64.
77. Neil Kinnock to the author, 15 June 2021.
78. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech at State Government dinner in Melbourne,’ 3 August 1988 via https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107311
79. Thatcher-O’Brien interview, 4 August 1988, via https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107081
80. Hawke, The Hawke Memoirs, 320–2.
81. Kinnock to the author, 15 June 2021
82. ‘Looking Forward’, 28 September 1989, within KNNK 10/1/43
83. House of Commons Debates, 7 June 1989, vol 154, col 249.
84. House of Commons Debates, 9 May 2019, vol 659, col 735.
85. See note 83 above.
86. For this incident in its wider context, see Hazarika and Hamilton, ch. 6.
87. Radice, Diaries 1980–2001, 196.
88. See note 81 above.
89. House of Commons Debates, 19 May 1989, vol 153, col 598.
90. House of Lords Debates, 25 January 1988, vol 492, col 485.
91. House of Commons Debates, 3 February 1989, Vol 146, col 560.
92. Moran, Armchair Nation, 360.
93. ‘Note for meeting with Red Wedge,’ 18 April [undated but 1987] KNNK/2/1/84; Murphy, 292
94. Data via officialcharts.com
95. Bigoted attitudes would sometimes be expressed, but relatively swiftly repudiated. For example, in episode 2175 (broadcast in Australia in June 1994) the blokeish Doug Willis is shown to be uncomfortable with the concept of a gay teacher nicknamed ‘Macca’—‘why didn’t he say something [about his sexuality] before?’ With Doug listening on, his wife Pam then asks a neighbour Mark, ‘does it worry you?’ Mark replies: ‘what, that he’s gay? No, why should it? He’s still the same bloke, isn’t he?’ Within the same episode Doug declares himself to have been a ‘fool,’ and he and Macca reconcile. See the episode descriptions at www.neighboursepisodes.com
96. Even with nominal decriminalisation, through the 1980s gay men in Victoria continued to suffer harassment from police under a vaguely worded ‘soliciting for immoral purposes’ clause in state legislation.
97. Murphy, ‘The ‘Rainbow Alliance’ or the Focus Group? 314.
98. Labour Party Youth Strategy—General Election 1987, 3 April 1987, KNNK/2/1/84.
99. Ibid.
100. Clarke, The Dark Knight and the Puppet Master, 173.
101. As per IPSOS-Mori, ‘How Britain Voted Since October 1974,’ https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-october-1974. The data here denotes percentages of those who turned out to vote. Conversely BARB data, except as indicated (e.g. 'Neighbours' viewers'), refers to everyone (rendering the soap's numbers even more impressive).
102. See ‘Observing the 1980s: Mass Observation,’ entry S496 (1989 Autumn TV) at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/home/mass-observation.
103. See entry C1191 (1989 Autumn TV) at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/home/mass-observation.
104. See entry B1989 (1989 Autumn TV) at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/home/mass-observation.
105. ‘Television Audience Reaction Report,’ BARB weeks 26–29/1991, WAC/R9/1100/5.
106. See B1215 and S496 (both 1989 Autumn TV) at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/home/mass-observation.
107. Widdecombe, Watching Neighbours Twice A Day…, 77.
108. ‘Television Audience Reaction Report,’ BARB week 3/1990, WAC/R9/1099/1.
109. Connolly, “Generational Conflict and the Sociology of Generations,” 158.
110. Edwards, “Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism and Education,” 203–14, 209, Cooper, “The youth unemployment ‘crisis’ of the 1980s,” 81–88; and Finn, Training Without Jobs.
111. Widdecombe, Watching Neighbours Twice A Day…, 78.
112. See C1191 (1989 Autumn TV) at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/home/mass-observation.
113. Widdecombe, Watching Neighbours Twice A Day…, 78.
114. Reading Evening Post, 25 July 1990.
115. Reading Evening Post, 2 April 1990.
116. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 14 May 1991.
117. Birmingham Evening Mail, 27 July 1991.
118. See the data at WAC R9/1099/1 (1990) and WAC R9/1938/1 (1996).
119. BARB week 3/1990, as above.
120. As per Los Angeles Times, 3 June 1991.
121. See note 71 above.
122. The Stage, 28 November 1985.
123. All via WAC/R9/1099/1, as above.
124. Irish Independent, 6 February 1988.
125. Mercado, Super Aussie Soaps, 210.
126. The show’s geography was actually somewhat ambiguous until the early 1990s—though newspapers in Britain and Ireland described Melbourne as its setting much earlier (e.g. Irish Independent, 1 July 1987 and Reading Evening Post, 29 December 1987).
127. Jones, “White Australia, national identity and population change,” 110–28.
128. Widdecombe, 103. Italics in original.
129. The Guardian, 2 November 1993.
130. 31 votes were cast for more sex.
131. Findings broadly replicated nationwide as per data on Australian serials, 1989, in WAC/R9/1098/3.
132. Gillespie, appendix. In general, the five day a week Home and Away lagged several million viewers behind Neighbours, and never made a BARB annual top 10 position.
133. Paine.
134. ‘Commuting trends in England, 1988–2015,’ via publishing.service.gov.uk.
135. As below, in 1997 50% of C2s and 59% of DEs voted for Labour.
136. Mattinson, Winning for Women, 11.
137. Ibid., 11, 10.
138. Ibid., 8.
139. Radice, Southern Discomfort, 2. My emphasis.
140. Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, 59.
141. Radice, Southern Discomfort, 7.
142. Compiled from https://neighbours-soap-opera.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Original_characters.
143. Radice, Southern Discomfort, 7.
144. Ibid, 24.
145. Ibid, 15.
146. Mattinson, Winning for Women, 33.
147. Bacchus to the author, 14 June 2021.
148. All via WAC R9/1099/1, as above.
149. Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty,’ 129–152, 144.
150. Harman and Mattinson, Winning for Women, 5.
151. Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, 50.
152. Ibid., 52.
153. Ibid., 16.
154. Ibid., 3.
155. See note 12 above.
156. Liverpool Echo, 1 December 1988.
157. The Age, 23 March 1989.
158. Taylor, “The birth and rebirth of the Liberal Democrats,” 21–31, 26.
159. See S496 (1987 election special) at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/home/mass-observation.
160. Bacchus.
161. Ibid.
162. Ibid..
163. The records of the Cambridge University Neighbours Appreciation Society are available at the Cambridge University Library, Special Collections, O.V. 128/454.
164. Bacchus.
165. Ibid.
166. Ibid.
167. Ibid.
168. Ibid.
169. Ibid.
170. Ibid.
171. Campbell, “New Times Towns,” 279.
172. Ibid., 94.
173. Ibid., 295.
174. Belfast Telegraph, 14 August 1982.
175. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 21 April 1988.
176. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 23 November 1985.
177. House of Commons Debates, 8 February 1989, vol 146, col 1016.
178. House of Commons Debates, 10 December 1987, vol 124, col 649; Evening Herald (Dublin), 5 April 1988.
179. Irish Independent, 19 December 1987.
180. See BARB’s The Week's Viewing in Summary including regional datasets at the Archives and Special Collections, Sir Michael Cobham Library, Bournemouth University.
181. See BARB’s The Week's Viewing in Summary, 8 May 1988 and 6 May 1990 data, ibid.
182. Hewitt and Mattinson, 5.
183. Moran, “The Strange Birth of Middle England,” 234.
184. See note 133 above..
185. Moran, “Birth,” 234.
186. Radice, Southern Discomfort, 10.
187. Major’s 1993 Conservative Party conference speech via http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=139.
188. Widdecombe, Watching Neighbours Twice A Day…, 224.
189. Mandelson and Liddle, The Blair Revolution, 32.
190. Gould, 233; Hale, ‘The communitarian ‘philosophy of New Labour,’ 87–107.
191. Mandelson and Liddle, The Blair Revolution, 33.
192. Blair foreword to Cornford (ed), John Macmurray, 9.
193. Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, 233.
194. The Age (Melbourne), 28 July 1990.
195. Carr, March of the Moderates.
196. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 March 2020.
197. The Times, 25 October 1988.
198. Daily Star, 13 December 1989.
199. Mattinson, Winning for Women, 171.
200. Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, 279.
201. Ibid., 223.
202. See note 182 above.
203. E.g. over ‘VAT on school fees, devolution and nuclear energy,’ Gould, 225.
204. Tony Blair’s Leader’s Speech, 1995, via http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=201.
205. See also Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire.
206. Guardian, 5 October 1995.
207. Calculated via the data generated in the ONS Freedom of Information Act request at https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/populationbyagegenderandethnicity [footnote 1]. There were 2.9 m 12–15 year olds in the UK in 1990. 83% of these equates to 2.4 m.
208. Widdecombe, Watching Neighbours Twice A Day…, 81.
209. Ibid, 228, 230.
210. E.g. Bernacke, “The great moderation,” 145–62.
211. E.g. Stefan Dennis’ trip to Inverness covered in Aberdeen Press and Journal, 30 January 1989.
212. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘1983–1997,’ 354.
213. Lawrence, ”Thatcherism, the SDP and Vernacular Politics on the Isle of Sheppey, c. 1978–83”, 231–48; Ortolano, Thatcher’s Progress.
214. Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, 1.
215. The UK population in 1990 was 57.25 m. Neighbours’ record 21.2 m audience equates to 37% of the total population (though, as discussed, its BARB figure excludes those aged 3 and under).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Richard Carr
Richard Carr is a Senior Lecturer in History and Politics at Anglia Ruskin University. He has authored the books March of the Moderates: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and the Rebirth of Progressive Politics (I.B. Tauris, 2019) and Charlie Chaplin: A Political Biography from Victorian Britain to Modern America (Routledge, 2017).