...Neighbours

I know what you’re thinking reader(s?) – Neighbours is gash. I can feeeeel you judging me, but in this instance you’re going to have to blame my mother (not to her face please, she’s small), for it was she who used to sit with me as a new-born baby, watching Neighbours - (that was when it was new to telly, so now you know how I old I am) – and this clearly caused some kind of brain infiltrating osmosis of Neighbours dependency to emerge.

Result? A niggling Neighbours habit, equal only to my dependencies on tea, chocolate, and the non-fizzy orange flavoured Lucozade. This Neighbours habit is a tricky thing, because unlike those lucky narc addicts, there is no Neighbours Anonymous for me to turn to, and part of me thinks people would actually be more willing to admit to actual heroin addiction than they would to a desire, want and NEED to watch a bunch of Australians prat about in an extremely limited number of locations in a pretendy Melbourne suburb.

In a lot of ways I hate Neighbours, but also I love it. Therein lies the rub. For a start, Neighbours is effing stupid, I know it, you know it, we all know it. Here are some things we all know:

We all know Karl didn’t even cheat on Susan with Sarah, but it still caused their marriage to break up. (They’re back together, natch)

We all know that the current Declan is NOT the original Declan. We know that for a while the part of Libby was played by a woman who was NOT Libby. And we know that the girl who now plays Summer is not the same hairy-faced child that left the street.

We all also know that no matter how nice Paul Robinson is being, he will revert to being a bastard when the storyline demands it. Paul has nearly not been a bastard a few times now, but despite losing a limb (and now mysteriously, a limp), having a brain tumour that made him a bastard (what is he a comic book villain? You’re not fooling anyone), and getting pushed off a roof by his own wife (now holding her hostage in their own marriage, duh!) he is still now and forever will be a horrible shit of a man. But, like Kelis, I won’t let you trick me twice (or thrice)… and when I say ‘you’ I mean the crack team of Neighbours writers.

Aaaand finally, we all know the houses on Ramsey Street are no where near big enough to accommodate the circa 14 people at a time that seem to be in residence… Teenager who’s parents would add nothing to the storyline with no where to live? Off to Karl and Susan’s with you! Extreeeemely tenuous long-forgotten 2^nd cousin twice removed of someone who was once in an episode 6 years ago for 14 minutes? Lynn Scully will offer you shelter. 

Oh…. And there is just one more elephant in the room that everyone knows, and NO ONE is talking about, something that is quite frankly more alarming and unbelievable than all of the above. Ironically it’s the only thing that’s actually real, and I am breaking the silence people:

Toadie has lost a SHITLOAD of weight.

Toadie once was the actual elephant in the room, and now (and seemingly overnight) the opposite is true. Toadie is now the opposite of an elephant in a room, and has become so thin, wan and withered that he looks like he might have a degenerative disease. And yet NO ONE, not his girlfriend, Sonia, not his pretendy ‘son’, Callum, none of his friends or… ahem… Neighbours have so much as mentioned it/batted an eyelid/mooted any concern about the degenerative disease thing.

I’m gonna guess (and hope, natch) that he doesn’t have a degenerative disease, and am going to assume that Toadie (supposedly he has a real life alter ego called Ryan Maloney, but whatevs) has actually worked really really hard to lose that weight – but do they mention it? Do they fuck! Too busy making up a storyline where Paul Robinson falls down a rabbit warren, has an imagined conversation with a talking human turd and comes out the other end a total bastard (probably).

All of the above and more is what makes me shout at the TV when Neighbours is on. I HATE how ridiculous it is, how some storylines are completely crow barred in (remember Poppy Rogers? Me neither…), how the writers insult my intelligence by parading an endless stream of nonsense in front of my face and asking me to buy into it, and most of all, I hate how I insist on sky plussing it every day, and watching it when I get home, as a priority, whilst eating my dinner. Fuck.