There are many theories about how 37-year-old Australian soap Neighbours will end on 29 July. Disappointingly, none involve Jason Donovan’s 1980s mullet returning to the show to trail its own spin-off series. One theory is that Dr Karl will be revealed to have no medical qualifications. Another is that Hendrix’s pulmonary fibrosis will be cured by a lung transplant, ideally not performed by Dr Karl, before a heartbreaking reunion with Mackenzie, who would be well advised not to hug Hendrix too tightly. A third suggests that Harlow, her young life blighted by the misfortune of being kidnapped by a cult, makes a triumphant return to Ramsay Street, performing her new single The Leader is Good (The Leader is Great) as cast members past and present sway arm in arm and the credits roll for one last time.
My favourite, though, is the suggestion of Alan Fletcher, who plays Dr Karl. “I’m not going to give away any spoilers,” he sensibly told reporters, then added: “But through the magic of technology, many people who couldn’t physically be with us have other ways of returning.” Neighbours has deprived death of its sting many times, not least when Madge Bishop, who died from pancreatic cancer in April 2001, returned to celebrate the show’s 30th anniversary in 2015. Perhaps she’ll be back to cheat death yet again.
But what Fletcher also seems to be suggesting is that some of the many actors who have passed on during Neighbours’ existence may be able to make comebacks, by means of digital grave-robbing. I’m certainly hoping to reacquaint myself with a digitally reconstituted Anne Haddy who played Helen Daniels, yet another of Ramsay Street’s matriarchs, for more than 1,600 episodes. During that time, Haddy, who died in 1999, achieved something singular – and I don’t mean winning 1987’s superbly titled Penguin Award for Sustained Performance by an Actor in a Series. She had two love interests, Douglas Blake and Reuben White, both – fabulously – played by the same actor, who also happened to be her real-life husband, probably provoking trauma that modern psychotherapy isn’t yet capable of handling.
After a lot of speculation, we now know that Neighbours will conclude with the return of pop poppet Kylie Minogue and pop stoppit Jason Donovan. They played Charlene and Scott respectively before going on to Greater Things, and were so popular that nearly 20 million Britons watched their 1987 wedding. Legend has it that so many tinnies were noisily opened by celebrating antipodeans that the only way of knowing what they vowed was to put the subtitles on. But now, older, wiser and, according to Radio Times, possibly plotting their own spin-off, Kylie and Jason would send the drama off with a ratings boost so big that, satisfyingly for fans, the suits may worry they’ve made a mistake in cancelling the show.
What would be absolutely intolerable is for Neighbours to end with someone waking up and realising the whole thing had been a dream. And yet this gambit has been played time and again in soapland. When Crossroads ended (for the second time, mind) in 2001, Jane Asher as Angel Sampson told a supermarket co-worker the following ludicrous words: “I’ve just had an amazing dream – that I owned a hotel called Crossroads.”
In 1986, Dallas had played the same joker when Pam Ewing awoke to the sound of a shower running. Her husband, Bobby, had not been run over by JR Ewing – instead, she had dreamt the whole thing. Some critics worried that Pam’s dream rendered the entire past season’s episodes meaningless. Others realised that it didn’t take a dream to make that true. As for Crossroads, like Madge Bishop on a grander scale, it cheated death. Commissioning editors had pulled the Brummie drama 13 years before, but Zombie Crossroads came back, just like Robbie to Take That, though less appealingly.
There are lots of books on how to write for soap operas but none, as far as I can see, telling you how to end one. John Yorke’s Into the Woods explains how to write a climax but not how to pull the plug, which is a shame, given he’s worked on EastEnders, Holby City and The Archers.
A drama’s climax, he explains, is the point at which the protagonist overcomes their flaws – which have been externalised in the characterisation of the antagonist – in a final confrontation. That’s why Thelma and Louise, after shooting the rapist and going on the run, must confront the law in all its patriarchal oppressiveness before exiting stage left at 70mph.
But only rarely does the climax come at the very end, which is arguably what happened in Breaking Bad where Walter White completed his emotional journey from, as creator Vince Gilligan put it, Mr Chips to Scarface, wasting the baddies with a jerry-rigged machine-gun while Jesse Pinkman, channelling his inner Thelma and Louise, exited stage left at 70mph.
Indeed, we’re so accustomed to a climactic ending that, as in the case of the Coens’ 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the shock of a story concluding abruptly without an ostensible narrative resolution was itself a piquant device. Only later did we realise that the climax, in the sense described by Yorke, actually occurred half an hour earlier.
Soap operas are curious dramatic forms, though, in that they have many narrative arcs, each one unfolding inside an overall structure that is meant to simulate the circle of life. Soaps mimic human life in its multifariousness, though, not one person’s tragedy in its singularity. Can any other screenwriters help? Sadly not. Like Yorke, Robert McKee, William Goldman and David Mamet are all silent on the matter.
One way to bow out, ironically, is to refuse closure. This is what happened when Waggoners’ Walk, Radio 2’s London-set rival to Radio 4’s The Archers, ended in 1980. Yes, we did find out that the supposed alien that had been spotted on Hampstead Heath was actually a monkey, but instead of a proper denouement what we got was the writers’ droll take on being axed by Auntie’s bean-counters. At the end, George proposed to Sophie, who said she needed time to think. George replied: “That’s all right, my dear. You have all the time in the world.” No, she didn’t.
Soaps have often ended with the creatives taking revenge on the boneheads who nixed them. When Eldorado – Britain’s sun-filled answer to Dynasty and Dallas and supposed antidote to EastEnders – finished in 1993 after only a year, the writers had the last word. Marcus, having survived an attempt on his life that blew up his car, made his farewell by sailing off with his girlfriend Pilar and delivering the final line: “You can’t trust anyone these days, can you?” Certainly not BBC commissioning editors with an eye on Eldorado’s dismal ratings.
Brookside’s final episode in 2003 went even further. A drug dealer called Jack Michaelson (widely believed to be a reference to Michael Jackson, the Channel 4 exec responsible for pulling the plug) was murdered and his body hanged from a bedroom window. As in Murder on the Orient Express, the suggestion was that all Brookie’s residents had a hand in the killing. Towards the end of the final episode, auld scally Jimmy Corkhill broke the fourth wall by ranting against the “people in their glass offices in London” – ie those who had swung the axe. “I can remember when the telly meant something,” he concluded, when it was not about so-called reality TV, but “about real people who live in real houses”.
Holby City was 23 when it ended in March, with an episode written by Brookside alumnus Joe Ainsworth, who possibly learned from Brookie’s farewell that exacting revenge is not just folly but dramatically dull. Instead, he delivered a masterclass. Surgeon Jac Naylor, long suffering from a brain tumour, was wheeled into theatre for one last operation, triggering a massive stroke that left her braindead. Nothing in Jac’s life became her so well as the leaving of it. She gifted her spleen to fellow consultant Ric Griffin, her kidney to another hospital, while colleague Henrik Hanssen accompanied her liver to Leeds where he (and Jac’s liver) were reunited with surgeon Russ Faber.
Ainsworth thereby not only brought old cast members back together for one last hurrah but paid timely tribute to the sacrifice of NHS workers during the pandemic. But here’s the thing: even as Holby the soap expired, Holby the hospital carried on. Newbie doctor Nicky McKendrick operated successfully for the first time on a beating heart. Ainsworth was showing us that soap operas, like the NHS and human life, are more than the sum of their narrative pasts. The circle of life goes on: the heart beats even after the end credits.
The truth is that when series end, there are no rules but often spadefuls of treacle. At the close of Mash, the US comedy drama about the Korean War, BJ had arranged some rocks to read “GOODBYE” to Alan Alda’s airborne damp-eyed medic Hawkeye. Similarly, when Brookside ended, Jimmy Corkhill graffitied a final letter D to the Brookside Close street sign.
One treacly trope is to bring the whole gang back together one last time – which may well be what Neighbours is planning. But its writers should be aware that this trick was devastatingly satirised in the final episode of Seinfeld in 1998. All the many characters wronged by the four protagonists over the years came back to testify against these New Yorkers, who were in court charged with, effectively, being sociopathically selfish. Indeed, Larry David’s script dared to go where soaps fear to tread, by ending with this implicit rebuke to fans: you just spent nine years adoring these appalling monsters.
Sadly, Neighbours is unlikely to end like that. But whatever surprises Kylie, Jason and the gang pull, one thing seems certain: when they’re dead, their CGI simulacra will be cast in a Neighbours reboot. Soap operas need never really end.
