As you may well know, Neighbours comes back next month. After one of the weirdest series finales in living memory – largely down to Kylie Minogue’s reluctance to say any actual words – the corpse of Neighbours has been surgically reanimated by Amazon Freevee. New episodes will begin airing daily from 18 September.
Not only that but, for one weekend next month, it’s coming to Shoreditch in London. Between 15 and 17 September, Protein Studios is hosting the Neighbours Experience, at which visitors can look around Susan Kennedy’s living room, have a drink in Harold’s cafe and stare longingly at Charlene Mitchell’s wedding gown.
Will anyone actually go to the Neighbours Experience? Very possibly yes, because TV shows keep pulling this crap all the time and people go nuts for it. It’s a simple enough formula: throw a bunch of old sets in a room for people to wander around, charge people theme-park prices for a ticket, then sit back giggling as they Instagram themselves into a spluttering pile.
The Neighbours Experience seems to be modelled on the Friends Experience, a globally-touring operation – currently operating in New York, Detroit, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Brussels, Long Beach and Birmingham – that recreates Central Perk and Monica’s apartment so that people can take selfies for an hour. The top price for entry to the Birmingham site is currently £84.91
It seems like an incredible amount of money to pay, just to get a photo where it looks like you’re on a 30-year-old television programme (roughly the equivalent of going to an immersive Dad’s Army experience during the heyday of Friends). But it seems to appeal to something deep inside a section of fans. Friends has been part of their lives for decades. Indeed, for some younger fans, Friends is something that has always existed in the world. So it’s like going to a historical monument, or an old church. Perhaps, even, the Friends Experience is a way for them to mourn the collective viewing experience; a way of showing up to a place and seeing other people as excited as they are, in an age when we’re usually all so fragmented and isolated.
It’s such an easy way to make money that plenty of other shows are following suit. Brighton Beach has previously held the Love Island Experience, for example. “THE ULTIMATE LOVE ISLAND FAN EXPERIENCE IS HERE AND IT IS LIT!” shouts the event’s website, promising visits from former contestants, a photo opportunity near a fire pit and the chance to watch Love Island on a big screen.
But what if you don’t like reality television? What if you’d prefer to immerse yourself in a terrifying, exhausting elimination competition where you are all but guaranteed to die in a horrible orgy of violence? Well good news! Immersive Gamebox, a company that projects 360-degree motion-controlled videogames on to walls, have launched a Squid Game experience. Here, players are put through challenges as seen on the series, such as the one where a giant face shoots you to death, the one where you die if you can’t cut a shape out of a biscuit, the one where you plummet to your death, another one where you plummet to your death, and the final Squid Game itself, even though nobody on Earth has ever been able to fully understand what its rules are.
At the root of all this seems to be Secret Cinema, a company that offers immersive screenings in locations designed to mimic the look of the films, and filled with performers who act in the spirit of the film. Which is good if you’re seeing something nice and fun but actively depressing if you’re watching 28 Days Later in a grotty dungeon full of people who are dressed as soldiers and have been paid to shout at you for visibly enjoying something you’ve paid 30 quid to attend. Not that I’m bitter about it or anything.
There have now been Stranger Things experiences, Peaky Blinders experiences, Crystal Maze experiences and dining experiences based on Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses. It’s clearly a growing market, so who can possibly say what’s next. Maybe soon there’ll be a Taskmaster experience, at which people get to play a collection of amusingly impossible games. Or a The Bear experience, where you get to take selfies in a restaurant kitchen under an immense amount of self-inflicted pressure. Or a Succession experience, where you dress up in nice clothes and your dad tells you how much he hates you. At this point, the sky’s the limit.
