Home and Aw... eh? (Home & Away)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Home & Away
Date:	03/05/02 (756 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can still produce excellent storylines, most of the old stalwarts are fine actors

Disadvantages: Channel 5 reception, doesn't quite know what it wants to be

I'm not a huge soap junkie, but I do try to catch the Aussie duo of Neighbours and Home and Away quite regularly. It's interesting to see the jostling for position between them - in Oz, H&A is way out in front, but here - thanks to its BBC1 slot as against H&A's crackly Channel 5 - Neighbours crushes it in the ratings.

What worries me about Home & Away is that the show's producers really don't seem to know what they want from the soap. There are really two roads to go down - the Neighbours route, with a light-hearted tone and lots of silly humour, or the grittier Brookside path, with people being bumped off left right and centre. H&A seems to want it both ways, and it doesn't work.

(Very slight plot spoiler coming up, though it's in every listings mag.)

One reason for the awkwardness is that Australian terrestrial TV has compulsory ratings system, rather like our BBFC film ratings. H&A is rated as "G", which means that it can go out in the early evenings, but has to avoid anything too "adult". For example, when Dani is attacked by Kane, it's quite clear that he has in fact raped her - but because of the Australian rules, this has to be skirted around. You wouldn't get that in EastEnders or Brookside - instead you'd get it made quite clear what happened and a helpline phone number after the show. I don't think the Aussie system is at all helpful in cases like this.

The huge cast turnover in recent months has not helped H&A's stability either. Think about it: how many current characters can you look at and instantly think, "they belong here"? Not many. Alf, Sally, Fisher, Irene, and maybe Will, Hayley, Gypsy, Colleen and Vinnie. That's about it - and all have been on the show for some years. Since then, only - very recently - Brodie has shown any signs of naturalness; the rest are largely a waste of space.

Time was when the show brought in *ac
tors* - now it looks worryingly as though we're drifting towards the US "big hair is better than big acting" model, and the producers are sliding towards the "soap by numbers" approach. I confess that the character I'm thinking of here is Noah - the acres and acres of Aussie print/web space given over to Beau Brady (especially with regard to his relationship with Rebecca Cartwright [Hayley]) is far out of proportion to his abilities. I hope he improves down the line - at the moment he seems terribly wooden on occasion.

For another example, look at the Sutherlands. There's nothing wrong with them exactly, but even after several months you still half expect them to disappear at any moment. None of them (with the partial exception of Brodie, who isn't actually a family member at all) appear totally comfortable with Summer Bay - they treat the place almost as some sort of a timeshare apartment. It doesn't help when Aussie Rules references (incomprehensible to anyone outside [parts of] Australia) are shoehorned into the dialogue just so we don't forget who Rhys is. If he was properly incorporated into the soap, that sort of blatant nudge wouldn't be necessary. And Shelley is trying so hard to be Pippa it's embarrassing (more on this subject later). The twins are so annoying they're often unwatchable (remember the ludicrous "psychic twins" storyline?), though Dani is not too bad.

Leah, if anything, is worse. The producers' recent "look at us, aren't we clever? We can put Greek in a mainstream TV show!" antics did nothing except irritate - if they'd written the thing better they would have been able to make it seem interesting: as it is, the "moussaKAAAA" thing just gives you the giggles. And it seems that she'd become the latest "scriptwriters' darling" (following on from Donna, Rebecca, Roxy, the early Shauna etc etc etc), getting consider
ably more screen time than she needs, so making her parts look thin. She's seemed very slightly more confident since she became pregnant, but would be a much better character if she didn't spend every second scene asking worriedly about Vinnie.

Then we have the overdose of teenagers (and near-teens) to consider. Okay, H&A is always going to have a lot of them, given its audience profile, but the feeling persists that there's one too many family around, even now Sam & Sandy (& baby!) have gone. Sorry to bring it up again, but if the Sutherlands left (without Brodie), things would be about right. After all, Gypsy, Will, Brodie and Hayley can (and do) create quite enough trouble on their own!

No everyone is bad, of course. Irene is probably the most watchable character at the moment, as she often is, and so long as she's around nothing can be entirely hopeless. With Alf it's hard to tell - since Ailsa's loss he's seemed a bit subdued, which is understandable, but the show badly needs him in flamin' form. His classic row with Leah over the organic veggies, though, was the funniest scene in the show for ages, and really showed up what H&A has been missing in the way of humour.

Fisher plods on in much the same style as ever: even when he was married to Marilyn his acting style didn't really change, and perhaps that's not such a bad thing at the moment - H&A has changed so much (and not all for the better) that we need a few solid rocks to cling to. And Sally, though not having had a really good storyline since her wedding, still looks as though she belongs - which I suspect is really a tribute to Kate Ritchie's experience and skills as an actor; when H&A stars are asked who of their colleagues is the best actor, she's very often the one who comes out on top. If she weren't a bit young, I suspect the producers would like her to be a foster mother a la Pippa.

And there's that name ag
ain. The loss of Pippa has left H&A without one of the central selling points of the show - the fostering, which was an excellent plot device to allow many characters to come and go, and - crucially - to allow them to be written out quickly if they didn't work out (eg Stephanie). Shelley's Drop-In Centre just doesn't have the same effect, because the people who go there don't live in her house, while Pippa's foster-children such as Jack and Sophie were under her feet every day, forcing much closer relationships.

Which leads me to considering why those characters I like work. And I think it's fairly simple: Sally, Don, Irene, Alf and so on are convincing in that you believe they might actually live in Summer Bay. Many of the others (Alex, for exmaple) could equally well just be visitors, stopping off on their way to the Australian Soap Stars' Retirement Home in Brisbane. There really does need to be a clearout of dead wood, and a focusing on what viewers actually want from the soap. Which in my case is a damn sight more humour and a damn sight fewer robots.

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