Home and Away

Twenty years of Home and Away! God, I feel old. (Though not as old as this pair. It's a successful programme, they could have stretched to airbrushing those bags and wrinkles. Cassie is meant to be eighteen years old! Too much sun, methinks.) I have been watching from the very start, when Alf had hair and Sally - who has been married about three times, and whose actress has an online sex tape - was barely more than a foetus. I like to stop work every day at 6pm and watch a celebratory half hour of Home and Away (which will be followed as of next week by an even more celebratory half hour of Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two, which is appropriate, as the Aussie version of Strictly seems to be won by someone from H&A pretty much every year). Five are also kind enough to show the previous day's episode at noon and the following day's episode on Freeview at 6.30, so if you are really desperate you can watch three episodes in one day, and if that isn't enough, you can read episode synopses on their website that stretch back and forth pretty much until both ends of time.

I also love Neighbours, which I have also watched from the start, and which is my lunchtime break: I'm pretty much an Aussie soap fanatic, and I try to find shame in this status, but so far it eludes me. This is all by way of warning you that there will be many more Neighbours and Home and Away posts to come.

For now, I will just draw your attention to the fact that H&A has just been castigated by the Australian broadcasting watchdog. I wonder what they could possibly have done wrong? Well, could it maybe be the storyline where Martha, having gone off the rails and developed a drinking problem after having an affair with a married man which culminated in an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion, gets involved with the dodgy owner of a dodgy nightclub and ends up as a lapdancer? She won't hear a word against her dubious lover until it's proved that not only has he fathered an illigitimate daughter by one of his dancers and driven another of them to heroin addiction, he is also using the club to sell cocaine. At this point I should probably alert the less informed that Home and Away is, strictly speaking, a children's programme. Apparently the other recent storyline that got them into trouble was one in which "two teenage characters decide to have sex", but I can't comment on that one, as I'm not certain if it refers to Ric and Cassie, Ric and Matilda, Cassie and Jules, Cassie and Mac, Belle and Drew, Belle and Lucas, or Lucas and Matilda, and I would hate to get my details wrong.

I'd write more about this but the lunchtime repeat is poised to start: Brad is going to propose to Sally, little knowing that anyone who does that generally leaves the series shortly after, and there is a storm brewing at sea, which means that anyone currently on a boat will be washed up on shore somewhere where they don't have people, and weeks will pass while Alf Stewart looks for them wearing a fluorescent jacket, and if they are pregnant they will give birth. And that's just twenty-five minutes worth.