Key points
- After 37 years, Australia’s longest-running television soapie, Neighbours, is ending this week.
- On Monday to Wednesday, 90-minute triple episodes will screen on 10 Peach. On Thursday, the 90-minute finale will air on 10.
- Many of the show’s huge roster of famous former stars are returning to bid Ramsay Street farewell.
- Plot details are being closely guarded, but the finale does feature a wedding, the 39th in the series’ history.
Hollywood stars Margot Robbie and Jesse Spencer and pop star Delta Goodrem will appear in the finale of Neighbours, adding some serious glamour to the bulging roster of special guests in this week’s long goodbye.
The finale will screen as a 90-minute episode on 10 on Thursday, officially badged as episode 8903. But from Monday night, on 10 Peach, the cavalcade of guesties will pour forth in a series of 90-minute triple episodes.
Margot Robbie, left, returns to Neighbours for the finale. She’s seen here with Ryan Moloney and Kym Valentine in 2010.Credit:Network 10
Nat Bassingthwaighte, Peter O’Brien and Olympia Valance are in tonight’s episodes. On Tuesday, Ian Smith and Jodi Gordon appear, on Wednesday Daniel MacPherson and James Mason return, and on Thursday Ramsay Street somehow has to make room for Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Guy Pearce, Kym Valentine, Carla Bonner, Kate Kendall, Sally-Anne Upton and many more.
Details of the storyline for the final 90 minutes are being closely guarded, but it will feature a wedding – the 39th on-air nuptials in the show’s 37 years.
Long-time fan fave Toadie Rebecchi, who has been played by Ryan Moloney for 28 years, will marry Melanie Pearson, played by Lucinda Cowden, who returned to the cast after a 28-year absence in 2020.
That event is understood to be the prompt for so many old-timers to pop in to offer their best wishes to the happy couple.
Pearce’s Mike Young is understood to have a fairly significant role to play, and O’Brien’s Shane Ramsay, who returned last week and appears throughout the show’s final week, is rumoured to be trying to settle an old score with Paul Robinson (Stefan Dennis). Both characters were there at the beginning … but will they both still be there at the end?
Scott (Jason Donovan) and Charlene (Kylie Minogue) – the show’s most famous alumni, whose teenaged romance propelled the soapie to its stratospheric ratings success in the UK in the late 1980s – return to the street.
If photos released a couple of weeks ago in which they can be seen on the real-life Pin Oak Court, Vermont, with a (fictional) real estate board in the background are any indication, they appear to be moving home for good.
Some of the stars may be there only in kind, however.
The final episodes were filmed in late May and early June, at which time Margot Robbie was shooting Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie in the UK and Los Angeles.
Robbie stars in and produces the film, which means her appearance on Neighbours is almost certainly via Zoom or some other screen technology only.
Jesse Spencer has a starring role in the Disney+ series Last Days of the Space Age, alongside fellow Neighbours alum Radha Mitchell, on which cameras began rolling last week in WA.
Spencer left the long-running US series Chicago Fire at the end of its 10th season (season 11 has just begun airing) so he may have been able to squeeze in an in-person appearance, though whispers suggest otherwise.
Delta Goodrem has been on tour in the US with the Backstreet Boys since early June. It’s unlikely her travel route to California would have gone via Nunawading.
Whatever form their presence takes, the fact the big-name stars are making an appearance at all is proof of the regard in which they hold the show that helped launch them, and so many others, upon the world.
The 90-minute Neighbours finale airs on 10 at 7.30pm on July 28.
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