Neighbours drew its biggest audience in 13 years and was the most-watched program in Australia’s five mainland capital cities on Thursday night as 873,000 people tuned in to bid Ramsay Street farewell.
The three-part finale, broadcast over 90 minutes, was the first time Neighbours had screened on 10’s main channel since it moved to the network’s digital multichannel after the end of the 2010 season. The ratings result was its best since July 2009.
More than 1 million people tuned in to say goodbye to Ramsay Street, and those, like Susan and Karl Kennedy, who lived there.
Before the move to 11 (now called 10 Peach), Neighbours had been averaging between 500,000 and 600,000 viewers a night. When it launched on 11 in 2011, it drew an audience of just 254,000 viewers. Its viewership since has bounced around, but has generally headed only in one direction – the wrong one.
The show typically managed to draw around 300,000 viewers per half-hour episode until 2016, when it dropped to around 200,000. Over the past year, it had typically drawn half that number of viewers in Australia.
Despite its decreasing relevance to Australian viewers, Neighbours ploughed on because it still had a loyal following in the UK, where it was typically watched by more than one million people a day. More importantly, production company Fremantle had a contract with Channel 5 that paid for the bulk of the show’s production costs.
10’s share of the budget was small, and coupled with its need to produce a certain amount of Australian drama under broadcast regulations, that was enough to keep the show on air locally.
Stars of Neighbours: Guy Pearce, Jason Donovan, Kylie Minogue, Margot Robbie, Alan Fletcher and Jackie Woodburne.Credit:Network Ten
The first contract with Channel 5 in 2008 was for 10 years. The next one was for four. The most recent extension was for just 12 months. In March, the UK broadcaster finally dropped the show, citing a decision to refocus on British content. Given its poor ratings locally, and the absence of a deal with another broadcaster or streamer, that was the end for Neighbours, after 37 years.
Despite massive coverage of the show’s imminent demise, viewers stayed away. On March 3, the day the news broke, the number of viewers was in line with previous episodes. Over the past few months numbers remained at their relative lows, hovering around 100,000 viewers.
This week, though, as the final episodes rolled out in sets of three, people finally started to take notice.
On Monday night, 156,000 metro viewers tuned in to the show on 10 Peach to remind themselves of what they’d soon be missing.
Thursday night’s finale was broadcast on the main channel, and preliminary figures show it drew 215,000 regional viewers in addition to the 873,000 in the cities, for a total audience of 1.09 million. It was also available to watch, ad-free (with a running time of a little over one hour) on Paramount+, though the streamers rarely release viewing figures so how many watched it that way is likely to remain a mystery.
It all adds up to a fitting farewell for Australia’s longest-running soapie. The resurgence in interest came too late to save it, but it did prove that in TV as in life, sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
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