Far Better 'neighbours' Than Nymphets

The Sunday Age

Sunday September 9, 2001

Liz Porter

I NEVER thought I would utter the following sentence in private, let alone own up to it in public, so here goes: "Over the past few months, I have become a regular watcher of Neighbours." Yes, that's me, the SBS and ABC watcher, the woman who has never lasted out a single episode of Big Brother, Melrose Place or even (going way back) The Brady Bunch.

But wait, there is a good reason. You see, a few months ago, my daughter started watching Neighbours (she had seen it at a friend's place and had enjoyed it). So I sat down with her to have a look.

I had had the task of interviewing Neighbours ``stars" over the years, so I had seen quite a few episodes at various intervals. I had even watched the show being shot a couple of times. Along the way I had never seen anything to challenge my view of this soap as insufferably twee, white-bread and Anglo, if otherwise very well-intentioned.

But then fast-forward a few years. I am now the mother of a nine-year-old girl. And she, like her peers in affluent Western society, is living in a world where a mixture of forces seems to be combining to railroad her towards premature and highly sexualised adolescence before she has even reached her 12th birthday.

On Saturday mornings, she flicks on Video Hits. And there it is: the long parade of pouting and gyrating pop nymphets, each as svelte, slinky and sexy as her predecessor. And I lie back watching and silently wondering what happens to young singers who might be too plump to look appropriately telegenic in low-cut hipsters and bare midriffs. Or who can sing, but not dance. Or who just want to stand still (fully clothed) and sing, being too shy to cavort.

Sure, we are all teaching our little girls that they can grow up to be politicians, physicists or paediatricians. Our female children are hearing this, and many of them believe it. But, at the same time, a raucous chorus of media and marketing images is shouting out the very opposite message: that a beautiful face and a perfect body are what really count. It is bad enough that teenage girls are the targets of the deluge of images of orthodox Sarah O'Hare-style female beauty now proliferating on TV, billboards and the sides of buses, and teenage boys are starting to be affected by similar six-packed himbo imagery. But what are we to do about the fact that fashion and cosmetic marketers are now turning their sights on to 8-12-year-olds? As any mother of a girl in this age group knows, the horrible ``tweeny" fashion genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Kids' clothing shops are bursting with mini-Britney Spears-style crop-tops and sexy off-the-shoulder numbers to be worn with jeans cut as low as Christina Aguilera's - all of it being sold to little girls who, in their more natural moments, are still climbing trees, riding scooters and tearing around basketball courts.

The marketers have even got on to an innocent little TV show like Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, a big favorite among 8-11-year-olds. Now there is a spin-off magazine, the UK-produced Sabrina's Secrets, featuring a Sabrina who, unlike the TV character, takes a big interest in ``beauty" hints. The mag is brimful of consumer nonsense, offering free ``cherry lipgloss" and other mini-cosmetics to its young readers, and including twitteringly inane features about hairstyles (``Take it from me," Sabrina says, ``if your fringe doesn't look tip-top, your hairstyle will be a total flop.")

So what is a mother to do? I'm not about to stop my daughter watching Video Hits or Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. What I can do, however, is encourage her to examine alternative role models to the pouting Britneys of this world. And this, believe it or not, is where Neighbours comes in.

So why do I suddenly like Neighbours so much? First, in Ramsay Street, the children behave like children. They are recognisably kids, in marked contrast to the spoilt, cynical and smart-mouthed mini-adults that populate most US sitcoms and practically all kids' holiday movies.

Neighbours deals with many social issues beyond the immediately personal. Storylines interweave topics such as fair play, freedom of speech, discrimination in the workplace, corporatised medicine and ``corporate shark" law firms. Moreover, the teenagers in it (the ones whom pre-teens like my daughter look at very closely) are frequently seen actually exercising a social conscience. What a delightful corrective that is to the prevailing dog-eat-dog nastiness of shows like Big Brother.

I still find the characters irritatingly Anglo, but the young females don't dress like pubescent sex kittens. They don't go around acting as if a girl's sole purpose in life is to be seductive and decorative. And there isn't a Britney-type in sight.

e-mail: eporter@theage.fairfax.com

© 2001 The Sunday Age

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