cymbaline

They don't seem to do long-term older couples, though I'm happy to be corrected on that. Before that they'd widowed Pippa for a 2nd time. Then they killed Ailsa off. Fisher's marriage to June ended offscreen. If you move forward to the present day, Alf is effectively single again. Irene and John are on their own.

It's such a 1990's scenario, isn't it? The beeper and the spectre of HIV. I've read that doctors still use pagers in some hospitals, but I'm sure they've long since ditched them at the Northern District Hospital. Where would the program makers be without text conversations on a screen? I checked for when HIV became treatable and saw that it was in 1996. I assume Kelly's HIV scare happened before this breakthrough?

I won't be able to go to any of these, but if I could, I'd be first in the queue. I hope the tour is a resounding success because if it isn't, that's the last time we'll see something like this.

Even if your favourite actor isn't in this, it's still a decent line-up. I'm sure the organisers have a list as long as your arm of people who said no, couldn't travel on those dates or were asking for too much money. The Neighbours cast has shown that there is a market out there for this sort of nostalgia. I hope the Home and Away fans in England will support this and give the organisers the opportunity to do more of them in the future. It isn't as if Channel 7 is doing anything to help the early years of H&A.

Michael Palin is probably the next most famous person after that. Neighbours has a surprisingly long list, though again most of the overseas ones are British. They also have some random ones like André Rieu, Dave Bautista, Hanson and Paula Abdul.

No Justice played in the Surf Club at the end of the 1990 season. Did somebody think they would be the next big thing and did they have much of a career in Australia?

I wonder has any well-known American ever made a cameo appearance in Home and Away? The only non-Australians I can think of have been British.

When did they resurrect the Sands Resort? It went bankrupt in April 1993 and wasn't mentioned after that.

Was the job Pippa took the same one which Joanne Brennan had previously held? If it was, you can understand why Donald opted for somebody who wouldn't deal drugs to the kids or accuse him of sexual harassment.

Although Pippa was a nurse, wouldn't she have needed to do some sort of retraining or refreshing before she could return to the workforce? She would've had more flexibility to do that when she was married and had a husband at home who could carry the extra load. As a widow, she no longer had that support structure.

Maybe the experience of managing a caravan park, fostering kids and being active in the community was enough. She had been involved with the P&C so she would've had some insight into the workings of the school system. It depends what the job spec was... In the real world, somebody like Pippa would've ended up working in a supermarket or similar but that was never going to happen here. This reads more like one of those clichéd films we've all seen. The one where the dowdy girl with horn-rimmed glasses and awful clothes gets a makeover and ends up running the company and snaring a gorgeous man along the way. To be fair, it wasn't a bad thing to do here, because things had become stale at the caravan park. I sometimes wonder would they have explored the idea of Vanessa Downing's Pippa as a single parent if she hadn't left so quickly after Roger?

We're in fantasy land now so why not aim higher? A TV series A series set in 1960's or 1970's Summer Bay already has some juicy material that could be expanded upon. Alf sowing his wild oats, then settling down with Martha. Celia and Les's doomed romance. Fisher & Barbara's marriage. Morag concealing her pregnancy after her knee trembler with Fisher. Matt Wilson's family, especially his brother who was shot by Al Simpson. Other families who would've been around then include the Smarts, the Dibbles, the Nashes. The circus could come to town, giving us a look at Floss and Neville while they were still performing and their surly son who couldn't wait to grow up and cut them dead.

It is a pity it lost the small-town feel it had at the very beginning. There was something nice about most of the locals having history that went a long way back. Inevitably that couldn't last once the turnover of actors began. I wonder was the mid 90's introduction of locals (Travis, Donna, Rob et al) an attempt to bring that back? There was a nice age mix in the beginning and it is a shame they moved so far away from that. Firstly, when they went for the teen-heavy formula and latterly, with the older cast. I wonder how a Home and Away-esque soap closer to the original formula would fare in this day and age? There was something nice and homely about a lot of it and I think that has been lost in the modern-day iteration. It's still hard to process how Home and Away went from occasional fisticuffs in the diner to the River Boys and post-watershed TV specials. It's never going to happen but I'd love to see a reboot of 1988 H&A.

Do you have any screenshots for us to look at?

A recurring theme in the early years was how broke so many people were. Fisher and the Stewarts were comfortably off but everybody else seemed to have casual or low-paid jobs. The Macklin office was one of the few places to offer anybody a career path and even then, that didn't last. It's so different to today, where they seem to be selling Summer Bay as a glossy place full of beautiful people with perfect bodies.

Early Home and Away could be very old-fashioned in ways. Floss and Neville as retired circus performers was a bit odd, even in 1988. I didn't like Ailsa's shop at all and wasn't sorry to see it go. It was a dated set and no cappuccinos or naughty magazines or pinball machines could rescue it from the timewarp. I don't know why anybody would want to sit down to eat anything in that shop, especially when Celia was within earshot! The outside of the shop was even worse. It's not surprising to read that it was a long-derelict real-life shop which was on the verge of being demolished. The producers agreed to destroy the shop onscreen (i.e. Dodge's arson attack) so that the local authorities could knock it in real life. You can see the production values improving as the show progresses, probably because it looks like it's a soap that'll do well. It's inevitable that Shane and Angel would've broken up within a few years. They were far too young when they settled down and neither of them was given the chance to grow as an adult and learn more about themselves. In real life, nobody would encourage a family member or friend to marry or have kids at 18 or 19 years of age. There's a reason why most of us don't end up forever with the boyfriend/girlfriend we had at that age. Shane's mother was portrayed as a spoilsport but she was actually spot on about how incompatible they were. Angel in particular would've come to resent Shane and her life in Summer Bay. The timeline of Michael and Pippa's courtship is insane if you bring real life into it. It only works if you struggle (as I do) to believe that the two Pippas are the same person. I was a teenager when they brought Michael in. Even before Dennis & Debra's real-life relationship came to light, teenage me detected the chemistry between them. I still quite like their onscreen romance leading up to the wedding. After that, Michael became increasingly less interesting and likeable. My guess is that once they'd installed a married couple in the caravan park again, it was job done as far as the writers were concerned. Having said that, I wonder how Tom would've evolved if he'd been around for as long as Michael. Perhaps he's better regarded because he was gone so soon, before they could trash his character. Floss and Neville were good characters but if they were to stay, they'd have needed to be more central to the community. For example, they could've had Floss running a quirky little gift shop selling tarot cards and angel things and whatnot. Being retired and mostly hanging around the caravan park did them no favours. That Carly and Ben relationship is pretty disturbing in hindsight. At the time, me and my friends went off Ben because he was being unreasonable but that's as deep as it went. When you're no longer a teenage schoolgirl and you know more about toxic relationships, things take on a very different complexion. I would love them to redo that storyline as closely as possible in modern-day Home and Away because I think it'd be seen very differently.

If the post '96 episodes were available online, it'd be hard to watch Donald Fisher being put through the loss of a child for a third time. They really kicked poor Donald around, didn't they?

That's always a tricky one. Where do you draw the line between the bad things that need to happen to people, and it being too much for viewers? I don't have an answer for that. My own feeling is that if an issue touches on something too close to home, it's particularly hard to watch. Most characters seem to die suddenly or violently on H&A. I'm looking at a list of deaths and there have been an awful lot of fatal shootings.

Has there ever been a vampire in Home and Away? If not, why not? It can't be more implausible than some of the other things they've filmed.

I'm not from Australia so I have no idea who most of the performers of the songs are. Still, I think the use of Archie Roach's "Walking into Doors" during the climax of Donna's domestic violence storyline was superb. Mike Perjanik's underscores are what I mostly associate with Home and Away. Even though there were plenty of times when the music seemed to be a bit much, I can't imagine old Home and Away without them.

It'd be funny if it was a sneaky tribute. They've also smuggled a Morgan in, so all we need now is a Fletcher or a Fisher to complete the set.

On a more light-hearted note, when they brought Lucinda in. You know that most of her future will involve fighting with or sleeping with Nick, then Ryan, then Nick again, then Ryan. Rinse and repeat until everybody loses the will to live and stops caring who she chooses.

That's the first time I can remember racism being addressed in such an open fashion on H&A. They'd touched on it in the past with original Roo's Asian boyfriend and with Kevin, the Indigenous guy who lived with the Rosses for 5 minutes. Other than that, the few non-caucasian characters who passed through seemed to go unacknowledged.

Michael's proposal to Pippa is full of foreshadowing, whether that was intentional or unintentional. First, he nearly drowned and that put the idea of proposing to Pippa into his mind. Then in the lead-up to his asking her to marry him for the second time, he says he can't guarantee that something terrible won't happen to him. He also promises he'll never leave her. As we know now, he did leave her for a while and that water is what brought their relationship to an abrupt end.

Off the top of my head, here are a few which are harder to watch because of events in real life or on Home and Away itself Bobby and Alan. We didn't know they were half-siblings at the time, so their closeness is a bit like The Empire Strikes Back when Luke Skywalker kisses his own sister Blake and Meg. I find a lot of this hard to watch because it's a bit too close to the bone. Cathy Godbold was later diagnosed with cancer and died young. Pippa tells Michael she's pregnant. The two are overjoyed at having their very own baby but we all know what lies ahead for baby Dale. Carly and Ben's marriage. In hindsight it's hard to watch this and to think that Carly is going to have a nice life with Ben.