SandsResort

Observations about the current cast's performance: Marilyn is the most popular female, followed by Mackenzie. (Yes Felicity beat Marilyn, by a tiny 12 point margin, but I'm just looking at current ongoing characters.) For males of course it is Alf followed by Tane. This seems at odds with some forum opinions that Mackenzie and Tane are "well past their use by date". It's funny that top male and female Alf and Marilyn were two of the characters with the least screentime or storylines this year. Maybe less is more! (Although that didn't help Roo.) Or maybe it's largely "legacy votes" from long-term viewers, but that doesn't tally with Sally etc being so far below them. Top male Alf got more than double the points of top female Marilyn (3045 to 1476). Lyrik in order of popularity: 1. Eden, 2. Theo, 3. Remi, 4. Kirby. The six lowest ranked characters are all female. Remi is the lowest ranked male*, but "7th from bottom" in a cast of 21 is getting towards the mid-table group anyway. Exactly mid-table in the ranking of current cast are young men Mali, Levi and Theo. It's perhaps surprising that Justin and Leah are beneath them. It should be emphasised that all of the current cast did really well, all picking up hundreds more votes than Fisher, Pippa, Bobby, Morag, Shane & Angel, etc, with even Sally slotted in between Bree and Abigail. Obviously that's recency bias, but it's still an impressive achievement for the current show.

This is how the current cast ranked relative to each other, highest to lowest. The + figure next to their name is how many extra points they achieved than the character below them. E.g. Alf got 135 more points than Tane. It illustrates how some characters were much further apart, or closer, than they appear from the rankings. +135 Alf +1065 Tane Massive 1065 points jump from Cash up to Tane +369 Cash Big 369 points jump from Marilyn up to Cash +64 Marilyn +44 John +250 Mackenzie Big 250 points jump from Eden up to Mackenzie +102 Eden +100 Dana Not much separating Irene and Mali (29 points) +29 Irene +99 Mali Not much separating Levi, Theo, Justin and Leah (22, 16, 34 points) +22 Levi +16 Theo +34 Justin +63 Leah +85 Remi +92 Harper +90 Kirby +47 Rose +41 Roo +63 Bree Abigail

I said in my previous post that there will only be two non-current characters in the Top 20. I was counting Felicity and Xander as "current", although technically they might fall just outside. Following that logic, the top ranked past characters are 1. Brax, 2. Sally, 3. Heath, 4. Fisher, 5. Pippa, 6. Bobby, 7. Morag. That list seems sensible, no big surprises, and it sounds better than Sally coming 26th.

Since the voting was opened up to non-forum members, you almost have to look at the results as if two separate polls are going on at the same time – a ranking of current characters, and a ranking of past characters. Looking at it like that, Ziggy, Sally, Heath, Fisher, Pippa, Bobby, Morag and Jasmine make the “Top 10 of past characters”… behind two River Boys, the only two non-current characters yet to chart. The jump in points is massive once we get to this stage. You’ve got legends like Fisher, Pippa and Bobby on 97, 96, 93… then you’ve got Kirby on 476, and that’s before we get to the Top 20. No offence to the actors, but when the history of Home and Away is written, I don’t think characters like Harper, Xander and Remi (yet to chart) will be remembered as 5 times more iconic than Fisher, Pippa and Bobby, as these results suggest. So, best to look at it as two polls within one.

1994 was a great year for Jack, with a lot of airtime. As you say, he was well-suited to lighter storylines. We had Shane tricking Jack into getting into bed with Fisher... Michael and Pippa suspecting Jack of being a cross-dresser... Jack dating Selina and then Sonia and Frankie, all at the same time, until they ganged up against him. Fun stuff. By 1995, Jack was being tempted to take steroids; being racially abused by his girlfriend's father; being blamed for the bushfire which scarred Nelson and destroyed Fisher's house. I enjoy both the 1994 and 1995 styles of storytelling, but they are clearly very different.

There's a very positive message we can take away from the surprising results of this year's poll: People love the current era. Or at least they love the current characters. That's promising news if we want the show to stay successful and stay on the air. I've seen opinions online like "The only people still watching the show are long-term fans who haven't given up on it, but no one likes the new characters". Well, that clearly isn't true because people voted in their droves for current characters. Not only are those people watching, but they are big enough fans to bother visiting this website and to bother submitting votes. There is still a lot of enthusiasm for the show. It wasn't clear that opening up the voting to non forum members would make THIS much difference. Rose got more points this time (in 32nd place) than Sally got last time when she won. This year Tane got more than twelve times the points that Sally got last time (and he got more than double the points that Sally got this time). The high scores are even more surprising when you remember it was harder for characters to get points this time, as we were only allowed to vote for our Top 5 instead of our Top 7. Detour into negativity... It can be tempting to think "We should limit the voting to forum members as only we can be trusted to rank past characters properly high", or even "It would be better if the current characters ranked poorly, then the producers might realise the show needs changing - bring back teenagers, stop the retcons, etc". But let's focus on the positive. More promising news: The new influx of voters didn't just give all their votes to Tane, Felicity, Cash, Xander, Bree, etc. Some of their favourite characters are the long-running characters. "We" the forum members are not the sole reason that Irene and Marilyn got around 2,000 points each, and Alf got over 3,500. Last time we gave those characters between 61 and 71 points, so clearly the new voters love those characters as well, and propelled them to those huge totals.

@Red Ranger 1 Thank you for the brilliant commentary as always. It's been full of spot on, wry observations about the show. E.g. "He was one of those that came in as a bit of a jerk and had the magic of Summer Bay make him…less of a jerk"; "Belle suffered the fate of anyone who decides to leave the show before the other half of a golden couple". You're also great at coming up with funny, snappy descriptions for each character ("managed to take the virginities of two of his classmates, then shot his teacher"). Thanks also to Chris and Dan for compiling the poll.?

Yes, I think most of the prominent regulars from all eras have appeared in this year's poll (or will appear). No glaring omissions this time. Arguably the biggest omissions are Curtis, Damian, Duncan. Are we confident that Sally is going to win like usual? Remember that this year's voters have displaced Morag from 2 to 31, and Fisher from 6 to 24. They seem to have short memories. If Sally does still win, then she's defying the trend of this poll ("current cast reigns supreme" ...plus the founding bad boys of the Lucy Addario/Louise Bowes era). It really would prove that Sally is unforgettable and capable of winning in any circumstances.

The current cast are actually ranking in the approximate order we might expect them to, relative to each other. The 6 new 2022 arrivals have ranked "at the bottom", beneath the 15 other current regulars (who, like adam436 says, all seem to have made the Top 20). So that's not a shock. The shock is just how high the current cast are ranking relative to past characters. I don't think many of us expected to see most of the 2022 arrivals in the same update as Fisher, Morag, Bobby and Pippa!

Those two groups are now even more conspicuous going into the Top 40. By my guess, there are 19 characters in the "old favourites" group, who debuted from 1988 to 2011, most of whom were 80s/90s arrivals except the Braxtons and 3 more noughties exceptions (Leah, John and one other). Then I think there are 21 characters in the "recent regulars" group, who debuted from 2016 to 2022. However, I'm not sure about someone like Ari Parata. I'm counting him in my predicted Top 40, but it would be a massive rise, from 0 points in 2020 (a year into his stint) to over 68 points this time (almost a year after leaving).

Wow, still none of 2022's new regulars in the latest update, and yet we know they make the chart. I can work out who is left now (give or take a few characters). The Top 60 looks to be a mixture of two groups: top tier legendary characters from across the show's history... combined with, um, pretty much every regular from the last few years. The current/recent cast don't usually do THIS well en masse. I suspect this is an interesting result of opening up voting to casual visitors to the site and not just forum members. Not sure what it means, though. Do "casual fans" have shorter memories? Or are they genuinely more positive about the current era than "hardcore fans", who are known (in any fandom, not just H&A) for complaining about the current era and harkening back to the past? Proof that this year's poll is a much wider sampling of opinion: Everyone in the Top 60 has received more than 36 points each - in the 4 previous polls from 2014 to 2020, only the Top 10 got that many points!

Interesting how some very popular characters fall down the poll as time passes. A few who previously made the Top 4 now didn't make the Top 80... Dex (2nd in 2012), Kane (2nd in 2004), Kit (4th in 2006), Angie (4th in 2004). The current cast have done well, as you've confirmed they all made the chart. Who would have thought that all of 2022's new regulars - Xander, Rose, Kirby, Eden, Remi, Bree - are more popular characters than Dex, Kane, Kit and Angie? Probably some "recency bias" in voters' minds.

Yay, this is always a great feature. So it's more like a secret ballot this year, I wonder how that will affect the results. If anything, it will probably make them more accurate. In past years, some of us were bound to be influenced by seeing other people's votes. "Oh yeah, I forgot about them, I'll vote for them too". Or even "I can see that big character is already getting a lot of votes, so no need for me to mention them, I'll save my votes for my more obscure favourites".

Yes, ITV's announcement today about extending their early evening news, disrupting their soap scheduling (moving Coronation Street out of the 7:30pm slot after 60 years!), echoes the recent changes on Channel 5 which disrupted Home and Away's scheduling. In an age where most TV ratings are going down, TV executives obviously think the news is more popular than ever. It's probably down to Covid and the associated restrictions etc - more people have been watching the news in the past couple of years because the news has affected our daily lives more than ever before.

I pretty much agree with this, but I wouldn't dismiss 2009-10. I enjoyed that era partly because of the 'Lost the Plot/WTF' storylines, if you mean storylines like (I've tried to describe them in a way that emphasises their craziness): Miles having visions of Rabbit (who had strangely accurate psychic powers and appeared in Marilyn's dreams despite being a figment of Miles' imagination), while trying to catch a graffiti vandal who turned out to be himself; Alf being hounded by Mr Oddly and haunted by flashbacks to his fear of ventriloquist dummies... then being hounded by Penn, who was haunted by flashbacks to his time in a mental asylum; plus, of course, the people smuggling mystery (severed hand on the beach; the police promote Angelo to head of a taskforce despite him killing fellow officer Jack; Irene goes to prison for murdering her lover out at sea; the diner burns down in a race riot; Hugo is responsible for a dozen immigrants dying in a shipwreck, then stages his death, then returns and gets away with using $100,000 of blood money to fund his and Martha's life on the run). Yes, they were all crazy storylines... but at least they were ambitious, exploring new territory for the show, and I found them enjoyable. 2009-10 also had strong 'normal' material like Belle & Aden's relationship; the introduction of the Walker family and John Palmer; and the return of Marilyn and Roo. So, I'd say: 2009-10: Slightly lost the plot, but entertaining for it.