35 years ago | Standish High School, Standish, UK | 8th November 1988

Thirty-five years ago,  the whole of the UK seemed to be entranced by the wedding of Scott and Charlene in ‘Neighbours’ – and I missed it because I was playing badminton.

It was November 1988, I was in the 4th year of High School – or Year 10 in today’s parlance. Britain was in the grip of a Stock, Aitken & Waterman epidemic and Neighbours had become a well-established cultural touchpoint. As a result, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan had both turned their daytime soap ubiquity into pop stardom and had got to the point where they needed to leave the Australian show in order to dominate the charts in Europe. The obvious way to do that was to ride the wave of will-they-won’t-they to its logical conclusion and marry them off, to go and live in Brisbane or somewhere.

The wedding aired in Australian in the July of that year but, being on the other side of a world without an internet, UK audiences, eleven hours behind Melbourne in the real world were several months behind Erinsborough in the made-up one. And so it came to be that Scott and Charlene’s nuptials would only happen, as far as the Poms were concerned, in November.

The extra time was put to good use by the people at Mushroom Records, who ensured that Angry Anderson’s Suddenly was released and given plenty of airplay as the official song of the upcoming ‘Wedding of the Year’.

November 8th was a Tuesday and I had badminton on Tuesday evenings so consequently, I was otherwise engaged in the Sports Hall at Standish High School while most of my contemporaries were glued to their screens.

If you’re old enough, you almost certainly remember the stills or the video clips from the wedding but, despite being quite an avid Neighbours fan at the time, I’ve never watched that episode. For some reason I either didn’t video it or didn’t bother watching the tape. 

If you’re really keen to see it, you can find it here on YouTube.