I just found out that NEIGHBOURS and HOME & AWAY are majority funded by the British channels that show them!

Did you know that five pays 60% production costs for H&A
and the BBC pays 65% production costs for NEIGHBOURS!

Aussie tv channels cant afford to pay for them and have to make deals with foriegn networks to produce them. This is shocking, i mean we British tv-licence payers are efectively paying for foriegn programmes

WTF....IS GOING ON?

British tv should be making British drama, not aussie crap!

I didn't know that but Home & Away gets good viewing figures for Five & Neighbours gets good viewing figures for BBC1 so they're hardly likely to pull the plug & see the soaps vanish are they?

If you look at the credits on certain programmes you will find that they are co-productions between TV channels from other countries. WGHB in Boston (USA) co-produces a fair amount of ITV1 drama output. The A&E network in America is also involved in producing some British programming.

Miss Marple (which BBC1 made in the 80s) was a three way co-production between the BBC, on company in the USA and one in Australia.

There are many other examples, &, at the end of the day it's upto the TV companies who they get involved in production deals with.

British TV companies pay for these shows because they get very good ratings, for their time slot, in this country - as simple as that. Neighbours is essentially a BBC TV show filmed on location - no-one in Australia watches it, but millions of people in Britain do. It's not as if the BBC pays for it and it doesn't get shown here. It does (twice a day)- a few weeks behind Oz. The BBC also has a say in the storylines and production because of the money it pays for the show.

The reason Neighbours is even made these days is for the UK audience. Give the public what they want - as licence-payers keep watching Neighbours, it keeps being made and funded by BBC money. Isn't that better than the BBC making a whole load of programmes people don't watch? I don't mean the intellectual stuff (for which there is a need and place, despite low ratings) but rather the mindless rubbish that is supposed to be Saturday night "entertainment" or trash like Mad About Alice.

I am more concerned about the BBC spending licence fee money on programmes many people can't actually watch - i.e. its digital channels .

Superb point there Vodka Squirrel.

Neighbours isn't exactly the best show on telly but it is one that people seem to hold dear in their hearts and both showings each weekday sustain impressive ratings.

Also I think that Ten, the Aussie network that shows Neighbours, sees the show getting good ratings in both Melbourne and Sydney - the only regionalised ratings zones that really need to have sufficient ratings.

I can't see Neighbours ending any decade soon!

Also Home & Away is still as popular as ever both in UK and in Ireland. Ireland have it before the UK and it's fiercely popular here and has been for a good 12 years

I don't know how reliable this info is but on the erinsborough.com forums someone has reported that Neighbours had an average 45.7% audience share of the 16-39 age bracket.

While writing this I just found the source here.

Of course, the other reason for the BBC and Five funding them is that by doing so to that extent the shows under EU law are classified as UK productions, so can be counted as original UK programming and not as non-EU programmes. This is especially important for Five given their large amount of US prime time programmes.