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Home and Away is an Australian weeknightly half-hour television soap opera produced in Sydney by the Seven Network since January 1988. It is broadcast on the Seven Network and its affiliates in Australia and is exported to many countries, most notably the United Kingdom, where it briefly became the subject of a bidding war between ITV and Five which Five won. The show has more overall viewers in the larger UK market than it has in its home market, but a higher proportion of viewers in Australia, due to Australia's smaller population. Some commentators speculate that the shift in the UK from ITV to Five damaged its popularity ; contract obligations kept it off air in the UK for a year and the smaller audience share Five has are believed to contribute to the show achieving ratings significantly lower than those it enjoyed on ITV. Its UK ratings are less than half those of Neighbours on BBC1. Five funds more than half of the production costs, and is officially Five's second highest rated show.

Synopsis

It features the travails of the inhabitants of a fictional small coastal town in New South Wales, Australia called Summer Bay.

Stories originally revolved around one family, which was Pippa and Tom Fletcher, and their foster children, who included Frank Morgan, Carly Morris, Steven Matheson, Lynn Davenport, and Sally Fletcher who was adopted by Tom & Pippa. The family expanded with the addition of Bobby Simpson (daughter of Donald Fisher and Morag Bellingham) and that of her adopted younger sister Sophie years later.

Currently the series focuses on several new families: the Hunter family, the Holden family, the Fletcher-Saunders family, the Patterson-Bakers, along with original character Alf Stewart and his grandchildren, Ric and Martha.

Like Neighbours, Australia's other current daily half-hour homegrown soap, it attracts a mainly teenage audience and features a constantly-rotating and attractive teenage cast, with a smaller band of older actors who tend to last considerably longer.

Cast

See main articles:

Current cast members

Recurring cast members

Coming and going cast members

Production & broadcast schedule

The show is filmed five days a week for 46 weeks of the year. The crew is given a four week holiday at Christmas and a two week break for recuperation mid-year. A normal shooting day is 7 :00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., but can go later if shooting goes over time. There are 8 weeks between shooting and airing the program. The interior shots are filmed at a permanent set for the show in Seven Sydney's Epping studio. The exterior scenes are filmed on location at Palm Beach in Sydney's Northern Beaches region.

Australian broadcast
Home and Away is broadcast in Australia on weekdays at 7:00 p.m.. The show airs for 46 weeks each year (except for occasions where worldwide events take priority such as tennis and Olympic Games). Each new season begins on the second Monday in January (an exception to this was the 2006 season where it returned on the third Monday), and the season finale airs on the last Friday in November.

During the broadcast there are three ad-breaks and immediately following the broadcast of each episode is a short promotional trailer for the next episode.

Repeat episodes of the series were broadcast between 1999 and 2002, with a one-year break in 2000. The first 623 episodes (except for Episode 469, which was overlooked when Seven were showing the tennis in September 2001) were shown in this run, before it was taken off in May 2002, and so far has never returned.

International broadcasts
As of 2006, in the UK, the show is broadcast weekdays at 6:00 p.m., (repeated 12.00 p.m. the following weekday) on Five. In accordance with European Union regulations for shows of this time-length, only one ad break is inserted into the programme at approximately the halfway point. An omnibus edition aired on Saturday mornings when that week's episodes were all repeated. As of October 2005, there has been no airing of the omnibus.

In New Zealand, the show the show used to be broadcast on TV 2 but now screens on TV3 on weekdays at 5:30 p.m., (repeated 10.30 AM on weekdays and an omnibus airs on Sundays at 10:15 AM). 1997 episodes are currently shown on Prime TV at 3:30 p.m. weekdays.

In Ireland the show is broadcast weekdays at 1:25 p.m. on RTÉ One and repeated at 6:30 p.m. on RTÉ Two regulary getting into the top 5 ratings for that week.

Other countries that broadcast Home and Away include: Belgium on Kanaal Twee; Denmark; Estonia; Iceland; Israel; Lithuania; Norway; Poland; South Africa; Sweden; France.

See also

External links

Official

Fan Sites

Seven Network shows | Five television programmes | 1990s TV shows in the United States | Australian television soap operas

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Home and Away".

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