Mini Hungarian language lesson: neighbours.

While the Anglophone world was glued to the screen watching Neighbours, we quietly made our own.

"Szomszédok" (i.e. "Neighbours") was the first ever Hungarian soap, which ran between 1987 and 1999.

And it was definitely quirky.

First of all, its setting was real: in 1987 a tiny village/outskirt of Budapest is demolished to make way for the M0 ring road, and some of the residents are moved into the nearby, newly built Gazdagrét council estate.

This really happened.

They are joined by other young or not so young hopefuls, everyone starting a new life in the same tower block.

The second weirdness is that in every episode it's Thursday. Basically they wanted it to be as up-to-date as possible, and since the show aired every other Thursday...

Thirdly, most of it was filmed on location, on the actual estate: the production company bought an entire floor in one of the high rises and turned it into their set.

And last but not least, quite a few of the cast were well-known, established theatre actors.

All this, and the novelty of seeing a soap opera set in "the real world", with characters commenting on day-to-day events made Szomszédok a unique and bewildering experience, watched even by people who wouldn't generally watch any soaps. (Like me and my family.)

But uniquely it also documented a key decade in the country's history: the fall of Communism, the first free elections and the subsequent "Wild East" years, all this from the low angle, the angle of the shop assistant, the taxi driver, the small-time dodgy businessman and so on.

It featured the first openly gay character on Hungarian television, horrendously from a 2020 perspective, with all the worst cliches of comedy campness, yet at the time it was really meant to be a sympathetic portrayal.

And if you somehow failed to get the moral message of an episode, don't worry: in what's probably the oddest move, during the end titles each character would turn to camera and deliver a monologue down the lens, recapping their thoughts about the world and the events just seen.

P.s.: what the show also gave us, although we didn't know it at the time: extreme memeability.

Despite it ending over 20 years ago, even now stills from the show are the richest single source of memes on the Hungarian internet.