“Neighbours” actor Ryan Moloney has hit out at the TV Week Logie Awards for failing to adequately acknowledge and honour the long-running soap, which will soon disappear from Australian and UK screens.
The show will air its final episode in both locations on Aug. 1 after its UK production partner, Channel 5, decided to end the partnership and focus on local projects instead.
Given the show has been running since 1985, Moloney – who has played Jarrod ‘Toadfish’ Rebecchi since 1995 – said he expected more from TV’s night of nights to acknowledge, celebrate and farewell the program.
“Yea look, in all honestly, it was incredibly disappointing,” he told 2Day FM’s Breakfast show “Hughesy, Ed and Erin”.
“The package that they put together, I kinda watched it and went ‘Oh, okay, so ‘Neighbours’ has just been summed up by a whole lot of food being dumped on people’s heads’,” he said.
Moloney said he wasn’t necessarily expecting the whole cast and crew to be asked up on stage, but more acknowledgement of the show’s long-standing stars would have been nice.
“We’ve got people who have been on TV for nearly 30 years each and I think probably the least they could do is get us to actually say something. It’s been a massive [show], we’re in the bloody Hall of Fame. If this is how you treat a show that’s in the Hall of Fame, then good luck to the Logies, really,” he added.
Moloney admitted he knew his expectations wouldn’t be met when he arrived at the event on Sunday.
“We turned up there and we did our mandatory three hours talking to people on the red carpet and kind of got in the room and we ended up getting split up and stuck on two different tables… Oh mate, it was horrible. Our table was actually stuck behind the cameras, we couldn’t actually even see the stage,” he told the Breakfast radio show.
“I kind of figured that we weren’t going to get a gig then.”
He said the cast of rival soap opera “Home and Away” even approached the “Neighbours” team to offer their condolences on how the show had been treated.
“Home and Away” won Most Popular Drama Program on the night.
