As Neighbours celebrates its 20th year on air, you get the sense that the soapie has kicked into high gear. It's sudsier than ever as our favourite neighbours have started playing hardball in this revved-up, emotion-charged, crazy soap opera. These days the person next door is less likely to be suffering from unrequited love and more likely to be a hooker (Sindi), toying with lesbianism (Sky), taking steroids (Boyd) or just cutting their hair and being a bit of a slut (pretty much the rest of the cast). Speaking of the cast, they're sexier than ever (except for Lyn Scully's baby who looks like a gargoyle).

The new-look soap and its higher ratings are largely thanks to the sweeping changes which took place three years ago. Neighbours was beginning to look quite old-fashioned, very stale and was starting to feel like it was stuck in the 1950s. The characters were too nice. The television-viewing public had moved on significantly from what they wanted in a soap and Neighbours hadn't caught up.

As is always the case with these things, writing a Neighbours episode looks like great fun. And easy. So it was surprising to read that one 22-minute episode actually takes more than 23 minutes to write.

You'd think that picking a favourite storyline might be tricky. But I readily admit that one of my favourite storylines was the one which saw Susan Kennedy develop amnesia. That storyline lasted for about nine months - it was an outrageous idea and deliberately very Days of Our Lives. 'Evil Harold' went really well, too, and upset many people.

Speaking of Harold, my dream storyline would be to turn the wobbly, church-abiding, vegetarian into a serial killer. Imagine the glint of the knife, the slash of the throat and then Harold's jelly-bowl laugh as he waddles off down the street reciting a random passage from Revelations.