Neighbours' shocking end: Alan Fletcher shares his emotional reaction

 "The industry needs a Neighbours."

Neighbours star Alan Fletcher has shared his emotional reaction to the soap ending.

It was announced last week that the show had been axed for a second time, this time by Amazon, after the streamer saved it two years ago from its initial cancellation.

Speaking to ABC Melbourne's Victorian Afternoons about the news, Alan – who has been a show staple for over 30 years as Dr Karl Kennedy – reflected on the reasons.

"Everything's money," he suggested. "Amazon have been fantastic to us and I wouldn't ever sit back and say, 'Amazon, you shouldn't have done this'. They're a business, they make decisions.

"It's just a tragedy that 200 who work on this show are suddenly out of work. This television programme means so much to so many people around the world and they're gutted."

Alan revealed that the show's cast have been contacted by devastated fans since the cancellation was announced, going on to share the importance of the soap to viewers – highlighting one interaction that particularly "moved" him.

There's this young bloke who wrote to me and said that he suffered so badly from depression," he recalled. "His life was a mess until he found Neighbours, and that gave him a sense of community.

"And suddenly he was communicating with other Neighbours fans, he was watching the show, and he learnt something about how to improve his own life by watching the characters on the show. It's actually more than a TV show, it's actually part of people's lives."

Alan also praised the show as a training ground for actors and crew over the years, sharing: "Neighbours has always had a policy of bringing people into the company, sometimes starting as a runner, and end up being a producer.

Neighbours is a training ground, it's a school, and really between Neighbours and Home and Away, both those two shows have fed the industry some of its best talent, who now are massive on the world stage."

Alan then lamented the "slow watering down of local content quotas" and rise of streaming platforms, suggesting it "means we could lose so much of our identity on our TV screens".

However, he did praise the Neighbours reboot two years ago for bringing in a more diverse workforce than before, including more female directors, though stressed that "the industry needs a Neighbours".