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Mishka

Soaps can teach very many things to those who watch them (I’m not among those, so I must be unbearably ignorant). They can also highlight various issues, and so both Coronation Street and Emmerdale have each got their own ‘gay in the village’, and Emmerdale has recently highlighted the problem of euthanasia.

However, some soaps go really multicultural. Neighbours, which is made in Australia and shown daily on BBC1, is now incorporating members of the Russian community (these, however, are not played by Russian actors).

There is a girl ‘from Belarus’, who’s got a strikingly Asian look. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not stating this is impossible altogether. I’m simply saying: it’s striking.

Better still, there is this female character ‘from Russia’ whose name is Mishka. ‘Mishka‘ is Russian for ‘a little bear‘. There is NO WAY it can be a female name. It can be a short form of the name Michael (Mikhail in Russian), but never a full name in its own right. As for a feminine equivalent to a masculine form of the name, in the West it is possible to meet a woman called Michaela, but not in Russia.

I don’t want to guess why Neighbours editors came up with this exact name, although I’ve got an inkling it may have to do with the 1980 Olympics, which mascot, as you know, was a teddy bear (it can also be called ‘mishka‘). So, the connection could of course be that the woman’s parents were feeling patriotic and called their baby after the mascot. The only problem with this interpretation is that the female character looks at least 49 and there is no way she could’ve been born in 1980.

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