Coronation Street

I doubt that to be honest. Technically they are before the watershed so should be suitable. They don't make any cuts to the ITV2 daytime repeats do they? I don't tend to watch the repeats as record the ITV episodes by series link, but id be surprised if they do. Even if they did have to make any edits I expect it would be minimal.

I thought they were all dark, miserable and depressing. That's why I stopped watching about 20 years ago!

I love the comments I hear so many people make about the soaps "I don't watch them, but I know they're a load of miserable crap". And the amount of people who are "happy" that EastEnders and the likes are cutting production even though nobody was making them watch it anyway.

Maybe they're happy because something else will be shown instead?

Aren't the ITV soaps contractually obliged to make a set amount of episodes a year (which is why they show more episodes if they get moved because of football, and why we randomly had a 1-hour Sunday episode not too long ago) or have I just made that up?

Technically yes, but realistically ITV owns the entire production from start to finish anyway so who are they going to shout at if they don't make 220 episodes a year? Shout at themselves?

They can watch something else, it's not like there's just 3 or 4 channels these days.

How many of the people who moan about the soaps will watch that "something else" anyway? They'll probably still complain it's crap.

Clearly the producers of Corrie will have an agreement to make a certain number of episodes per year for ITV. Obviously this is important, in particular, so that they provide the show's sponsor with what they've paid for.

In the current circumstances though, there will have to be some flexibility – if the programme can't be made, it can't be made. ITV may have to reimburse Compare The Market for missed sponsor credits, or, given that they're cancelling their sponsorship of the show, they might offer to extend the sponsorship until they've fulfilled all commitments.

I guess with Co-Op and Costa, they could offer to include them in more scenes for a while to make up for missed appearances.

Well, indeed, there will obviously be some flexibility with everything at the moment.

One of the main reasons why, in normal circumstances, you always get episodes moved rather than cancelled is because production moves so fast the schedules are really regimented. If you're set up to make six episodes a week, you may as well keep doing that permanently, rather than changing everyone's working patterns when there's only five in a week (and that obviously also gives you a bit of leeway when you have additional episodes in later weeks).

It's like any other factory, really - they're set up to make X hours a week and that's how many they'll make.

Won't they have been getting extra sponsor bumper airings anyway due to ITV3 now showing old episodes?

Probably that rarely repeated show 'The Chase'

Wrong length. All the freed up timeslots are half hours.