Coronation Street

This does come as a surprise. When the soap is getting criticised in recent times for its poor quality storylines, they add another episode.

This really isn't the right move from ITV, they needed to remove one episode so they don't have to draw out storylines now across six episodes for it to span the week. The fans might cause an uproar if they removed an episode but over time I'm sure they would see it would be the right thing to do.

I'm an EastEnders fan myself, and where I normally wish they would add an episode on a Wednesday, in reality I know it would be overkill and I think 4 episodes a week is just right.

I know football is partly to blame, but just look at tonight - Corrie is one for half an hour at 7:30, then an hour at 9pm!
Like others have said, Sunday night would be the best place for the additional, along with the second Thursday episode of Emmerdale. Sunday has been full of duds on ITV ever they moved them - and replaced them with Dancing on Ice (and look what happened there...)
Maybe we could see the return of family dramas at 8pm?

They did!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(TV_serial)

And I don't think they've done anything remotely as interesting or controversial since.



More like reflecting a failure to understand the non-linear correlation between quality and quantity...

The football is entirely to blame, it's the two episodes that should have been on Monday so not relevant at all.

What did happen? That it ran for 9 years?

I think this is a risky move for ITV. Yes, in the short term, it'll bring them more money in advertising revenue, but I can only see it damaging the quality of the programme long term.

It'll inevitably mean more dull padding in the programme. Very little of substance ever happens until about 7.56pm in the first of the double episodes already, so I expect there will be more of this.

Adding an extra episode adds further demands on fans, making it more difficult to follow if you've got even a half busy life. Some will probably give up. There will be extra demands on the cast too - I wouldn't be surprised if this increases turnover of actors which is never good for ratings.

Coronation Street, whether you like it or not, is the jewel in ITV's crown. I can't help but feel they need to treat it with more care, or they could damage their biggest asset.

The schedulers are to blame. Live football every two years is as fixed in the schedules as the soaps themselves yet they still commission as many episodes. Of course the last minute picks affect scheduling but they could quite comfortably have cut an hour from both soaps for the 3-4 weeks of the tournament without really upsetting anyone.


As for this move I think both soaps would benefit by switching to 3 x 1 hour episodes rather than 6 x half hour episodes, ideally with them airing on alternate nights.

Even the BBC dont do that with EE, Holby and Casualty, and have to move them from pillar to post, so I can't see ITV ever doing so.

The point I was making was that ITV decided to axe the soaps and family dramas (Heartbeat, The Royal, Where the Heart Is) from Sunday nights - where they performed well (especially compared to what they have now). They moved DoI there for only three months of the year, and didn't know what to do with the rest of the year.
Now, they don't have DoI either, and rely on fillers and under-performing entertainment formats to fill the massive void!
Also, being pedantic here - DoI ran for seven years on Sundays. The first two series aired on Saturdays.



As Brekkie pointed out, ITV knows that soaps will be affected by football every two years - now they are playing catch-up, and scheduling miss-placed episodes in odd places - two weeks in a row, Friday nights have Emmerdale at 7.00 and 8.00, with Corrie at 7.30 and 8.30. I think that is relevant.

It has been repeated over the years that the way ITV relies so heavily on soaps is because of all the competition out there that they didn't have back in the 1970s. What are the main competitor channels to ITV?

Well, I would agree with that. The problem with the soaps scheduling on ITV at the moment is exactly the opposite, though, in that there's a traffic jam of soaps on Mondays and Fridays especially, and then next to nothing the other nights. So even though there's only been one extra episode of Corrie and Emmerdale respectively since 2000, it looks like there's loads more, partly thanks to those evenings when it's all soap. Whereas on Tuesdays after 7.30 and Sundays you have nothing fixed in the schedules so you get some right odds and sods and the ratings peak and trough massively.



However, the other general point is that the usual female-skewing ITV audience wants soap, and there may be hours of soap on this and last Friday, but there's also been hours of football for the past few weeks. Ideally you'd spread it all out a bit but that's not possible at the moment. Last week ITV had football in primetime for three consecutive evenings, which is alright for the male audience but did nothing for the traditional ITV audience. So that meant on the nights they weren't showing football they had to aim very heavily at that audience and that means loads and loads of soap.

Haven't they learned from X Factor that dragging something out to the extremes only harms a programme, rather than resulting in increased viewership?