Coronation Street, the world’s longest-running soap, has been hit by a wave of bleak headlines suggesting the show is in crisis.
High-profile departures and budget challenges for its UK network ITV have prompted a wave of negative headlines. But what’s really going on?
Poor old Coronation Street. The world’s longest-running soap has been hit by a wave of bleak headlines suggesting it is in crisis. A perfect storm of soaring production costs and ITV’s declining advertising revenue has put the future of the UK’s most-watched soap at risk. Or so it seems.
The 65-year-old show has seen several stars depart – most notably Helen Worth’s near-eternal character Gail Platt, who has struggled through seven marriages, including one to a serial killer. December saw five actors – Worth, Sue Cleaver, Charlotte Jordan, Luca Toolan and Colson Smith – hit the headlines for either leaving or announcing their departures. Reports also suggest that bosses have cut back on the number of regular cast members appearing in the background in scenes shot in the street’s beloved Rovers Return pub to save paying them for non-speaking roles.
In December, the show’s incoming producer Kate Brooks gave an interview to the fan-run Coronation Street Blog in which she warned that departures would continue in 2025. “There are a few exits this year and a few unexpected ones. They’re going to send shock waves. I think people might not expect the exits that will be occurring.” No wonder newspapers have reported that actors are quaking in their shoes. But are they really?
Last weekend Andy Whyment, who plays dozy but kind-hearted Kirk Sutherland, posted on Instagram: “There is a story about Coronation Street in the press nearly every day at the moment. I’d just like to say that the show is not on its knees and there is most certainly not a cast revolt, as one article has said. Please don’t believe everything you read. I for one am extremely happy and feel very grateful to still be working on Coronation Street.”
So what is going on? It’s true that Coronation Street has a large cast and that ITV is facing budget challenges – an industry-wide fall in ad revenue lopped £153 million (NZ$335m) off the network’s earnings in 2023 and it cut its 2024 programme budget by £10m to save cash.
But the show’s UK audiences have been on par or slightly down compared to 2023 – holding at about 4.4 million per episode. This is nowhere near the 0.9m year-on-year fall of total broadcast TV viewing in 2024 and Corrie even saw viewing figures increase year-on-year in late May and August. Soaps overall have fared comparatively well – in 2024, EastEnders ratings remained steady at about 3-4m viewers and Emmerdale held on to about 4m.
Cast changes may have hit the headlines last month, but soaps are supertankers in plot terms and, for most of these characters, their departures had been anticipated for some time. Worth, Jordan and Cleaver had all decided to leave by the start of 2024, an ITV insider says, while Toolan, who played the recently stabbed Mason, was hired on a limited contract with his fatal exit planned from the outset.
“This month the writers are sitting down to work out what is happening in spring of 2026,” the insider explains. “Corrie is now fully storylined in detail up to this summer. That story planning takes into account actors who have said they want to leave at the end of their current contract. That usually gives us six to nine months to plan a satisfying exit.”
Nonetheless, there have been on-screen savings. During Covid, restrictions on filming meant the team discovered they could make the show for less money if, instead of shooting in Manchester, they built Manchester on the show’s lot. There’s now a large exterior set called The Precinct, with a park, flats and the exterior of Weatherfield General Hospital. There’s also a “volume wall” – a large wraparound LED screen that provides video footage for scenes like Joel Deering’s recent demise on top of a railway bridge over a ravine. This was filmed with actor Callum Lill less than a metre off the floor in a Manchester studio. As a result, Coronation Street is on location far less frequently.
“You can see on screen that there have been changes in the budget and the production structure over the last couple of years – although we have been seeing a tightening of belts in all the soaps over the last few years,” says Steven Murphy, former editor of Inside Soap. “Corrie has had a mammoth cast for the average TV show. People are contracted for a year for X number of episodes and get paid extra if they appear in more. These days, that overtime has faded away.”
When Corrie launched, there were just 21 characters. This has grown in inverse proportion to the ratings, peaking in 2019 at 103 before sliding to about 84 at the end of last year. This is the largest soap cast – but not significantly so. EastEnders boasts some 78 regulars and Emmerdale about 74, while Hollyoaks has 41. And stories about cast cuts avoid mentioning that 12 new faces are due to join Corrie in 2025.
For Murphy, the “perfect storm” is current events colliding with a change of producers. “Every time a producer comes in, they’ve got their own ideas, so contracts don’t get renewed,” he points out. “Back in the day, this story would have been Kate Brooks as Brooks the Butcher with a cartoon of her holding a big axe. In the age of social media, it took one story by one paper for everyone to start repeating it. Momentum gathers and it feels like it’s a huge crisis.”
Although the average age of the Coronation Street cast has hovered around 45 since launch – its oldest cast was in 1982, with an average age of 49 – older performers such as Violet Carson’s Ena Sharples, Bill Waddington’s Percy Sugden, Doris Speed’s Annie Walker and Julie Goodyear’s iconic Bet Lynch used to dominate storylines. The arrival of producer Brian “The Axeman” Park in 1997 saw the emphasis change but lockdown, when older cast members like William Roache and Barbara Knox missed months of filming and story planning, pushed younger cast members to the forefront.
By 2023, younger actors so dominated storylines that viewers protested last year at the airtime given to Ruxandra Porojnicu’s Alina Pop and Caitlin Fitton’s Lauren Bolton. “I don’t want to see teenage kids all the time,” one viewer posted on X.
The move to younger characters is dismissed as “pandering to ‘yoof’” by one former writer. “The loyal audience who watch when the show is broadcast and provide the core of the overnight audience are older,” he points out. “But the BBC and ITV aren’t interested in them. The advertisers know that people over 40 don’t change their brand loyalty, so it’s pointless trying to reach them through TV advertising. As far as the advertisers are concerned, the only audience worth reaching is that which is still capable of switching brands – feckless youngsters.”
Conversely, there are issues with working older, more expensive performers too hard. “There are practical issues about older actors,” one Corrie insider points out. “William Roache is great and it’s wonderful he’s still working. But you can’t be shooting on the lot with a 92-year-old in the winter months.”
For the younger actors in particular, soaps are not the job for life that an older generation of performers once cherished. “So much of the sort of warp and weft of Coronation Street is its history, but the trouble with a lot of TV shows nowadays is that people flee quickly,” explains Gareth Roberts, who has written for Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Brookside. “It used to be that, if you left Corrie, you were never seen again.
“Nowadays, soaps are a springboard and you get people moving on quite quickly. It’s strange, because obviously society is getting older and TV audiences are older. Older viewers tend to complain and grumble about young characters, but then they get quite involved in them. Young people are more dramatic. They just are. They make for more intense stories.”
Brief stints in Corrie have helped the careers of the likes of Suranne Jones, Joanne Froggatt and Katherine Kelly and, of course, prime-time queen Sarah Lancashire. It also trained writers such as Jack Rosenthal, Paul Abbott, Sally Wainwright, Russell T Davies and Kay Mellor among many others. But soaps as the repertory theatre of prime TV are faltering.
Over on Channel 4, Hollyoaks has been cut from five episodes a week to three since September – and it is available only on E4, more4 and YouTube. At the time, Channel 4 said “the move reflects how young audiences are already consuming Hollyoaks, with Channel 4 data showing that the most loyal soap fans watch an average of three episodes per week”. Corrie, meanwhile, has six episodes a week and currently has no intention of cutting that back.
Why does all this matter? “You only have to ask your mates ‘What are you watching at the moment?’ and everybody says the same thing – there’s nothing on and there’s too much choice,” the former Corrie writer sighs. “Everything looks the same, has the same tone, same actors - all commissioned and produced by the same sort of people, from the same universities, who all have the same worldview.
“Where are the new writers? Perhaps the baby soap writer of today will be giving us the hits of tomorrow? But how can they if all the entry-level writing gigs have been axed?”
Rumours of a Corrie crisis may be exaggerated – according to Parrot Analytics, which measures the online chat and viewer demand for shows, audience demand for Corrie is 31 times higher than the average UK TV show – but, as Hollyoaks shows, British soap opera’s future is not secure. And even for non-soap watchers, if we do lose these engines of creativity completely, we stand to lose a lot.
Coronation Street screens Tuesdays to Thursdays on TVNZ 1, with episodes also available on TVNZ+
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