Coming together for Corriedale
In a historic first, British soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale come together for a unique event dubbed ‘Corriedale.’ ITV creative director of continuing drama Iain Macleod tells DQ about the plotting and production that went into making this special episode.
With a combined history stretching across 120 years, any number of episodes of British soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale could be said to contain drama, secrets, lies, injuries and potential deaths.
But that teaser particularly relates to a special hourlong episode airing tonight – dubbed ‘Corriedale’ – that marks the first time the worlds of both ITV series will collide, figuratively and literally.
Launched in 1960, Coronation Street follows the daily lives of the residents of Weatherfield in Manchester, while Emmerdale, which debuted in 1972, charts the highs and lows of the residents in the eponymous Yorkshire village.
In the episode, airing to mark the start of a new scheduling line-up, characters from the two shows now find themselves thrown together in the wake of a devastating multi-vehicle collision. The aftermath will give rise to fear, murderous intent, death and destruction, and life in Emmerdale and Weatherfield will never be the same again.
Characters confirmed to be caught up in the drama include Kit Green (played by Jacob Roberts), Asha Alahan (Tanisha Gorey), Carla Connor (Alison King), Shona Platt (Julia Golding) and David Platt (Jack P Shepherd) from Corrie, alongside Emmerdale’s Cain Dingle (Jeff Hordley), Charity Dingle (Emma Atkins), Jacob Gallagher (Joe-Warren Plant), Robert Sugden (Ryan Hawley) and Joe Tate (Ned Porteous).
While ITV soaps work to storyline documents that can be plotted up to 12 months before an episode airs, with filming taking place between six and 10 weeks before transmission, the idea behind Corriedale has been in the mind of Iain Macleod, ITV’s creative director of continuing drama, since the start of 2024. At that time, Macleod had recently become an executive producer on both Emmerdale and Coronation Street, having previously produced both soaps. Working on the two shows meant spending numerous hours driving along the M62 that connects Corrie’s Manchester base with Emmerdale’s home in Leeds, either side of the Pennines in Northern England.
It was during this period that he began mulling crossover ideas – one with a lighter touch included Tim and Sally from Corrie enjoying a “mucky weekend” at a B&B in Emmerdale, while others were “fully blended” – and ITV approached him with the opportunity to make a “really big noise” to mark the start of the broadcaster’s new soap schedule.
“Instantly, I put all my chips on the ‘go big or go home’ option,” he tells DQ. “I used to produce Emmerdale and live in Manchester and spend an awfully long time commuting between the two cities. Anyone that’s travelled on that route will know it’s often an absolute traffic nightmare. I thought, ‘Well, actually, what literally connects Coronation Street and Emmerdale is this arterial route across the Pennines.’ So the idea stemmed from my loathing of commuting down the M62, essentially, and it built from there.”
The exec admits he was nervous that ITV might think his idea was “too much,” having been aware of numerous other times a crossover had been mentioned in story rooms, only to be quickly shot down. However, he was emboldened by his belief that “modern soap viewers in the streaming age are certainly not traditional.”
“If ever there was a time when a soap viewer would have an appetite for this, I felt like it was now, and it turns out the network agreed, so they greenlit it, and away we went,” Macleod continues. “The result is absolutely stunning. It feels visually really premium. It’s really exciting.”
He is confident the finished episode works for those who usually watch one of the shows but not the other, and even viewers who watch neither Corrie nor Emmerdale. And as someone who knows both soaps inside out, Macleod’s favourite part of the process has been seeing characters from both shows interacting for the first time. “I knew I’d love that bit the best but I don’t think I was prepared for quite how much I love it,” he says. “It’s just been a lot of fun; it’s been great to see the two worlds collide, literally and figuratively. I’m really excited to see what the viewer reaction is like.”
For some time, Macleod was the only person on either series who knew what would be coming up, and faced the “tricky” task of trying to lead each show’s writing team towards this story destination without revealing exactly what he had in store.
“It was one of the most highly protected pieces of intel in the TV market, certainly within ITV, so I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone about it,” he says. In particular, he wanted to make sure the special episode served as the climax to several storylines from each show, while also triggering a spate of new ones that will now continue into 2026. “It’s taken quite a lot of coordination to make sure that the respective shows were arriving at the right place to coincide with what we needed for this hourlong,” he says. “But we got there.”
What was most important, however, was that these stories emerged naturally from each show’s writing team, without Macleod “imposing” stories on either side. “So my job has been to try to work with them to come up with what I secretly knew to be the right type of big story and then use my many years of experience to interweave all of that into this hourlong. It’s been a puzzle, but a really fun one, to say the least.”
Macleod initially imagined meeting some resistance from writers about bringing the two shows together, as they each have their own idiosyncratic styles, tones of voice and senses of humour. In practice, however, he found their response to be “really positive and really excited,” with numerous writers pitching to write the episode – an honour that eventually went to current Coronation Street and former Emmerdale scribe Owen Lloyd Fox.
“I felt quite strongly that it needed to be a single authorial voice rather than a co-write,” Macleod says. “Luckily, there was a writer [Fox] who was incredibly well positioned to do that. They had some track record on both shows. They knew the characters from both shows. We’ve got fantastic writers across both shows, any of whom could have done it, but this one person just felt like they were the most qualified in the end.”
Of course, writing the script wasn’t easy. The stories and scenes had to be really clear from the outset, while the episode as a whole needed to be enjoyable without years of knowledge relating to a particular character or storyline, but without spoon-feeding backstory to the audience.
Fans may also be pleased to know that iconic theme tunes and title sequences for each series remain intact, with Corriedale forgoing any combined introduction.
“The more I sat there with my eyes closed, imagining what that might look like, I couldn’t picture any version of it that would be anything other than slightly horrible,” Macleod says. “So we haven’t done that. We start really straight into the action, which is the right thing. We have commissioned a blended theme tune that we’re going to use, possibly on our socials, or somewhere other than in the main transmission. But the main episode itself won’t have blended titles and won’t have a blended theme tune.”
What was blended was the team that came together to film the episode across three weeks in October last year, with the schedule including a 12-night shoot on a disused road near Harrogate, Yorkshire. Due to the location, most of the crew came from Emmerdale, with some electricians and members of the costume and makeup teams brought over from Coronation Street. Post-production was then almost exclusively completed at Coronation Street.
“An exchange programme went on at a crew level, and I think everybody loved it,” Macleod says. “It was a lot of night filming, and that’s pretty draining, even if you’re really excited about the material, but the morale was unbelievably high from start to finish.”
The exec was also on set “a fair bit” and found the atmosphere to be “buzzing.” “It looked fantastic. Actors that weren’t required for a scene were all huddled around the monitors looking at the scenes they weren’t in, shocked because they couldn’t believe the spectacle of it, and became honorary parts of the crew,” he recalls. “Where they might have been more tempted to head off back to their dressing room and relax, they were staying on set and wanted to be part of it. There was a really amazing atmosphere around the whole thing.”
Following Corriedale, Macleod believes “the sky’s the limit” in terms of what the blended episode might mean for both Emmerdale and Coronation Street in the future. Much will depend on viewer reaction, but in the immediate future, the worlds of both shows won’t overlap. However, the consequences of the devastating crash featured in the special are likely to reverberate in both shows for some time to come.
“I was quite keen that it felt like a single, momentous blending of the shows, but that then they would mostly peel off back into their respective universes, and that is what we’re doing,” he says. “I know there have been loads of questions around that exact issue, both from viewers and from people working on Coronation Street and Emmerdale, like, ‘Is this the beginning of a more permanent blending?’ The answer is definitely not.
“People who love Emmerdale love it for being Emmerdale, and it’s the same with Corrie. You mess with the DNA of those in any long-term way at your peril.”
Yet at a time when British continuing dramas have experimented with live and one-shot production techniques, Corriedale goes down as “one of the biggest things” Macleod has ever done.
“I’ve presided over weeks where we’ve blown up more stuff, perhaps, or spent more money. But in terms of the newness of this and the freshness of it, and the excitement I feel around seeing characters from each show interacting that you never thought you’d see interact, that’s what makes it feel big to me,” he adds. “The [challenge] in soap these days is to find new stuff, stuff that the audience would accept and want to see, but new stuff, and it’s really hard to find new stories these days. Just for the unprecedented nature of this, it has to go down as one of the biggest things I’ve done.”
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tagged in: Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Iain Macleod, ITV