Corrie and Emmerdale collide for first time in explosive crossover episode

The worlds of TV soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale will collide – literally – in an explosive crossover episode on Monday, kicking off a revamped but reduced schedule for the shows.

Characters from both soaps will come face-to-face for the first time in the one-off Corriedale, which executive producer Iain Macleod jokes is “like the Marvel multiverse assembling”.

When Macleod took over both long-running shows two years ago, he started thinking about mixing the ITV soap universes, perhaps by sending a character or two on holiday across the Pennines.

“And then gradually you think, if you’re going to do it, why not go huge? Which is what we’ve elected to do,” he says.

In soap terms, “going huge” means staging a spectacular and slightly preposterous stunt in an attempt to grab viewers’ attention.

And so, on a dark road on a winter’s night somewhere between Coronation Street’s Manchester setting and Emmerdale’s West Yorkshire home, circumstances conspire to bring characters from both camps together. At high speed.

“First and foremost, as a soap fan, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these two worlds collide,” Macleod continues. “It’s so exciting.

“I think fans of both shows will enjoy the opportunity, just for this hour, to see what’s it like if your favourite character from over here interacts with your favourite character from over there.”

The meeting of the TV tribes had to happen on neutral territory, and Macleod says he got the idea for the storyline from his own journeys back and forth between Manchester and Leeds.

“Anyone that’s had the misfortune of making that journey with any frequency will know it’s fraught with delays and accidents and road closures and extreme weather events,” he says.

“So partly it was inspired by my loathing of that commute and having spent a long time embroiled in some kind of chaos on that transpennine arterial connection between the two cities that host our soaps.

“I was thinking, hmm, I wonder if I can turn my traumatic work journeys into something creative.”

For the actors, filming the special was a chance to get to know their counterparts.

“We had a lot of time to spend together,” says Joe-Warren Plant, who plays Emmerdale’s Jacob Gallagher. “There were three weeks of night shoots, and that was quite intense for the cast and the crew.

“We had a lot of time off set as well whilst we were waiting for the big set-ups and explosions. So we were hanging out in each other’s dressing rooms, in the trailers, and just having a lot of fun.”

There was “a little bit of competitive rivalry” during the build-up, he says, “but then as soon as we got on set, all of that went away”.

“There’s never, like, beef – but you obviously want to fly the flag for your side. But it’s been absolutely amazing. Everybody from Corrie has been so warm and welcoming.”

The all-action one-hour episode required 14 all-night filming sessions.

“They were really quite pleasant considering we were working from six at night till six in the morning,” insists Julia Goulding, aka the pregnant Shona Platt from Coronation Street.

“It was a really big team effort. It was great being with the Emmerdale lot. I had actually had a really nice time.”

Shona encounters trouble en route from the wedding of Corrie’s Debbie and Ronnie, and the only downside to the night shoots was spending so long in a pregnancy suit and the same dress, Goulding says.

“I had a frock on because I was coming back from the wedding. So it was a bit uncomfortable.

“There were other people in trainers and jeans, but I was there in my sparkly boots and my frock with my pregnancy bump.”

A few actors have tasted life on both sides of the soap divide.

They include Chris Bisson, who played Vikram Desai in Coronation Street from 1999 to 2002, and has been Jai Sharma in Emmerdale since 2009.

That caused a conundrum for producers when the two shows came together.

“I was thrilled to be part of this,” Bisson says. “I knew there was potentially a bit of an issue with me having played a character in both the soaps.

“I phoned the boss and said, ‘Please, let me be in it! The punters need to see Steve McDonald think he saw Vikram!'”

The two soaps will go their separate ways again after Corriedale in what ITV is calling a soap “power hour”, with Emmerdale at 8pm followed by Corrie at 8.30pm every weeknight (and both available to stream from 7am on ITVX).

“We’re setting a new routine, and actually I think it’s better for the soaps,” Bisson believes.

“I think we can get back to telling stories in the way that we used to tell them, because we’ve been forced into always trying to do a special double episode on a Thursday. But, of course, we did it every Thursday, so it wasn’t special any more.

“So let’s just play the genre in the way that people want the genre played, which is telling great stories, relevant stories, and it retains itself as the modern repertory theatre.”

Corriedale is the latest attempt to shore up the shows after years of declining ratings, according to the Sun’s soaps editor Carl Greenwood.

“They want to relaunch the shows at between 8 and 9pm and they needed a big bang to do it, because the soaps have lost millions and millions of viewers over the last few years,” he says.

Corrie got about 4.3 million viewers per episode and Emmerdale attracted 3.8 million in 2025 – both down by about a third over the past 10 years.

And after increasing their episode numbers over the decades, the soaps are now being scaled back for the first time. Corrie and Emmerdale will be on air for five hours per week in total instead of six.

“I think it was inevitable. There was no way they could sustain the hours that they were putting out in the episodes with the declining viewers,” Greenwood says.

They’re not the only soaps to have been trimmed – Hollyoaks and Casualty have also reduced their episode counts, while Doctors and Neighbours have bitten the dust completely.

“I don’t think we’re going to see soaps gone,” Greenwood adds. “But I don’t think we’re going to see as much of them going forward.”

The airtime has been reduced mainly because daily half-hour-episodes have the benefit of being in a reliable slot, and are in “a more consumable length and format”, Macleod says.

It will also have “a really positive effect on the way we tell stories”, he explains. “It’ll allow them to be a little bit pacier. The plot points can move on more quickly day-to-day, rather than having to play it over an hour.”

The budgets have been cut, though – but ITV hasn’t said how much by.

More than 70 staff and crew jobs have been lost, almost all through voluntary redundancies, Macleod says, meaning there have been some “difficult times” behind the scenes.

“We’ve lost a lot of very long-standing members of staff. It’s been a tricky year in that respect,” he says.

“But I think we’re entering 2026 in really rude health.”