Coronation Street

Tbf that thread probably exemplifies the very best of DS. Guesswork, well in advance of the storyline. I think even the actress who plays Jenny Bradley flagged it up on social media for praise.

There isn't any element of surprise on Corrie but it's slightly better than the producer before Oates' time, revealing storylines like Faye's pregnancy 10 months in advance. I think the way the soap industry is now it's harder than ever to keep secrets.

Today's first ITV3 episode was strange- the "End of Part One" music played going into the credits. I'm wondering if it was some dodgy editing back in 1990 or creeped in somewhere else?

On the YouTube video of the Granada Plus showing, you can hear the sound suddenly cutting out just before the credits, so possibly it was there on the master tape, and G+ silenced it? Would be good to see an off-air of the original broadcast.

In 1989/90 Granada was producing an omnibus for most regions consisting of two episodes a week (even after they went to three eps, the omnibus only had two). Perhaps something went wrong with the tape for 31st Jan and they had to refer to the omnibus and edit it down.

It's possible, today's first episode was the first half of the omnbius shown on 4/2/90 according to Corriepedia, so the end of that episode would have been going into a break on the omnibus showing.

Strange. Even on that Granada Plus version above you can hear the break music. But they've edited out Alma's "persuade me" which was there on the ITV3 episode today.

I wouldn't try eating one though, they were most likely all injected with TCP to stop the cast from pinching them.

Extremely odd! You can tell that the break sting was present in the Plus version too, though disguised by the editing. This was indeed the first half of an omnibus. Is it possible this episode and the next may have been originally shown as an hour-long episode for scheduling reasons, on 31st Jan or 2nd Feb 1990 (but if that were the case, there wouldn’t have been three ad-breaks as I’m sure 60-minute shows, including the Corrie omnibus, only had two breaks until around 2000)? Nothing about the next episode looks unusual - as if the titles or ad-break was added later - both Plus and ITV3 eps are identical at the start and in and out of the break.

One thing I did notice is that Plus cut a scene from each episode - in the first one, they cut the scene of Alec walking the baby, and in the second they cut a scene in the Rovers back room. I didn’t realise Plus habitually shortened their Corrie repeats by removing scenes.

Some thoughts on current Corrie.

It didn't take long for Carla to change her mind about Peter. Its so boring to be honest, cant they think of anything different to do with the characters. Carla back in the factory is one thing but getting back with Peter, I don't believe for a second that she would.

The Sally storyline i'm enjoying to an extent mainly because I like the character a lot. The Sean storyline is also quite good. Jude bores me to tears to be honest, Angie could be a great character if she was given better storylines. Gemma behind the bar at the Rovers just doesn't work for me, very over the top.

Corrie definitely a long way from being at its best for me at the moment. Perhaps the reason I talk more about the ITV3 episodes because it is so much better than current Corrie.

They could do with getting a new character running the hair salon or the corner shop. Both of those seem pretty stale.

Yes, they did it all the time to fit in more adverts, which is why it's annoying on the occasions a G+ edit made it to either DVD or ITV3. For example when ITV3 showed the G+ edit of Xmas 1987, one of the scenes they cut was the introduction of a couple of characters who were important over the next few episodes- so their appearance in the next episode was confusing.

ITV3 show them in 35 minute slots instead thankfully, and I don't think we've had a G+ edit since the spring of 88. We do get a lot of episodes with the old Granada endcap though (in fact we're seeing it more than the "For IT*" endcap), which some people here have supposed may have been export versions, though I don't think any actual content has been cut from them.

I guess maybe cutting out that line was part of their way of hiding the break music?

Though I haven't actually properly seen today's ITV3 episodes, as a 15 minute chunk was missing from the middle of my recording of the first episode- so there must have been either an outage, or the Tivo box rebooted (though that shouldn't take 15 minutes unless they decided to install a software update or something, so I assume the former). So I've had to set the 6AM repeat and watch it tomorrow.