Coro St Reverts to Half-an-Hour

Bad news, Coronation Street fans — the soap is soon to revert to three half-hour episodes a week.

Last week TVNZ 1 aired hour-long instalments and will do so again tonight and tomorrow.

But Thursday’s broadcast will mark a return to a half-hour strip for the foreseeable future.

Initially I thought this was a scheduling convenience because it follows the season premiere of House Rules: High Stakes, which will push Corrie’s start time back to 10.00.

But it turns out TVNZ 1’s hour-long broadcasts were part of a catch-up strategy after the network fell “half-a-week” further behind ITV than it wants to be because of delays in the programme’s delivery.

In the UK, six half-hours a week of Corrie was the norm until COVID-9 disrupted production.

Ideally, TVNZ 1 likes to trail the UK by nine half-hours but over the last three months this had stretched out to 12.

With the soap still not having returned to full production, delivery remains an ongoing issue — hence TVNZ 1 falling back to three half-hours a week.

“We’re committed to keeping up after going through the big jump ahead for primetime in 2018 and slowly catching daytime viewers up,” a spokeswoman said.

Meanwhile, Friday’s UK broadcast of Corrie was the first episode to acknowledge the pandemic.

“Thankfully, bar the odd clunky line, it was all done true to Corrie’s spirit, through the humour and characterful dialogue the show is famous for,” Radio Times reports.