Corrie's on fire
Gaffe fans will have their YouTube accounts fired up and ready to go on Thursday night as Coronation Street presents an hour long live special to celebrate fifty years on our telly. However, they might not get the chance to see a total meltdown in Weatherfield as it has emerged the producers are filming the dress rehearsal … just in case.
That’s right, should there be a ‘technical emergency’ the programme will shunt from a live feed to a pre-recorded back-up.
The show did the same thing ten years ago when they made their last foray into live television to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Corrie … and on that occasion (see above), they were fine.
Producer Phil Collinson said: ‘We are pre-recording the dress rehearsal so we have something to switch over to in the event of something terrible happening technically.’
‘We won’t need to do that – we didn’t need to do it before,’ he added, referring to the live programme a decade ago.
It turns out that EastEnders took the same precaution in February this year when they went live for an hour in Walford to mark their 25th birthday.
Speaking to the Beehive, an EastEnders insider confirmed: ‘Yes, we did have a pre-recorded back up, with the various endings filmed in case of a technical crisis.’
One assumes that ‘technical crisis’ in EastEnders-speak does not included actors fluffing their lines or else surely the director would have been hitting the play button pretty quickly once Scott Maslen came on set in the Square. (see right)
A Coronation Street source told the Beehive: ‘We don’t for one moment believe we’ll be using the pre-recorded dress rehearsal. The episode will be live from Manchester in the same way it was 50 years ago tomorrow night.’
So, you never know your luck, you might still get to see Ken Barlow trip over or someone die and then miraculously start moving again because the actor has cramp.
The Coronation Street live special will be broadcast from 8pm, Thursday 9th December on ITV1 and ITV1 HD
