Coronation Street

Watching Classic Corrie from earlier and didn't know that legendary French comedic actor Franck Dubosc played Patrice, Jenny Bradley's fiancé.

Watching the ITV3 episodes, you notice how often many "doorstep" scenes are done in the studio, with a studio mock-up of the front door and the brickwork around it, as well as seeing outside of the front doors to a backdrop of the street. Both look horribly fake, and you haven't seen them use either for a long time. Open doors are usually shot from an angle where you can't see out of them now and they'll always shoot doorstep scenes on the outdoor set. I guess modern viewers wouldn't accept the obvious fakeness of them, and they'd only show up even worse in HD.

I notice you do still sometimes get studio shot doorstep scenes on EastEnders, but the design of the houses there mean they don't look as fake.

Same goes for Neighbours. Occasionally you'll get a quick glimpse of a wall of the inside the real houses as a character is leaving or entering.

Neighbours also did fake front door scenes, You could tell they were fake as the brickwork didn't obviously match the real exterior, especially Number 22 back in the 90's.

Something else that annoys me is that all the front doors open the wrong way. Ordinarily a door will open so it is flush to the wall but in Corrie they open the other way. I get this is to hide the fact there is a studio on the other side and not the actual street but it's just one of those things that irrationally bug me!

Also, The distance between Ivy's front door and the stairs compared to everyone else is enormous. Again another small niggle. I'm just being picky!

I remember that. Was a bit odd having one episode repeated on Wed at 3.30pm and the other 2 on Sunday teatime. I remember HTV reduced Sons and Daughters from 3 times a week (Wed-Fri) to just 2 days a week for the networked repeat of Corrie on the Wed. I think most regions were either showing Sons and Daughters, The Young Doctors or A Country Practice in the 3.30pm slot at the time. Cant remember when HTV dropped the mid week Corrie repeat but Sons and Daughters was definitely back to 3 times a week by the time it ended in 1991. A Country Practice replaced it in the 3.30pm slot Wed-Fri.

Going back to Corrie. loving the ITV3 repeats still. ive not seen these episodes since Granada Plus repeated them in 2001, apart from the ones on DVD, but often its like watching episodes ive not seen before, amazing how much ive forgotten since 2001!

Next Friday they'll be showing the 16/3/88 episode- as next Friday is the 16th March it means we'll be exactly 30 years behind!

When the repeats started in October we were about 31 years 8 months behind, so we have already narrowed the gap quite a bit in quite a short amount of time really that the repeats have been on air. When we reach late 1989 and it going to 3 times a week it will slow down but we will still get through the episodes fast, showing over 3 weeks worth of Corrie each week on ITV3. If they keep showing the repeats at 10 per week we should reach the point Granada Plus gave up sometime next year.

As of today we've seen a full 2 year's worth of episodes as well. Started at 15/1/86, today was 18 & 20/1/88.

I'm so glad ITV finally came to their senses, treating viewers with classic episodes. I'm still worried they will pull the plug, and while I would've liked the episodes to have started from the beginning, beggars can't be choosers.

Watching today's episodes reminded me how great Mike was, the antagonist who could charm the pants off any woman. His clashes with Ivy and Vera were great; the writers now are persisting with the hackneyed Connors, and Beth couldn't hold a candle to the Duckworths.

Looking at 1988 in soapland, it was a big year for Neighbours. The ratings grew because of the BBC's decision to reschedule the repeat before the 6pm news. A lot of kids played truant or rushed home during lunch before that.

Do we know how well they rate? And I do hope they can get them on to the ITV Hub soon. They put them on there when they first started but it didn't last long before they took them off.

By not long, you mean the first 2 episodes on the first day were up for a couple of hours, then suddenly taken down, and that's it. I presume it's rights issues, possibly not too easy to clear up for a 30 year old show with 10 new episodes a week and a multitiude of cast and crew members coming and going.

They clearly rate well enough for them to have stuck with them for this long anyway. Certainly better than Drama did with The Bill where they gave up after a mere 2 months (if their excuse is to be believed anyway, I'm still suspicious that was rights issues as well). Sadly not easy to get ratings without properly paying or subscribing, all you can get otherwise are channels' weekly top 10s, and they don't show up there (but a weekday daytime show is unlikely to anyway, the top 10's entirely primetime and weekend). Someone on DS said a few weeks ago they were getting around 140,000 (which seems reasonable for weekday daytime on a digital channel), but I don't know if that's correct.

Yes, I remember the lunchtime repeats of Corrie and Emmerdale - as 623058 states, they stated in September 1993, replacing the (partial) Corrie omnibus that only Granada kept.

These lunchtime repeats weren’t networked (or may have been part-networked) as regions showed them, along with H&A and various quiz shows, at different times in the early afternoon. It seems ludicrous by today’s standards to think of the variation in the early afternoon schedule across the regions, despite the fact they were showing the same episodes of the programmes.

I think this went on until about 96/97? I know the Sunday omnibus was back in some, or all, regions by the late 90s - by then there were 4 episodes a week so I think there were still some weekday repeats too.