Here’s the full press release.

ITV STUDIOS today confirmed that Phil Collinson is to join the company as the new Producer of Coronation Street.  Manchester based Phil joins ITV STUDIOS from the BBC where his credits include Series Producer for the iconic Doctor Who.

Phil will take over from Kim Crowther who has decided to step down after two and a half hugely successful years as Producer of the UK’s favourite soap. Phil will join in March to allow for a suitable handover period.  Kim will continue to produce the show through to the early summer of 2010. Phil will report into Kieran Roberts, Executive Producer of Coronation Street.

John Whiston, Director of ITV STUDIOS said:

“We are delighted Phil has agreed to join ITV STUDIOS and carry on the fantastic, creative work that Kim has spearheaded.  Phil is a hands-on producer, with a fine track record in shaping much loved and treasured programming and I have no doubt he will bring all that talent to Coronation Street.

“I would like to thank Kim for her immense contribution to the show. Kim’s sheer hard work and her boundless imagination are the qualities that have continued to keep Coronation Street as fresh and exciting as ever as it enters its 50th year.

“Kim leaves Corrie in fantastically good health, having increased total audience share in the last quarter as recent storylines around Tony, Carla, Maria and Roy Cropper have been delivering spectacularly large audiences day in day out this autumn. This achievement is testament to the skill and talent of Kim and her team.

Kim Crowther said: “Coronation Street is very special to me. It’s been a huge privilege to work with such a wonderful cast, production and writing team. But after a couple of great years, I’m looking forward to reintroducing myself to my children. I’m delighted to be passing the baton to Phil, and wish him all the best for what should be a spectacular fiftieth year for the show.”

Phil Collinson said: “I am  absolutely thrilled to be joining Corrie, the nation’s favourite street and a show I’ve been a huge fan of all my life . It goes without saying that it’s a tremendous honour to be entrusted with building on Coronation Street’s success and creating the must-see storylines for 2010 and beyond. Kim will be a tough act to follow but I will be working with one of the best teams in the business and I can’t wait to get stuck in.”

This is the week when The Bill moves to a new once-a-week 9pm slot, whereupon it upgrades to HD, a new title sequence and theme music. And to hammer that point home the channel have, confusingly, scheduled two episodes of the drama, running over Thursday and Friday.

In addition, it’s revealed that Coronation Street is to lose its traditional Wednesday at 7.30pm slot. Instead the soap will TX on Thursday nights at 8.30pm, while Emmerdale will screen two episodes also on Thursday, and its regular Tuesday hour-long episode will be cut back to 30 minutes.

An ITV spokesman said: “Coronation Street will make a move from Wednesday to Thursday nights on ITV1 from July 23 as part of a change to the schedule to reflect ITV’s contracts for the Champions League, FA Cup and England internationals, which will see ITV1’s live football broadcast on Wednesday evenings.  In addition, two separate episodes of Emmerdale will be broadcast on Thursdays from the same date.   We’re delighted that Thursday evenings on ITV1 will be a great showcase for soap from Weatherfield and the Woolpack.”

2 – How come Kenzie and Chesney are in the same year, yet the former looks about five years older than the latter?

3 – Do smokers have to go behind the bar and to the hallway to get to that shelter?

4 – Why has work suddenly ceased on the new flat development?

5 – Who owns that joinery firm at the end of the road that we see in every episode?

6 – Why did bosses keep Jane Danson’s real-life pregnancy off our screens but aren’t doing likewise with Julia Haworth’s?

7 – Was that Casey woman ever put on trial?

8 – What happened to Eric the bookie, played by Tony Slattery – given that Lloyd’s debt, called in by Harry, was to an unseen bookie not called Eric?

9 – Given that his son has driven his car into a canal and wound up in jail, and his step-daughter got married, where the hell is Martin Platt?

10 – Why is this programme, for all its niggles and faults, still by far the best thing on television?

Kevin Webster was before magistrates and on his way to chokey within a fortnight of smacking his daughter’s teacher. Now, I appreciate that the backlog of committal proceedings is long, but surely by now the trial or hearing at Weatherfield Crown Court would have happened?

Or are Granada trying to airbrush a largely ineffective old storyline quietly away?

The McDonalds have always been brilliant. Feisty, argumentative and racked with tensions, they nonetheless maintained the believable end of their edginess and it was a poor decision to axe first Andy (though Nicholas Cochrane’s character, as the strongest-willed, was the most disposable) and then Jim. Although both have returned sporadically when plotlines have demanded it (the Blackpool special, Steve’s riotous second wedding to Karen) it has fallen on Simon Gregson’s shoulders to prove that a McDonald presence on the Street needed to be maintained. Bringing back the character of Jim pays a sly tribute to Gregson’s standing on the Street these days as, despite being only 33 in real life and in character, one of the programme’s longest-serving continuous characters.

I hope Jim is back to stay, and although he is much more chalk to the rest of the family’s cheese, I hope there are plans afoot to bring back Andy too, even beyond any necessary cameo for Cochrane to undertake for the wedding episode. There is a difference with the McDonalds I enjoy.

I suspect that all Corrie fans thought immediately like I did when I read the news – what will happen to Jack? Reading on, and it was made clear that Bill Tarmey would be sticking around to continue playing his character. To my mind, this leaves Granada with absolutely no alternative – they have to kill Vera off.

This may be somewhat insensitive, given that Liz Dawn is leaving because she has emphysema, but the Duckworths have – despite a ratio of rows and fallouts more suited to opposite sides in a civil war – been the Street‘s most enduring and tight-knit couple. It has been programming policy for many years now that they will never be given a storyline which leads to their permanent splitting up. Every adult around them has a turbulent marital history – widowed, divorced, separated, deserted, jilted, parenting out of wedlock – but not these two. Their weaknesses have been their strength.

A 50th wedding anniversary for the Duckworths – although we’ve only had 27 years of it with the cameras on – is due this year. In typically soapish manner, this could be the time for Vera to discover something’s up with her – she has only one kidney, for example; the reminder of that is with her grandson Paul, who got the kidney a few years ago and is now getting his feet under the table – and begin the process of fading her out. Like Stan and Hilda Ogden before them, this could be the ultimate making of the Duckworth legend; we all recall the astonishing performance of Jean Alexander as she opened the just-deceased Stan’s spectacles case and finally broke down after losing the man she had spent 20 years on our screens terrorising. For all Bill Tarmey’s undoubted disappointment at waving away his sparring partner, I suspect the chance for him to do something beyond the malingering-gambling-drinking pensioner with half-repaired glasses shtick just once will be something this excellent performer will relish.

Vera started on the Street in 1974, largely in the background at the factory later to be taken over by Mike Baldwin, at which point she seeped to the front. Her running gossip sessions with Ivy Tilsley and Ida Clough were finely honed comic soap, the type of which the likes of Sean Tully, Janice Battersby (a Vera successor in most ways, except she’s still hard to like) and Fiz Brown are continuing with gusto. When not sewing flared denims, she was in the Rovers continuing the tirade, or – like the then unseen Jack – having discreet liaisons with other men. Once Jack became a real person with Tarmey’s elevation from extra to speaker in 1979, we learned the truth about the Duckworths – they had eyes elsewhere, but ultimately couldn’t be without one another.

Vera was sacked by Baldwin, then reinstated after a plea from his trophy wife Susan, then sacked again. She tried running the Rovers, but was as a bad an accountant as she was a leader and delegator. She learned to drive (infamously with a Vera lookalike in the long shots, as Liz Dawn had never even sat behind a wheel before) after winning a car, and her constant belief that she is loosely Royal thanks to a spot of illegitimate fumbling on a red carpet somewhere has always been a delight. The application of that ugly stone cladding and the renaming of her house as The Old Rectory emphasised her unquenched desire to rise a level. Her dogged belief in her villainous son, Terry, has also brought out the best in Vera, even though she really should have aimed such belief in her husband, although her subsequent surrogate motherhood to the likes of Curly Watts and Tyrone Dobbs at least partly cleansed her sense of failure, along with the good relationship she enjoys with the two remaining mothers of the three grandsons which Terry spawned and then left.

But ultimately, it’s still that very partnership with Jack which has been Vera’s saviour, her constant, and therefore – just like the most solid relationships in real life – it has to end in the way the vows intend and death must do them part. It’ll be sad to close the door on another long and distinguished chapter in Corrie‘s history, but with the older characters there’s only so much room for sentiment – after all, there’s high class drama to had, first and foremost. Let Vera go with dignity and style – so no sudden heart attacks to prevent the expected cause of death, like the cop out over Mike Baldwin – and let’s hope that Liz Dawn’s battle against emphysema is a long and unharrowing one.

Especially for the fans, Kevin made sure he mentioned in his speech the memorable first meeting between the two in January 1986 when, while driving Brian Tilsey’s breakdown van somewhere unspecified, he drove through a puddle and soaked an 18 year old puffball-skirted, highlighted fashion victim of the era, who gave him such merry hell through the window when he stopped to apologise that he offered her a lift home to get changed. And love blossomed…

Her first big role was to be the eagle eyes of a dawn-breaking Street when she spotted that the Rovers was on fire. Kevin is remembered as the hero who climbed a ladder and dragged Bet to the window (and better still ran the length of the street with dressing-gowned Percy Sugden carrying the ladder), but ultimately he only got in because Sally was looking the right way. He was too busy trying to bite chunks out of her neck…

Typically of long-serving Street characters, Sally has worked just about everywhere available on Coronation Street itself. She answered phones in the old yard, then had a job in the Rovers, until walking out in a strop when her lunchtime shifts were given to the returning Betty; she childminded for Gail and others at their homes; she worked in the corner shop for Alf Roberts, then did Kevin’s admin for a while in the garage before taking on her current position at Underworld. All she needs now is to become Steve McDonald’s latest recruit at StreetCars and the full set will be hers.

She’s lived at No.13 (or 12A, as Hilda Ogden briefly tried to call it) since Hilda’s lodger Kevin met her, initially with the timeless and kindly Mrs Ogden, who didn’t like her at first (only because she adored Kevin’s posh ex, Michelle Thingy) and then as long term leaseholders and finally owner when Hilda did her disappearing act to Derbyshire. There was that period where she left Kevin and moved in with Greg Kelly above the corner shop, but of course, this was soap…

Sally Whittaker has developed her namesake from ambitious, gobby teenager to ambitious, arrogant middle-aged mother with splendid gusto. She’s had to deal with fallouts, marriages, remarriages, domestic violence, wayward kids, business failures and hurt pride, and has always come through the test. When Johnny Briggs left Coronation Street, he called her “the best actress on the programme, and yet nobody notices” – and I think that sums her up. Here’s hoping she’ll be celebrating her 80th in the Rovers in 2047, and Kevin, aged 84, will still be on about that big dirty puddle.

Deirdrie’s suspicions finally came to fruition when, amidst insults about loyalty and bad motherhood, Tracy spilled every bean from the tin. The truth will always out when the viewer already knows what it is – those who believe soap should reflect fairness more than reality dictate this rule – and so now the emphasis will be on Deirdrie to get Tracy off the hook for Charlie’s murder, rather than Clare, David or even Tracy herself.

It was one for the fans too – we got references to Tracy’s biological dad Ray, that memorable combination of perm and glasses (“Sexy Specs”) from Deirdrie’s heyday, and the unconvincing Ecstasy storyline which led to Tracy getting Samir’s kidney after the Moroccan monotony (“He could barely string a sentence together” – was that a dig at the acting or just the character?) got clubbed over the head (though not by Tracy, natch). All we needed were digs about baked beans, tape-playing and buggering off to Newcastle with just a teddy bear because you weren’t allowed to have a dog. I’m almost disappointed Tracy didn’t scold her mum for letting a truck drive into the Rovers Return frontage sometime in 1977 while she was near the front door in her pushchair.

Anyway, the acting was terrific (if rather loud; Heaven only knows how the supposedly sleeping Ken, Blanche, Amy, Adam and Peter didn’t overhear) and the idea paid off.

Two questions; was the almost idle (and truncated) reference to Deirdrie saying that Samir was the “only man she ever lov…” a little indication of where Tracy might take this with Ken if her mother fails to star in court? And when did Corrie last do a two-hander?

It was excellent. Now for the trial.

What we got was Sean facing the camera, and Sunny facing him. We saw the back of Sunny’s head, and the stunted movement of the two bonces made it obvious there was no real lip-locking whatsoever going on.

Okay, so the story dictated that Steve wouldn’t know it was Sunny until he recognised the shirt on his back later as he got into his taxi. But in the interests of drama, it would have made sense for the viewer to get a close-up, especially as Sean and Sunny had acted their own dramatic moment outside the nightclub just before the camera panned back and the faked tonsil hockey got underway. The actors surely can’t have dictated what did and didn’t happen.

Then I remembered the explosive reaction – of the not-good variety – the last time (and, indeed, the first time) Corrie decided to embrace man love. So we got Nick Tilsley clumsily molested by confused Todd Grimshaw – the former doing outrage a little too forcefully; the latter playing confused extremely well. And it was barely a brush of the lips before Nick jumped up and began his tirade at Todd. But the Daily Mail went berserk; the TV critics panned it for not going far enough or, in some cases, just made some very weak jokes; and retired Corrie stalwarts like Jean Alexander gave interviews about how it was all wrong and misguided and there was too much emphasis on youth issues.

After that, Todd met that nurse friend of Martin’s in Manchester’s gay village but never kissed him, before disappearing off down south. Sean has since filled the gay quota for one street but never actually seems to have any fun, and has struggled to get beyond mild flirtation when it comes to relationships. He has to be seen at the moment trying to rekindle former passions with Sunny, despite him being the beau of barmaid Michelle, his close friend. The storyline might end happily (I doubt it though) and as it includes Steve, will be often played for laughs, but ultimately the lack of kiss and the lack of direction for the likeable Sean – the sort of gay bloke straight guys like Jamie can feel some empathy with – means that Corrie has listened to the critics and lost its nerve.

Last summer Charles was suspended by the show following a series of tabloid revelations about drug taking. As a result, Lloyd abruptly disappeared with absolutely no explanation whatsoever as to where he had gone. No other characters seemed to notice he wasn’t there any more, and for over six months Lloyd simply wasn’t referred to. Not mentioning the fact that a main character wasn’t around was like trying to ignore an elephant in the corner of a room with a lampshade on its head.

Last night, however, Lloyd returned as suddenly as he had gone following Charles’ reinstatement. No acknowledgment was made of the fact that he had not been on the Street for so long. It was quite ridiculous of the programme makers to think people would not find this unusual, particularly as viewers of Corrie were well aware that Charles had been suspended. But Lloyd was back in his element, talking normally to characters that we had never seen him meet and running his cab firm as if all was perfectly normal. 

The ridiculous thing is that it would have been so simple to have covered the character’s absence by writing in somebody mentioning that Lloyd had, say, had to go away to look after an ill relative or gone on a long holiday. One simple line would have been enough to make such a lengthy period of leave seem credible. Emmerdale has had a similar problem recently due to the situation surrounding Ben Freeman, but they successfully put in a couple of lines to deal with the fact that his character was no longer around – why couldn’t the writers of Corrie have done something similar?