As the viewers choose which pairing gets an additional scene, the ITV boss promises this iconic duo is “sparky”

Coronation Street and Emmerdale are set to collide for the first time ever with Corriedale providing an hour-long episode of explosive entertainment as the two worlds merge for one night only.

The collaboration will kick off the new soap “power hour” which will see a change in schedule, with Emmerdale and Corrie running every weeknight for 30 minutes

Now, the full cast list has been confirmed and will include many beloved characters from either side of the Pennines. Meanwhile, in an extra treat for the viewers, the producers of both programmes are inviting the audience to choose which two characters, one from each soap, they would like to see meet and interact in a scene.

The four different options viewers will get to choose from were filmed in November and will feature either Emmerdale’s Emma Atkins (Charity Dingle) and Corrie’s Alison King (Carla Connor), Emmerdale’s James Hooton (Sam Dingle) and Corrie’s Andy, Emmerdale’s Nicola Wheeler (Nicola King) and Corrie’s David Neilson (Roy Cropper), or Emmerdale’s Mike Parr (Ross Barton) and Kate Ford, aka Corrie’s Tracy Barlow.

At the Corriedale premiere which took place at Bradford’s National Science and Media museum, producer Iain MacLeod gave an insight into the additional scenes, making a quip into how anxiety-inducing it will be on the big night.

He shared: “Because I hadn’t made Owen (Lloyd-Fox) do enough work by this point, he very kindly agreed when I suggested we would write based on a sort of long list of viewer suggestions from social media discussions, we chose four pairings that we like the sound of and that the viewers like the sound of, each pairing being one character from each show, and we’d write a scene and shoot a scene of all of those four pairings, and then starting in January, there’ll be an online poll, which is free of charge.

“So it’s just a bit of fun. And for me, quite a lot of stress. But it’s just a bit fun, and you can vote for which of these four pairings you’d like to see in the finished episode. So when you see that again on January 5 there’ll be an additional scene in there that will be chosen by the audience, voting closes 15 minutes before transmission.

“I will be in the transmission suite on the night, going, oh, that one. Hopefully that’s the right one. And I’m already feeling a little sweaty about that. to be honest.”

He continued: “We’ve designed it so that there’s a juncture where it can feature, and I’m not telling you where it is at this point. But yeah, the pairings are, I’ll forget these now because I’m nervous, but we have Roy and Nicola, Cafe Supremos, the pair of them. We have Kirk and Sam, which actor James Hooton described as the meeting of two brain cells. We have Carla and Charity, which, you know, certainly there’ll be a lot of noise around that if that ends up being the one that is successful.”

Iain then touched on Ross Barton and Tracy Barlow, both incredibly flirty characters from either side of the Pennines. He teased: “And then there’s Ross and Tracy, which is, I mean, they’re all excellent. Ross and Tracy’s very sparky. It’s two appallingly flirtatious people, unable to avoid sort of hating slash flirting with each other. So they’re all individually brilliant scenes.

“In the can, they’re ready to go. We’ll find some avenue for you to see all of them at some point, I’m sure, but in terms of what goes in the episode, final version of Corriedale to be enshrined for posterity, that will be up to the audience.”

Adding what it was like to write the extra scenes, Owen Lloyd-Fox shared: “I think the hardest thing was that I wanted it to be, well, I was begging for a movie length, but I wanted it to be a week long. I loved being asked to do those extra scenes, those characters together, because in my head, I’m a fan as well as a writer.

“In my head, I’ve thought, you know, what would happen if Tracy meets Ross and there was a load of different combinations of characters that I would want. The hardest thing was just fitting anything in, I would have loved to have written it forever.

“I want these brilliant characters to sit down and have a chat and just, you know, to be in the pub and feel each other out and have affairs and do all the things characters do together.”