Iain MacLeod, a former Hollyoaks boss, has revealed why the Channel 4 soap occasionally changes scenes and storylines right at the last minute.
Iain currently works as the Executive Producer for Continuing Drama at ITV, overseeing what happens at Coronation Street and Emmerdale. Between the years of 2014 and 2016, he was boss of Channel 4’s continuing drama.
He recently sat down with the This is Media City podcast and shared secrets about the soap industry. As well as confirming future plans for Emmerdale and Corrie, Iain also explained why Hollyoaks storylines can get switched up so suddenly.
An example of this was when Rita Simons got cast in the show. She was originally meant to play Norma Crow’s daughter, but plots changed which meant she came in as Joel Dexter’s mum Marie Fielding instead.
‘Corrie had the advantage of having been running by that point for about 53 years so they kind of had the running of the machine down to a T. You know, it was very smooth. The protocols and systems were fairly failsafe. There was a lot of latency built in. So if you for any reason had to pull a storyline out abruptly because you couldn’t transmit it anymore, which does happen, there was ample time to rework that and put something else in in its place’, Iain said.
‘Hollyoaks was a lot more hand-to-mouth. It was a lot more “Now! Now!”, everything that happened has happened yesterday. But it was exhilarating. I worked there for two years, and I always say I think I learned more in six months on Hollyoaks than I learned in six years on Corrie, just in terms of the “everything that can go wrong, will go wrong” side of it.’
He added: ‘What they achieve on the budget and the schedule within which they have to work is astonishing. And Hollyoaks gives you this kind of sense of indestructibility, which is if I watch something on a Thursday that I think isn’t fit for transmission, and it’s supposed to be on the telly next week, we can still turn that around.
‘We can reshoot that, we can redo this, we can recast them. You suddenly realise that actually nothing’s finished ’til it’s on the TV. Lots of other places where I’ve worked, it’s sort of like, “Well, it’s too late now”. But on Hollyoaks it’s like everything they put out has to be the very best it can be.’
‘And if anyone over there comes out of a viewing and it’s like “I don’t know, that was all right, but I think the performances weren’t as good as they might have been or the stunt didn’t work quite as well as it should have”, they feel emboldened to just go “We’ll do it again and we’ll get it right. We’ll make it better”.’
Elsewhere, following the success of Corriedale, Iain confirmed on the podcast that Corrie and Emmerdale now have plans to improve the visual quality of their episodes.
‘In terms of the look and feel of the shows, we’re in the midst of a big piece of work around evolving what they both look like’, he said.
‘I want there to be a somewhat consistent visual feel between the soaps, so you know when you turn on Emmerdale or turn on Corrie, that it’s an ITV soap – without homogenising it too much.
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Should the soaps change or stay the same?
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They need to change to stay relevant
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Keep them the same!
‘But we’re updating all of our kit, basically, in terms of cameras and post-production infrastructure and all the rest of it. There might [also] be some news around shifting from HD slightly upwards, in terms of the resolution that we’re using.’
Iain went on to explain that he really wants Corrie and Emmerdale to have a similar feel to a show from a streaming service, like Squid Game on Netflix.
He noted: ‘What we don’t want is to be left behind. If your mum’s now watching Squid Game on Netflix, you don’t want those viewers to turn on Corrie or turn on Emmerdale and it looks like a completely different century – or genre, even.
‘We want to evolve our look so it retains some of the cinematic flavours that we saw in Corriedale recently.’