Emmerdale: The Truth At Last?

“Isn’t it good when everything’s cleared up?” suggested Kris Green over at Digital Spy when boldly providing us with the ‘truth’ behind the press stories circulating over moral at Emmerdale.

It would have been great, had the ‘ITV spokesperson’ been telling the truth, but as usual it was a nice bit of spin.

Funnily someone at Yorkshire Television said to me recently, “It’s not what you know, its who you know in this business,” and seemingly – sadly – that’s true.

Earlier this year a member of ATV News’ reporting team was given an unofficial tour of the Emmerdale studios by our mutual friend – who just happens to be a YTV staff member (not directly connected to the show). The visit provided some interesting notes – so lets provide some truth to the mix shall we? I won’t say the exact month we visited we’d not want to get our sources in trouble…

In their report Digital Spy tried to clear up newspaper reports of on-going low moral in the cast. In defense of the ITV spokesperson, that part seems to be quite true; our reporter didn’t see any signs of low moral – the crew and actors seemed to be in merry spirits on the studio floor.

However the second part – filming hours – that part isn’t exactly as reported. Obviously any programme that has increased its output over the past few years will need to add more hours to the schedule and when our reporter visited one Emmerdale employee told them that hours had recently increased to meet the demands of filming six episodes a week. The complete opposite of what has been reported as fact elsewhere.

Our reporter was also told how the Emmerdale production had taken over more space at the YTV studios so more scenes could be recorded at the same time. Notably the ‘Woolpack’ was just one of the sets that had been moved to ‘new studio space’ – which was formerly an old costume storage bay. The extra space created, funnily, especially for the increase in more episodes and more production hours which apparently isn’t true – but is!

Nice to have the real facts of the matter isn’t it?