It's not the end of the street for British soap operas - but they arrive at a crossroads

After 'Corrie' was usurped in Christmas Day ratings by a game show, Nick Hilton asks if soaps can adapt to survive

- Nick Hilton

When Helen Worth joined the cast of Coronation Street in 1974, the ITV soap opera was reaching up to 8 million British households per night. As her character, the redoubtable Gail Chadwick (who, in true soap fashion, was also known at various points in time as Gail Potter, Tilsley, Platt, Hillman, McIntyre and Rodwell) evolved, so the programme’s viewing figures grew. By the 1980s, Gail and co were regularly finding 20 million viewers entranced by the drama on the cobbles. Soap operas ruled the airwaves.

That was the first of Worth’s five decades on the show, which came to an end last month as the well-coiffed doyenne of Weatherfield bid a final farewell on Christmas Day. It feels like the end of an era. Worth is but the highest-profile exit in a raft of recent departures – from Colson Smith’s Craig Tinker to Charlotte Jordan’s Daisy Midgeley – that have sparked rumours of a show in crisis, as dwindling enthusiasm has been coupled with industrial turmoil and budget cuts.

Doom-laden predictions that the age of soaps is nearing its end will have been bolstered by the poor festive viewing figures. A mere 2.47 million viewers tuned in to Gail’s adieu, which lost the overnight ratings battle to EastEnders. Walford’s Yuletide extravaganza – a storyline about Cindy Beale’s affair with her stepson – scored a meagre audience of 3.98 million and barely scraped into the Top 10 most watched shows on Christmas Day.

Corrie, meanwhile, was comfortably beaten by the 3 million Brits who tuned into The Weakest Link. This has prompted a new round of soul-searching, alongside fresh predictions that soaps will soon be squeezed from the schedule. But the soap opera is a British institution and, having suffered the turbulent fortunes of the past decades, is not likely to be so easily vanquished.