The explosive collision of Coronation Street and Emmerdale in the landmark Corriedale event was a massive hit with fans, peaking with 4.7 million viewers (averaging 4.2million viewers across the hour).
The live overnight audience figures are the highest live TV ratings for a soap in over a year, and the biggest TV peak audience for a soap since 2022 (outside of Christmas Day episodes). Corriedale is the highest live TV audience for any drama across any broadcaster or streamer since Call the Midwife in February 2025, and ITV’s highest TV audience since I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!
The hour-long special, which saw the two soap worlds collide in a high-stakes multi-vehicle pile-up, has sparked a social media frenzy, with a combined reach of over 140 million across social platforms and viewers labelling it as “the greatest hour of television I have ever seen” and “absolute cinema,” among other things.
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We won’t give too many plot spoilers away since, even after ITV’s impressive viewing figures reveal, there are still a good 60m out there that haven’t watched it yet, whether by accident or design.
The critics, however, were somewhat divided. The Manchester Evening News labelled the, literal and figurative, soap collision as “pure soap gold,” while a five-star review in the i paper opted for a spot of word play, noting that “the Coronation Street and Emmerdale cross-over episode could have been a car crash. Instead, it was a triumph with a car crash.”
At the other end of the spectrum, the Telegraph described it as “just a lot of shouting in the dark,” and The Express unceremoniously announced that “Corriedale should never happen again – it’s ruining both ITV soaps.”
Over at Digital Spy, where they always delve that bit deeper into pop culture, the burning question was why the wedding planner, Emmerdale’s Belle Dingle, was nowhere to be seen at the event itself. Enquiring minds want to know.
The success of Corriedale officially launches ITV’s new 2026 ‘Soap Power Hour’ scheduling pattern, which will see reverberations of the crash playing out across both Coronation Street and Emmerdale on ITV and on ITVX.
Both soaps kick off 2026 following a record breaking year for soaps on ITVX, with a 30% increase in viewing – achieving more than half a billion streams in 2025 for the first time ever.
Corriedale was produced by ITV Studios Continuing Drama.
Image: ITV
