Neve Gordon-Farleigh
Global Leaders won’t be the only ones uniting in a couple of weeks, as British soaps and dramas come together to broadcast a number of episodes revolving around the environment and climate change.
At the start of November, in a television first, a variety of British TV shows will bring the ever prevalent conversation of climate change to our screens.
Scenes have already been filmed by Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks and continuing dramas of Casualty, Holby City and Doctors are also included.
Throughout the episodes, viewers will see a number of characters feature in other soaps and dramas as they discuss the ongoing issue of climate change.
It has been revealed that one character from Channel 4’s Hollyoaks will feature in EastEnders, whilst a character from Doctors will be swapping the streets of Letherbridge for the cobbles of Weatherfield.
Alongside character crossovers and setting swaps, social media clips will be played where residents of Coronation Street will see characters from Emmerdale, and medical dramas of Holby City and Casualty will also be discussed during the episodes.
A British Television First
Sharon Marshall took to Twitter to tease the news before announcing it on the This Morning sofa.
She said: “In November, we’re going to be having the world’s first soap crossover. Now for the first time, all five British soaps – and our continuing dramas – they’re all going to come together and tell the same story at the same time. That story is going to be climate change.”
Continuing to tell Holly and Phil about the big news, she added: “All of these people have been talking about it in secret for months and months to make this work and what they’re each going to do is film a scene, have a reference that is going to cover a different aspect of climate change and – this is the fun bit – a soap first.”
“You’re going to see all the programmes do a nod to the other and characters will start popping up from one soap in another soap on screen. That has never been done before.”
Societal Issues On Screen
These crossover episodes will start on Monday 1 November which will see the start of COP26, in which Global Leaders will come together to discuss how they aim to tackle climate change.
“Never before have all five soaps and both continuing dramas come together and united in telling one story.”
Jane Hudson, Emmerdale‘s Executive Producer originally came up with the idea and the editorial teams and scriptwriters of the dramas and soaps have been devising storylines, following months of planning.
Jane said, “Never before have all five soaps and both continuing dramas come together and united in telling one story. And we certainly haven’t seen characters pop up in other shows before. This is a real treat for our audience, whilst also allowing us to get across a very important message.”
As the environment is proving to be an important conversation around the world, Hollyoaks Executive Producer Lucy Allan recognises how important the topic is for young people: “We know how important climate change and environmental issues are to our youthful audience, and to all soap viewers. It has been great to work together on an engaging way to, hopefully, inspire conversations about issues that are so important.”
Although we haven’t seen soaps come together like this before, these TV shows frequently highlight current issues. During the Covid pandemic we saw our favourite on-screen characters highlight how the virus had changed thousands of lives, whether this was on the streets of Walford or in the ER of Holby City and Casualty.
Although more information will be revealed in the next couple of weeks, it will be interesting to see how such an important topic like climate change will be highlighted onscreen.
Featured image courtesy of Gabriel McCallin on Unsplash. Image license can be found here. No changes have been made to this image.
Neve Gordon-Farleigh
Neve is a 21 year old freelance journalist, and our Head Current Affairs and Instagram Editor for Empoword Journalism. She specialises in social media journalism and runs the Journo Resources Tik Tok page. You can find her on Twitter @Neve_GF.