User blog:Jtomlin1uk/Episode cast lists

Chris, a.k.a Notdoppler, suggested that I should write a blog about our constant efforts to have on this site a complete set of cast lists for all of the episodes. This sounded a good idea to advise of progress and problems, so here goes:

First some background: Stangely enough, it's not the 1960s or 1970s which give us most problems in this area but more recent decades. A few weeks after Coronation Street began in 1960, TV Times began publishing cast lists in the billings. Previous to that, they had just credited the writer and the main production staff. Fortunately, the casts started to appear in billings prior to Episode 12 (18th January 1961) (the last consecutive episode available on VHS) and because they published a seperate cast list for each episode up to mid 1972, it's easy to complete that data. After that, they published a full "cast for this week" and as the Monday and the Wednesday episodes featured roughly the same casts then they're okay. Issues arise when one of the weekly episodes isn't transmitted because then they are out of synch as regards being made in the same studio session, with the same director and the same cast published in one week. TV Times isn't much help then. That happened in 1975 and 1979 due to strikes and in 1988 due to the ITV Telethon. The first two instance have been cleared up with the assistance of some very helpful sources but, despite similar assistance, we're still missing six episodes in 1988.

When the programme went thrice-weekly in 1989, the problems became greater. It was very rare that all three episodes in the week had a consistent cast and, with the start of satellite channels soon after and the television listings magazines becoming multi-channel, the latter became a wholly unreliable source of accurate cast information.

All is not lost though - the internet comes into its own for the 1990s and 2000s and the excellent Corrienet site has proved a godsend for information in this area. Episode by episode I'm transcribing that information and uploading it. There are gaps though (particularly 1995) so others sources are being investigated. These though are not easily and readily available so patience is needed to collate all of the data required. I have every confidence that in a few years we will have complete regular casts on all of our episode pages but it won't be overnight. Below is a table for the 1960s to the 1990s of how complete we are in our data (the 2000s onwards are complete although some verifcation is needed for earlier in the decade). If anyone has good reliable information (by which I really mean episodes on tape) and can supply us with cast and other info, it will be gratefully received. I would, however, ask eager editors to hold back on transcribing info from Corrienet or IMDB when they spot obvious gaps as I'm keeping a very careful list of our sources by episode and noting which ones need verification. If too many people do that at once, the issue will just get confused. I promise to update this blog regularly with our progress.

In the table below, I've distinguished between casts which are thought to be complete (e.g. TV Times, Corrienet) and those which have been verified, either through watching them on one of the DVD sets or from another very reliable source. The good news is that TV Times appears to be very rarely inaccurate so far for 1961 to 1989, we can have a high level of confidence in our data. After that, verification is needed.

The totals for the four decades are therefore as follows:

Updates to these figures will be fairly frequent but not every time new cast lists data is uploaded.

John.--Jtomlin1uk 16:24, November 9, 2011 (UTC)