Emmerdale’s executive producer Iain MacLeod has said the soap’s recent spate of awards is “long overdue”.
The ITV soap has won multiple awards this year, including Best Soap at the Inside Soap Awards and TV Choice Awards, as well as the award for Soap and Continuing Drama at the Royal Society Television Awards – the first time it has scooped the accolade since 2012.
MacLeod told press at the soap’s studios in Leeds on Tuesday: “It’s nice to make a big noise.
“I think that the show, long before I got here and long after I leave, has been, and will be, amazing. And recently it’s been getting a lot of awards, but I think that’s long overdue and that’s a credit to everyone that’s been working on the show since it started and is very little to do with me really.”
MacLeod took over the role at Emmerdale from Kate Oates, who moved to be executive producer of Coronation Street earlier this year.
Next week will be traumatic for everyone in the Dales, as a flash-forward to a funeral signals the end is nigh for a villager.
Viewers will see the same day played out on screen from different characters’ perspectives, culminating in a tragic event that kills off a familiar face.
MacLeod also rebuffed the idea that the unusual filming techniques employed during this week of episodes would become the Emmerdale norm.
He said: “No, not really. The idea was that this was a slightly more cinematic week, the scale of the events was slightly more filmic. We went into it with quite an open mind.”
MacLeod said the production team felt they had “earned the right stylistically” to use music in the scenes because they had “slightly stepped outside our normal style into the world of more filmic shooting”.
He added: “But this is not the start of a rebrand of Emmerdale or an attempt to turn it into something else. It just felt like, as the trailer would have you believe, a special week of episodes, and therefore we used some unusual devices.”
Meanwhile, MacLeod also spoke about what’s in store over the festive period.
He said: “Christmas is very Christmassy this year. I don’t know if that’s a ridiculous thing to say, but we wanted Christmas to be slightly fluffier than that.
“That’s not to say it won’t have its own dramatic twists and turns. But Emmerdale week on week just continues to be really dramatic, so I’d struggle to say there’s one particular week that’s any more or less dramatic than the others.”
