Coleen Nolan says she’ll be financially worse off after the sweeping changes being made to ITV’s daytime schedule behind the scenes with Loose Women only airing during term time
As the much-discussed cutbacks in ITV’s daytime schedule begin to bite, veteran Loose Women panellist Coleen Nolan – who has been with the show since its inception – has spoken frankly of her concerns about the changes.
“We’ll only be on during term time now,” she explained on the Not My Bagg podcast. “So all the holidays will be off.”
She added: “On one hand, you go ‘quite nice time off.’ but then on the other hand, you go: ‘I’ve till got bills to pay.’”
Coleen believes that, given the scale of the cuts, Loose Women was lucky to have survived at all: “It could have been worse,” she said. “They could have said: ‘By the way, we’re not recommissioning it. See you later’.”
As part of the huge budget cuts, there have been major changes to shows such as Good Morning Britain (GMB), Lorraine, and This Morning as well as Loose Women. Production has been shifted out of ITV’s huge studio in west London and to a much smaller facility in Covent Garden – where there will no longer be room for Loose Women’s live studio audience.
Coleen said: “I love having the audience there. You know, you get all the feedback from the audience and the adrenaline from the audience. So that’s going to be really weird for us.”
The absence of a live audience has been noticed by viewers too, with Loose Women fans making comments on social media such as: “The audience makes a huge contribution to the atmosphere of the show. Bring them back.”
It’s not only the audience that have disappeared, but many of the show’s backstage staff too. While Coleen has complain that her income will be reduced, some 220 people have lost their livelihoods altogether.
Coleen, 60, says that while she understands the reasoning behind all the cost-cutting, she’s still been very sad to say goodbye to so many backstage personnel that she has known for years: “They’ve all got to find new jobs,” she said. “So there’s a sadness.
“I understand that it’s a business, and sometimes in business hard decisions have to be made and nowadays it is all about budgets.
“TV is so different now. I mean, if you think of how many channels there are, the competition… I can’t even count how many channels there are.
“It’s a different era now to what it was 25 years ago. When I was a kid, there was three channels. That’s how old I am!
“When I did the Cliff Richard series when I was nine, that went out on a Saturday night and there were 23 million every week watching that show.”
One venture that Coleen will be embarking on to replace the substantial dent that the ITV cuts have made in her life – and in her income – is a live tour. She’s following her hit 2024 show Naked with a new one-woman show called This Is Me which kicks off next month.
The show will take audiences through Coleen’s life story. It starts with her childhood in Blackpool and following the story of success that began before her ninth birthday with an appearance on The Cliff Richard show as part of the original six-strong Nolan Sisters.
But Coleen will also touch on the more difficult aspects of her life, including her divorces from Shane Ritchie and Ray Fensome, as well as her shock basal-cell carcinoma diagnosis.
“People have asked me whether my honesty and openness has ever left me feeling vulnerable,” she told Woman’s Weekly. “I can only answer that I can sleep better knowing I’ve been honest.”
