Loose Women’s Coleen Nolan has described the upcoming changes and cuts at ITV as "devastating" with staff members currently living in limbo. The channel recently announced a raft of changes to its daytime schedules, including slashing the daytime panel show down to 30 weeks a year and merging the teams working on Lorraine, Loose Women and This Morning.
Now Coleen, who celebrated 25 years on the show this year, has expressed her devastation and fears about what will become of the show’s behind-the-scenes staff once the changes come into force. “The crew have become family. I’ve watched them grow,” she said. “Some of our runners from back in the day are producers, married with kids. I’ve shared my life with them. They’re in limbo, not knowing what they’re going to do."
Coleen has been on Loose Women since 2000(Image: Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock)
She continued, “Loose Women isn’t ending, which I’m so thankful for, but it’s changing. It’s going to be very different in the respect of the size of the crew, but it’s still running. Which it should be – there isn’t another show that celebrates and supports all women of every size, age, whatever. But it’s heartbreaking to see some of my colleagues not knowing what they’re going to do. Many of them have young families and mortgages.”
Sources previously told the Mirror there wouldn’t be any “radical changes” to the Loose Women panel, but there are expected to be a number of redundancies in the behind-the-scenes crew.
Lorraine Kelly’s daily show is also being cut to 30 minutes each day and to 30 weeks of the year, with Good Morning Britain running until 9.30am to fill the time. GMB will also be extended until 10am on the weeks Lorraine is off air entirely.
Coleen, 60, joined the series in 2000, joining Jane Moore, Kaye Adams, Nadia Sawalha and Ruth Langsford, and told Mirror's Notebook magazine she had never experienced anything like the current changes.
“You read about it all the time – a chain store’s shutting down and 300 people are affected,” she said. “You go, ‘Oh that’s awful. Anyway, what do you want for dinner?’, because it doesn’t directly affect you.“I’ve never been so close to it. It’s made me realise how much this is happening across the whole country at the moment and it’s devastating.”On announcing the changes, Kevin Lygo, Managing Director of ITV’s Media and Entertainment Division, said the channel’s daytime slate was “a really important part of what we do” and would “enable us to continue to deliver a schedule providing viewers with the news, debate and discussion they love from the presenters they and trust”.
