TV programmes that have run their course

It depends. Coronation Street and most British soaps were built on being realistic and relatable to audiences. Coronation Street used to blend the drama with comedy too, which kept the audience for decades.

It's just not the same thing anymore and the TV market has become much more fragmented too with moves to streaming now very much where TV is. In 2000 coronation Street could command between 10m and 20m viewers per episode these days it's down to 4m to 7m and it's shrinking. It's headed to a situation where broadcast TV shows like that aren't really capable of capturing massive audience anymore and I suspect that will reduce the UK soaps to a much smaller scale of production, which in turn will shrink the audiences.

The other issue is the source of actors. The majority of northern soap and also comedy actors (Last of the Summer Wine etc) tended to come up through community theatre, local theatre, panto etc and make breaks into TV through Granada and Yorkshire TV. Nowadays they're all stage school types, with a much more national focus, so the quirky, distinctly Northern and even EastEnders character actors are increasingly hard to find. They're all too polished.

I'm noticing OT is increasingly being criticized on Twitter, as being about bullying and body shaming. There's a bit of a backlash against it as the entire show seems to be about motivation by humiliation. I'm not sure that's really as acceptable these days. There's a lot more sensitivity about those topics than there was in 2008.

Yeah, but it's still looking at a peak audience that's not even approaching a slow episode's audience back at it's last peak in the early 2000s. That ultimately means production budgets shrink. ITV itself isn't really where it could be. It always strikes me as struggling to retain audiences in a market that's totally changed. I'm not sure that the ditching of regional identities and centralising of production did them any favours either. The regional identities of ITV affiliates was a huge part of the way viewers felt attached to them. It's just bland and corporate these days. I think it was a huge mistake to even allow one company to merge that network into a bit monolithic entity. It also limited the access to regional production, as smaller shows often got national air time, produced on smaller stations and that's often how people got their break into tv. I could see ITV really sliding in the next decade.