Fair City to return and the plot will be thick with Covid-19

FAIR City fans may soon get the news they’ve been waiting for with RTÉ ready to make a statement about when filming will resume.

The last episode of the soap screened on April 12 and fans of the Carrigstown-set drama have been pining for more ever since.

Fan pages of the soap have been complaining they have nothing to do in the evenings and even started a petition for RTÉ to air the series from the start in 1989.

Now an RTÉ source says that ‘detailed plans’ have been made to get the show back up and running.

‘It’s going to be complicated and it will take longer to film but we’re nearly there,’ she said.

An RTÉ spokesperson said the broadcaster had no information on when filming would resume but ‘would know more towards the end of next week’.

She confirmed that scriptwriters were already working on plots which will include a Covid-19 storyline and they have been ‘very busy’. She added: ‘We are working towards finding ways of getting back to production of Fair City. Our primary concern and top priority is for the health and safety of our cast and crew.

‘Fair City will look a little different, but by implementing these changes we will be able to go on telling stories.’

Among the measures being mooted across the industry to make filming safe are make-up tutorials for actors.

The actors will be taught how to apply their own make-up to ensure strict social distancing rules can be adhered to on set.

Rival soaps EastEnders, Emmerdale and Coronation Street are all due to resume filming in the coming weeks.

EastEnders is making official plans to return to filming in June, and programme bosses have also revealed that future episodes will reference the pandemic.

Coronation Street suspended production in March as lockdown took hold, with the number of episodes cut back to three a week.

The producers have previously said that they have enough episodes in the bag to remain on air until July, meaning that if filming does resume next month, the soap may not go off the air at all.

Emmerdale also shut down production in March, cutting back to three episodes a week from its usual five.

ITV has confirmed that the soap could be one of the first to go off air, saying they will run out of episodes at the end of May.

Meanwhile, Una Crawford O’Brien, who plays Renee in Fair City, says the actors are also missing it terribly.

‘It’s closed indefinitely, we have no idea when it will reopen,’ she told a newspaper.

‘I don’t know how they’re going to do it when we do get back.’

Over 2,000 fans of the show have also signed an online petition to show old episodes. The campaign was started by mega fan Emma O’Sullivan who said airing the show from the beginning ‘would give everyone a lift and a trip down memory lane’.

However, an RTÉ spokesperson said: ‘It’s not just a case of taking them off the shelf and screening them.

‘It would cost us money to show them and we’d rather spend that money on bringing new episodes of the series to the screen.’

‘It’s not a case of taking old episodes off the shelf’