Coronation Street goes East

Corrie's Eugene Ferguson with Joy Luck's Yuen Ying Ming and Song Zhi-Peng

A £15m Chinese version of the veteran ITV soap Coronation Street is to go into production at the end of the month.

Joy Luck Street, China's first ongoing soap, will be co-funded by Granada Television and will follow a community in suburban Beijing where it will be filmed.

The Corrie-style series will be shown three nights a week, for an initial three-year run.

Cultural differences

But while it will follow the format of its phenomenally successful British forerunner, there will be some notable differences.

The inhabitants of Joy Luck Street will meet up in a local tea shop rather than in the Rovers Return and as young Chinese men are required to do military service, it will feature fewer heart-throbs than its UK counterpart.

Joy Luck Street's characters will be based on Chinese stereotypes

Eugene Ferguson, who successfully launched Riverdale - a Canadian version of Coronation Street three years ago - is behind the new project.

He said: "It is based on Coronation Street and will be similar to it, in that it's about a community in a mixed working-class and middle-class area and we'll have similar types of characters.

"There will be grumpy old people and objectionable young people, just as there are over here.

"But we won't have an Ena Sharples or Duckworth family - the characters will be based on Chinese stereotypes instead - and certain things we consider interesting as storylines wouldn't be thought of as such in their culture."

It is also unlikely that The Joy Luck Street will be featuring too many controversial plotlines, as all programmes in China have to be passed by government censors before they can be broadcast.