Emmerdale bosses make major change to Woolpack – and cast members are gutted

Emmerdale’s Lucy Pargeter has revealed that bosses have made a major change to the soap’s iconic pub The Woolpack.

The actress, 48, has played Chas Dingle since 2002 and she appeared on Friday’s vodcast Off Script with former co-star Kelvin Fletcher and his wife Liz.

During the trio’s chat, Lucy had some surprise news for Kelvin, 41, who played Andy Sugden from 1996 until 2016, about the village’s iconic boozer The Woolpack.

Kelvin asked: “Is The Woolpack still real beer?” to which Lucy admitted: “Babe, honestly, you’ll be gutted! Until a month ago, it was still beer so on a Friday it was your cheeky half in the afternoon.”

To which Kelvin replied: “Don’t tell me it’s no longer…” as Lucy continued: “I can’t even pull a pint in The Woolpack anymore, it’s not even linked up! We have to have a non alcoholic dome in the back of set that goes [mimics loud noise] every so often halfway through a take.”

This prompted Kelvin to ask: “So you don’t pull pints now?” to which Lucy explained: “I can’t do it, they’re trying to rig it up to make it look like real beer but they haven’t found a way to do it! So there’s a lot of me just standing with my back to camera trying to pull this pretend pint and then go: ‘Ta-da!'”

Reflecting on his time on Emmerdale, Kelvin said: “I always remember scenes in The Woolpack, when you were there, and I’d say: ‘Oh Luce, just pour us a pint!'”

Elsewhere during the chat, Lucy opened up on her most challenging storylines on the ITV soap. She said: “The baby loss, Grace, losing baby Grace was the hardest. I’d just had the twins as you know twins life is quite difficult so I’d just had the twins and going through an awful lot of stuff personally.

“This was a hard story but I used it in a cathartic way to try and go through quite a lot of my own emotions while playing the storyline, which is quite dangerous to do, but it was a challenging time personally and on the show. It’s the hardest one I’ve done.”

Looking back on the storyline, Lucy added: “I’m really proud, me and Dominic [Brunt, who plays Paddy Kirk] were incredible there were days where I had a meltdown on set, an emotional kind of meltdown, and he was there. We could let each other go wherever we needed to go and we were just there for each other.

“He was just incredible on that storyline. You can feel embarrassed, sometimes when you’re acting in these scenes you’re like: ‘Oh God, am I really playing it like this? I’m quite embarrassed to go there!’ but to have someone you’re working with to go: ‘Just do whatever you need to do, I might laugh at you in private…’

“No, not really, but you’re in a safe space, to just be able to play with it and go there!”

Emmerdale airs weeknights at 7:30pm on ITV1 and ITVX, with an hour-long episode on Thursdays.