Coronation Street are set to kill off a surprising (and beloved) character next year as the Underworld knicker factory collapses.

The soap showrunner, Iain MacLeod, revealed the news during a preview of what is coming up in Weatherfield in 2019. Among all of the drama? There's going to be a new villain walking the cobbles by the end of next year (or, rather, a "super villain" according to MacLeod). There's also going to be an explosive stunt in March, which will see the Underworld knicker factory collapse - and one character die. While the two facts aren't linked at first, it won't be long until the residents figure out that the disaster was actually deliberate. At a media event on Monday, he said [via Digital Spy]:

"It's one of the biggest things we're doing in the next year. We're knocking the factory down in March in a colossal big stunt.

"It will at first appear to be an accident, but will then be revealed to be a mystery and it'll have been some kind of criminal enterprise that causes it all to fall down.

"Somebody will be dying in said collapse. I'm not going to tell you who that is or who pulls the factory roof down! It's going to collapse. The roof will fall in.

"It plays out over four or five months. The resolution of a whodunit is so fundamental to the enjoyment of a viewer, so we want to keep that under wraps."

He added that it is going to be a "community" storyline, which will lead to a number of big storylines stemming from the factory collapse. He continued:

"It will have ripples that extend into the next six to 12 months and will eventually see the coronation of our next super villain. "This is the beginning of creating the next iteration of the Corrie bad guy."

As for who gets killed, he didn't say. However, he did warn that there won't be a dry eye once the scenes air. He told Metro: 

"The death is very well written. There won’t be a dry eye in the house, but the bit I’m more interested in is the aftermath and the revealing of secrets."