ITV is to rest its long-running 1960s police drama series Heartbeat and its spin-off The Royal.

ITV says that this decision  has been taken to cut costs due to the slump in advertising revenues caused by the recession.

ITV also says that its spin-off series The Royal will also suffer the same fate.

ITV reports that it has enough episodes already made for both shows to keep them on air until 2010 meaning that Heartbeat will have had an 18-year run. However, no new episodes would be commissioned after the end of the current production cycle.

Heartbeat has seen its ratings dwindle since ITV removed Emmerdale and Coronation Street from its Sunday night schedule. Analysts had predicted that drama would suffer cutbacks on ITV due to the downturn and the resting of these two signiture shows underlines this as ITV struggles to maintain advertising revenues during the recession.

The news comes a week after ITV said that it would be halving the number of episodes of The Bill, which will now run just once a week - 9pm on Wednesday nights,

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