Incidental music

Incidental music is defined as music within a film, television programme or other media that both complements and adds to the drama being played out, enhancing its atmosphere or sign-posting to a viewer how they should be emotionally reacting to what they are watching or listening.

Such music goes back to the earliest days of Greek drama and has been used for centuries, even in the plays of Shakespeare. In the earliest days of cinema, the lack of sound on film meant that for the first couple of decades of the medium, music, and particularly piano music, was used in the picture houses alongside the hand-cranked films that audiences were watching. One of Violet Carson's first professional jobs was providing such music using her piano skills.

Even when the "talkies" began in the late 1920s, film makers realised the extra effect that music could bring to their productions and the same was true of television when it began in the 1930s.

In the genre of serials and soap operas, the UK is unusual in that music is rarely used as part of the programme, the major exception being the Channel Four "teen-soap" Hollyoaks. In other countries music features to a large extent, especially in bridging between two scenes. For many decades in the United States of America, organ music was played throughout episodes of the daytime soaps, only being phased out in the 1970s. The Australian soaps use a large library of stock soundtracks to this day.

Coronation Street has only used incidental music on a small number of occasions, so much so that most viewers would make the claim that it has never been used and the rare incidents when it is heard provoke surprise. The table below summarises the known uses in the programme's history.

(Note:This list does not include instances of characters breaking into song, such as Rita Sullivan singing "A Winter's Tale" in Episode 7499 (25th December 2010).)