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The title sequence opens every episode of Coronation Street. It is a short sequence containing various shots of terraced streets representing Weatherfield, played against the show's theme music composed by Eric Spear. Until 1999, the title sequence carried no credits, and ended with the Coronation Street logo, but since then the sequence has started with the logo and contained the writer and director credits for the episode.

With only slight variations to incorporate recent trends, the sequence has been largely unchanged since the series' debut in 1960. In all there have been eight title sequences in the fifty-year history of the programme with slight varients within those sequences.

1960 sequence
Coronation Street's first set of black and white titles was viewers' first glimpse of the show in 1960. After an opening clip of rows of terraced houses, taken from dock buildings on Ordsall Road in Salford with St. Clement's Church in the distance, the view changed to a tilting-downwards shot of Archie Street in Salford, on which the architecture of the fictional Coronation Street was based. Occasionally in the 1960s when the first scene of an episode was set in the street, the sequence would be cut short and the logo and music would play over the start of the scene instead. Many times in the decade some or all of the title sequence would be dispensed with if the Street set had been erected in the studio for the episodes in question (no outdoor set being built until 1968), Episode 95 (8th November 1961) and Episode 108 (25th December 1961) being examples.

There was a varient in this sequence in the form of the typeface in the logo from Episode 13 (20th January 1961) onwards to a condensed version of Times New Roman, otherwise the sequence remained the same.

1964 sequence
New producer Tim Aspinall brought in a change in the sequence in 1964 when the shot of Archie Street from the front was replaced by a view of a ginnel with a woman scrubbing the path in the background. This latter shot was filmed between Archie Street and Clement Street and the outline of the eastern end of St. Clement's Church can clearly be seen at the end of the ginnel as a car drives along Cavendish Street.

On occasion in the middle of the decade the title caption would be displayed over the opening scene of the episode, irrespective of where it took place and no title sequence would be run at all.

1969 sequence
In 1969, the show started being recorded and transmitted in colour and this necessitated a new title sequence which made its debut with Episode 930 (24th November 1969). This new sequence started with an establishing shot of a block of flats before panning over to the rows of terraced houses, zooming down and then finishing with a ground-level shot of a generic terraced street. The location of the opening shot was Grafton Court tower block on Clayton Close in Trafford, Manchester with the camera situated on the next door Clifford Court. The empty land in the distance to the right of Grafton Court as the sequence opens is Hulme and Moss Side, whose streets had just been demolished in 1969, the industrial buildings immediately to the left of Grafton Court are on Cornbrook Street (some of which are still there today) and the vast number of houses further left as the shot pans along are in the since-demolished area between Cornbrook Street, Shrewsbury Street and Stretford Road although the terraced streets further on beyond Shrewsbury Street and in the foggy distance are still extant. The programme was first broadcast in colour for one week prior to the new sequence being utilised and as it does not seem to have been ready Episodes 928 and 929 broadcast on 17th and 19th November used a colour photocaption of a terraced street (usually used for the "Part Two" photocaption in the early colour years) at the start of the episode with the programme title superimposed on it. The programme graphics were yellow in colour but these were amended in early 1970 to white.

1975 sequence
The next time Coronation Street changed its opening credits sequence, with Episode 1500 (11th June 1975), it included for the first time, a shot of the actual outdoor set built next to the Granada studios, along with a series of close ups of chimneys of houses similar to those found in Coronation Street. Letters written to the Manchester Evening News in 1982 identified several of the streets shown as being Duke Street and Ascension Street in the Lower Broughton area of Salford and the block of flats as being on Sussex Street in the same district. Compared to previous sequences, this was a relatively fast-moving montage of shots with eleven different.

1976 sequence
This large number of shots within the limited time-frame of the sequence annoyed new producer Bill Podmore when he took over the programme in 1976 as he related in his 1990 memoir Coronation Street - The Inside Story:


 * "The quick-changing views over the slated rooftops of Salford...seemed to be out of time with the slow, haunting refrains of Eric Spear's signature tune.
 * "I asked to see all the sequence film, shot years before in the back streets of Old Trafford and Lower Broughton. Although much of it lay on the cutting room floor, it was reassembled into a continuous film. Suddenly, on walked that wonderful cat. When it curled up in the spring sunshine I knew I had found the perfect clip. It looked exactly as though it had contentedly sat down to watch the programme, and from that the day the Coronation Street cat became almost as famous as any character on the show. It provided us with an enduring mystery, too. Any number of people, imposters all, insisted they were the owners, but its true identity was never discovered." (see below for more on the cat).

Under Podmore's direction the sequence was revamped to slow its pace down by removing most of the chimney shots, and bringing forward the sixth shot, a distance shot over terraced rooftops, to the forefront of the sequence. This depicted the Bradford area of Manchester looking towards the north west from a vantage point near Ashton Old Road with the Bradford Road gasworks in the distance. The gasometer to the left has since been demolished, as have almost all of the buildings seen on screen and the City of Manchester stadium, home to the 2002 Commonwealth Games, has been built in the middle distance between the camera vantage point and the remaining gasometer. In this modified form the sequence remained the same (except for one shot) until 1990, making this the longest-running title sequence. It was also the last to include the Granada television logo at the start.

With the construction of a new outdoor set for the series in 1982, the final shot of the Street was replaced to reflect this, a change which occurred from Episode 2210 (7th June 1982) onwards.

1990 sequence
Making its debut with Episode 3134 (15th October 1990), the title sequence received its first major revamp since the mid-1970s. In accordance with the show itself, the sequence was recorded on videotape rather than film as it had been the case before. By this point, there were few streets left in Salford that resembled Coronation Street, and the limitations of the outdoor set made complex establishing shots impossible. In the early 1990s, the sequence ended with a typical shot from the Rovers end of the street with a dog frantically running up the length of the street, although this was left out from the mid-1990s onwards. From Episode 4704 (24th October 1999), the title sequence began including writer and director credits, and the Coronation Street logo was moved to the start of the sequence rather than the end.

2002 sequence
The current title sequence was introduced from Episode 5191 (7th January 2002) when Coronation Street started being broadcast in 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. Improvements in CGI (computer generated image) technology allowed establishing shots which included Coronation Street and previously unseen surrounding streets, which weren't part of the set but instead computer generated, such as Viaduct Street and Mawdsley Street, as well as a glimpse of one of Greater Manchester's Metrolink trams passing over the viaduct.

With the programme's move into high definition, a new title sequence was commissioned which made their debut on the New titles premiered on 27th May 2010 on ITV.com on 27th May 2010. These incorporated shots of Manchester City Centre dissolving into shots of Coronation Street.



Cat
Today, the cat is seen as essential an ingredient in Coronation Street's opening title sequence as anything else. The 1976 sequence was the first to include a cat, although as stated above, this was by accident. Viewers who lived in Lower Broughton wrote letters to the Manchester Evening News in 1982 insisting that the cat was called Whiskey and belonged to a Mrs Norma Royle of Laurel Street. Eric Rosser, the programme's then archivist stated however in a letter published on 5th April that that sequence, directed by Ken Grieve and filmed by cameraman Ray Goode was shot off Ashton Old Road in Manchester in 1975 near the location of a business called Arnold's Garage and the name of the animal was unknown.

The cat became so popular that when the time came to replace the sequence in 1990, a competition was held on ITV's This Morning programme to cast a cat to star in the new montage. The winner was Frisky, owned by Jon-Paul Rimington of Leeds who was paid a one-off fee of £200 for his services. From the mid-1990s to 2001, the shot that included Frisky was the last shot of the sequence. Frisky was asked to make a lot of charitable appearances which were handled by Kevin Horkin who ran an animal agency and had organised the competition. The cat finally died in 2000.

With the cat firmly established as an expected feature of the title sequence, one featured in the versions introduced in both 2002 and 2010, although it was far more prominent in the latter.

End credits
The end credit sequence plays after the last scene of every episode, and is a list of all actors and key production personnel who worked on the episode, with actors listed in order of appearance.

Until recently, Coronation Street's ending credits had changed even less than the opening credits. In the early days, scrolling credits were used against an image of the street. Since 2000, many ITV show end credit sequences have been standardised, including those of Coronation Street.

Advert breaks
Since Coronation Street is broadcast on a commercial channel, ITV, every episode has an advert break. The break is preceded and followed by a linking screenshot.

In many episodes, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the 'End of Part One' caption and the music would play over the end of the scene before the break instead. Similarly for 'Part Two' after the break.