Title sequence

The title sequence is a short graphical sequence which opens every episode of Coronation Street. It traditionally contains various shots of terraced streets representing the programme's setting of Weatherfield, played against the show's theme music composed by Eric Spear. From 1999 to 2010, the episode's writer and director were credited in the title sequence but as of 2010 the title sequence carries no credits, ending with the Coronation Street logo instead.

With slight variations to incorporate recent trends, the sequence has largely followed the same formula since the show's debut in 1960. In all there have been eight title sequences in the fifty-year history of the programme with slight variations within those sequences.

1960 sequence
Coronation Street's first set of black and white titles provided viewers with their first glimpse of the programme in 1960. It consisted of 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, after which 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. Similarly, on many early episodes which had overrun, the end credits were cut to remove the cast and production credits.

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.

This sequence was used until Episode 336 (2nd March 1964) after which there was a three month period where there was no title film run and the programme title was shown exclusively over the opening scene or location.

1964 sequence
New producer Tim Aspinall brought in a change in the sequence which was introduced in Episode 366 (15th June 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 tower block, then panning over to rows of terraced houses while zooming in and then cutting to 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 various terraced houses.

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 in the penultimate shot 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 shots. It would prove to be the shortest-lived regular sequence in the programme's history.

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. The new titles made their debut with Episode 1596 (3rd May 1976) and would be the longest-used titles by timeline in the programme's history.

In this modified form the sequence remained the same until 1990, making this the longest-running title sequence. It was the last to open with a fade from the Granada television logo, a change which occured in 1988.

One minor change to the sequence took place with the construction of a new outdoor set which caused the final shot of the Street to be replaced, a change which occurred from Episode 2210 (7th June 1982) onwards. Uniquely in this period, Episode 2631 on 18th June 1986 has its own special title sequence, showing various images of Manchester at dawn.

1990 sequence
Making its debut with Episode 3134 (15th October 1990), the title sequence received its first major revamp since the mid-1970s. By 1990, Coronation Street was fully videotaped, so a new videotape sequence was recorded to replace the 1976 film sequence. The opening shot showed Alpha Street in the Langworthy district of Salford, looking south-east towards the blocks of flats on Rosehill Close with the jagged roofs of the factory building on Highfield Road between the two. Other shots in the sequence included streets in Bolton.

In the early 1990s, the sequence ended with a 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 and the logo was superimposed over the shot of the cat. 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. Although timeline-wise, this sequence did not run as long as the 1976 version, its various incarnations were used on some 2000 episodes, whereas the former sequence appeared on 1537 episodes.

2002 sequence
In early 2002, changing Coronation Street production standards saw the series recorded and transmitted in 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, necessitating another new sequence, which was introduced in Episode 5191 (7th January 2002). For the first time, only the purpose built set at Granada was used for recording, with most shots depicting Coronation Street itself. Improvements in CGI technology allowed a complex establishing shots of Coronation Street surrounded by other terraced Streets, and the ginnel between Coronation and Mawdsley Streets to show the backyards of both rows of houses, as well as a glimpse of one of Greater Manchester's Metrolink trains passing over the viaduct.

As with the 1990 sequence from 1999, writer and director credits were carried in the title sequence, and the Coronation Street logo was displayed at the beginning.

When this sequence was introduced, Coronation Street was making a gradual move to five episodes a week, with two episodes transmitted on Mondays. Only the first episode transmitted on a single day contained a title sequence and ended with a caption stating "Coronation Street contines in half an hour", with the second opening episode with an ad-break photocaption. Occasionally, the end shot of the titles was changed, such as a shot of a milk float from the Corner Shop end of the street, set in the early morning. In Christmas 2007, most of the credits were changed to a panning shot of the street set in the early morning.

2010 sequence
With the programme's move into high definition, a new title sequence was commissioned which made its debut not on screen but on the internet on 27th May 2010 on the Coronation Street pages of ITV.com. Within the programme it was first used on Episode 7351 (31st May 2010). This sequence incorporated shots of Manchester City Centre, including the Castlefield basin, before dissolving into shots of Coronation Street. At the insistence of new producer Phil Collinson, the Coronation Street logo was moved back to the very end of the sequence with the writer and director credit displayed over the opening shots of the action of the episode.

The technical explanation behind the sequence said,
 * "Footage of the Street was captured using a Red One camera and then offlined in Final Cut Pro. "Space Digital"’s Simon Blackledge used in-house tools to conform in Nuke X before multi-layer 3D composites were created directly from the raw R3D files. A final grade was done using Apple Color."

The Cat
Today, the cat is seen as an essential ingredient in Coronation Street's opening title sequence, with four successive title sequences featuring one. As explained above, the cat first appeared by accident in the 1976 sequence. 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 version than the one preceeding it.

End credits
The end credit sequence is also notable. It is a list of all actors and key production personnel who worked on the episode, with actors listed in order of appearance. If two or more episodes were broadcast on one day, only the final episode that day contained end credits, which contained overall cast credits rather than individual episodic credits.

Until recently, Coronation Street's ending credits had changed very little, usually consisting of an image of the Street, terraced rooftops or cobblestones, or, common in the mid-1970s, a black screen. Since 2000, most ITV programme end credits have been standarised. The programme's credits currently use images from the title sequence, with cast credits displayed at the bottom against a black backdrop.



Advert breaks
As ITV is a commercial channel, every episode of Coronation Street has had an advert break. The break is preceded and followed by an 'End of Part One' and 'Part Two' photocaption respectively (although since 2002 the captions have simply read 'Coronation Street')