Coronation Street

Name: Coronation Street
Genre: Drama

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The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

Coronation Street rebuilt its titles: two distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1 and 31, running between 19 and 25 seconds.

At 25 seconds at its longest, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.

It arrived on ITV in 1960, when The Sooty Show, Ivor the Engine and Danger Man were also on the network.

Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; Coronation Street did so once.

All 2 opening title sequences

19s

Fan upload of the first episode's titles, December 1960.

25s

Fan upload of the 1990 titles. Counting a season per year from the December 1960 launch, that is the thirty-first.

1965–NBCDrama

"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

1965–1969CBSDrama

An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.

1962–1971NBCDrama

The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.

1968–2012ABCDrama

Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.

1964–1999NBCDrama

The first American serial to run an hour, and the first to spin off another serial from itself.