[James2001]

Really does show some of the ridiculous things about generic credits- that shows are stuck with the corporate style of the channel that originally showed it at the time it was made, and they can look terrible and unreadable in situations like this. At least when it comes to shown from other countries that use generic credits, there's usually a version with "proper" credits used on repeats, DVDs, international broadcasts etc. but very rarely seems to have been the case with ITV.

Also means they can't do things like EastEnders did this week where they scrolled the credits over the shot of people standing round Dot's grave. Corrie used to do that sort of thing a lot before generic credits came in. It takes a lot of that creative freedom away from the programme makers, whereas even though the BBC and Channel 4 do have guidelines on where text can be placed, they're still in the show's own style, have background pictures and video and allows for one-off variations like this.

There certainly were some shows in the early days of generic credits at least that did have versions with credits in their own style- for example, the earliest episodes of 2001 Crossroads had their own credits on the ITV2 repeats (whereas the original ITV showings had the swirly heart generic style, I think there's a series of Bad Girls which had generic credits on original broadcast, but its own credits on DVDs and repeats), but seemed to be few and far between, and stopped fairly quickly.

Strangely there were a handful of episodes over the Autumn of 2000 after generic credits were introduced which did still have Corrie's old style of credits- the live 40th birthday episode was the last. There was one case where an episode that actually had old style credits on the original ITV showing, but had the generic style on ITV3, and conversely I've seen a recording of the Freshco siege episode from the Canadian screening, which had the generic credits style, but the ITV3 showing had the old style scrolling credits over a shot of the outside of Freshco (not sure how it went out on ITV), which suggests at least some episodes in 2000 must have had both regular and generic credit versions made.

Edit: this video seems to be the two episodes I mentioned, the Freshco siege and the follow up, recorded from the original ITV broadcasts- both have the old-style credits. The ITV3 screening of the second episode had the wavy hearts generic ones.

www.youtube.com