Long, long ago, when the world wasn’t digital and there were only three channels on TV, there was a show called Jackanory. It seemed a simple little show - a grown-up sat in a peacock chair and read a story straight off the autocue, into the camera.
But when I mentioned to Twitter that it was the 50th anniversary of that show, my timeline glowed with nostalgia. “School often made me anxious,” said @L_BuckleyArcher, “snuggling up with marmite on toast and Jackanory made me feel safe and happy.” @Nicolakidsbooks said just hearing the theme tune made was enough to make her purr.
Of course Jackanory wasn’t always cosy. Finding Miss Slighcarp or Charlotte Sometimes in the slot I associated with that magical woollen muffler of a voice, Bernard Cribbins, was like finding a cluster of scorpions in my lunch box. As for Tom Baker’s crazed, intense reading of the Iron Giant… that put me right off my Marmite.
Educationalists were worried that Jackanory would mean that children would no longer read for themselves. But in fact librarians reported a huge increase in borrowing, not only of the featured titles but also of their sequels and prequels and other works by the same authors. The show provided a corrective to the numbing samey-ness of the commercial mainstream, introducing us to bold and challenging stuff from far away, from long ago and from wilder imaginations. I would never have known The House That Sailed Away, for instance, or Swedish detective story Agaton Saxe or Philippa Pearce’s The Minnow on the Say, without Jackanory.
I hope it will be remembered that Jackanory actively commissioned some truly wonderful work. I think I’m right in saying that Joan Aiken’s Mortimer the Raven was made especially for Jackanory. And there’s Helen Cresswell’s sublime Lizzie Dripping who stepped into the World on Jackanory Playhouse (Joan Aiken and Helen Cresswell were the Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies of Jackanory). And of course the art work. I’m pretty sure my first encounter with Quentin Blake was on Jackanory and that I learnt to appreciate the different voices of illustrators from watching the show.
More importantly it made reading a shared experience. We often talk about reading as though it was a solitary, isolating activity. But for most of history, and certainly for me, stories are things we share - around the fire, at the bedside, on the “story mat” at the end of the day in primary school and definitely on Jackanory.
@PhilEarle said that Rik Mayall’s rendition of George’s Marvellous Medicine, seemed to burst out of the television. Next day at school, everyone was talking about it: a water cooler moment based around a book. “None of us could believe what we’d just seen. It broke every rule.” I felt very much the same about Kenneth Williams reading Noel Langley’s The Land of Green Ginger. Phil called it his first water cooler moment - like watching Doctor Who or Game of Thrones.
I learnt so much. I’m not the only one. Brian Minchin, the producer of Doctor Who, wrote me a long, lyrical email about how that Tom Baker rendition had influenced him.
“Looking at it now,” Brian wrote, “what grips me is the utter belief that production had in the importance of the story it was telling. There are no layers of irony or nods and winks. This is a full on and committed attempt to bring Ted Hughes to life on a tiny budget but with complete conviction… I’m only realising it now, but it must have affected me, cos that ingeniously created world and that commitment is something I’m trying to recreate now every day at work!”
That’s a great legacy but I think there was something more profound going on too. One of the unconsidered marvels of human complexity is our ability to recognise voices. When I switch on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme half way through an item I often know who’s speaking, even if it’s someone who has been out of the public ear for years and who didn’t mean that much to me anyway. The other morning for instance it was… of all people … Norman Lamont. It never ceases to amaze and delight me that I recognise not just the words and their meaning but the actual identity of the speaker. Even if they’re nothing but an ex-chancellor of the exchequer.
How much more amazing and delightful to have these voices in my memory bank - Bernard Cribbins, Kenneth Williams, Joanna Lumely, Judi Dench, Bernard Holley and Liz Crowther. And - someone whose voice I haven’t heard since then but who I imitate when I read his stories, whose cadences are part of that intimate story-telling moment between me and my children: John Grant, who read Littlenose the Hunter.
Nostalgia is often regarded as a trivial emotion. But the complex magic of these voices pull us back to a moment when our minds were fresh. They bless the present with the beauty of our past. They bring back to us the open-hearted enthusiasm and willingness to listen that we had as children. The rhythms and cadences we heard while cuddled up with the Marmite continue to reverberate in our work and in our play.
Jackanory laid down in my heart as well as my mind a fund of stories that I can draw on now, not just for writing or reading, but for when I’m troubled or bored or feeling lost.
Nowadays I’m patron of The Reader Organisation - a project whose volunteers read big ambitious books not just in schools, but in prisons, in drug rehab, in hospitals, to people who struggle. One of the prison reading groups did Henry V. Afterwards one of the prisoners who had attended the readings said something which went straight to the heart of what Jackanory did to me. This man was in for violent crimes and the story of how Shakespeare’s Prince Hal rejected his old friends and began again really hit a chord with him. He said that listening to someone else read - knowing he was not going to be asked for any “input” or “insight” - was “the first time I had ever felt alert without feeling stressed”, the only time he’d felt fully switched on without the threat of violence. That’s what human voices do.
Someone reading a story straight into camera. It seems like a simple idea. But it left space for the real complexities that more complicated programmes drown out - for the diverse stores that are our common patrimony, for the irreducible complexity of our own being. At a moment when the political narrative has been reduced to the murderous simplicity of the playground, that seems like an urgent and important undertaking.
Maybe in this time of need, Jackanory - like King Arthur - could come back. But that, as Bernard Cribbins might say, is another story.
Jackanory’s 50th Anniversary Collection is availabe for the first time on BBC Store bbcstore.com
Jackanory At 50 Event: There are still a few tickets available for the Children’s Media Foundations’ anniversary event, Jackanory At 50, at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H ODT on Sunday 13 December 2015 3-6pm. The event will feature clips, talk to the stars and relive some of the memorable books as it looks at Jackanory from every angle, both in front of and behind the camera. For further details and to register for tickets see Jackanory 50th anniversary.
Frank Cottrell Boyce’s latest book is The Astounding Broccoli Boy