Jackanory

Jackanory
A title frame from the 1960s (top, the same font continued to be used throughout the 1970s)
Genre	Children's television
Created by	Joy Whitby
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
No. of episodes	3640 (2330 missing)
Production
Running time	15 minutes
Release
Original network	BBC1 (1965–96) CBBC (2006)
Picture format	405-line (1965–69) PAL (576i) (1969–96)
Original release	13 December 1965 (1965-12-13) – 24 March 1996 (1996-03-25)
Chronology
Related shows	Jackanory Playhouse Jackanory Junior

Jackanory was a long-running BBC children's television series that was designed to stimulate an interest in reading. The show was first transmitted on 13 December 1965, and the first story was the fairy-tale "Cap-o'-Rushes" read by Lee Montague. Jackanory continued to be broadcast until 1996, with around 3,500 episodes in its 30-year run. The final story, The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, was read by Alan Bennett and broadcast on 24 March 1996. The show was briefly revived on 27 November 2006 for two one-off stories.

The show's format, which varied little over the decades, involved an actor reading from children's novels or folk tales, usually while seated in an armchair. From time to time the scene being read would be illustrated by a specially commissioned still drawing, often by Quentin Blake. Usually a single book would occupy five daily fifteen-minute episodes, from Monday to Friday.

A spin-off series was Jackanory Playhouse (1972–85), which was a series of thirty-minute dramatisations. These included a dramatisation by Philip Glassborow of the comical A. A. Milne story "The Princess Who Couldn't Laugh".

The show's title comes from an old English nursery rhyme:

The rhyme was first recorded when published in The Top Book of All, for little Masters and Misses around 1760.

In November 2006 Jackanory briefly returned with comedian John Sessions as the revived programme's first narrator reading the Lord of the Rings parody Muddle Earth, written by Paul Stewart (and illustrator Chris Riddell). The second narrator was Sir Ben Kingsley, reading The Magician of Samarkand by Alan Temperley. They were broadcast in three 15 minute slots on CBBC and BBC One and later repeated in their entirety on BBC One on consecutive Sundays. The readings of Muddle Earth were heavily accompanied by animation and featured John Sessions speaking the lines of all the animated characters (and occasionally reading those of Joe whenever he wasn't on-screen), leading to criticism that the spirit of the original programme, a single voice telling a tale with minimal distractions, had been lost. (The original series had occasionally included dramatised material, in e.g. 1984's Starstormers by Nicholas Fisk, and increasingly so towards the end of its run in the mid-1990s.) The Magician of Samarkand was a similar production, without additional actors speaking lines; Ben Kingsley read both the story and the lines of all the characters. Both of these stories were produced and directed by Nick Willing.