[this foreword originally appeared in the hard copy guide to 1960s Jackanory, now long out of print].

If you want to be poetic about it, Jackanory was a meeting of two distinct forms of storytelling. The older, traditional practice of simply reading a story from a book, and the newer, more sophisticated storytelling modes of television, which many at the time feared would soon phase out book reading altogether. In fact, Jackanory not only ensured the promotion of the old medium in the new, but also effectively breathed life into it. The series allowed stories of all styles to be told by different faces and in different voices, changing mood, tone and direction with each weekly, thematically grouped set of episodes.

Even within the confines of the more restricted format of the early days, the key strength of Jackanory was its remarkable scope for diversity. The series drew on an amazing range of different types of story for its source material, from traditional and folk tales to modern children's books, and even Music Hall anecdotes. It also attracted a wide range of storytellers from different backgrounds; the 1960s alone saw Hattie Jacques, Harry H. Corbett, Ted Ray, Jon Pertwee, Rodney Bewes, Bernard Cribbins, George Browne, Wendy Craig, Joyce Grenfell, Alan Bennett, Magnus Magnusson, and - at the more unlikely end of the scale - George Melly and Wendy Wood taking part. Kenneth Williams initially refused overtures to participate, apparently out of fear that he would be required to wear a hat(!), but in 1968 he was finally persuaded and began a long association with the series. There were even tentative moves to experiment with the format in which stories were told, blending the straight reading to camera technique with dramatised segments, film sequences, live in-studio cookery provided by Clement Freud, and even the developing art of televisual special effects for a reading of Five Children And It.

In fact, the chronology of 1960s Jackanory is a curious one that provides a fascinating snapshot of the age, from the very much of-its-time reminder that Jon Pertwee was also appearing onstage in There's A Girl In My Soup! to, on the more dubious side, the inclusion of a series of Golliwogg Stories. A cultural historian alone could find acres of mileage in this listing, and it's a tremendous shame that so few of the original shows now survive.

Thankfully, among the dozen 1960s editions that do survive are the five Traditional English Tales told by Lee Montague during the programme’s first week in 1965. While so much archive footage from the era only exists in the form of ‘telerecordings’, a crude process that essentially involved nothing more than pointing a film camera at a television monitor (with an inevitable degradation in picture quality), the surviving dubs of these early shows retain the visual flavour of the videotaped originals. This makes for interesting viewing – Montague reads from a simple set with few props and a backdrop made up of back-projected silhouettes, but overall, the shows do not look or feel that dissimilar from the few examples of storytelling that still lurk in the children’s television schedules today. The obvious matter of the shows’ monochrome nature aside, all that really dates them is the occasional use of modish illustrations similar to those that might have been found in children’s books of the era. Scanning the listings for 1960s Jackanory may feel somewhat akin to peering down a dusty monochrome kaleidoscope; actually watching the handful of shows that are still around, oddly enough, gives the exact opposite impression.

Like many of the other great BBC children's television creations of the same era, Jackanory had its origins in surroundings that were far removed from the trappings of Television Centre. The production team devised the series whilst holidaying in a traditional log cabin in a remote part of Scotland, a setting which in all honesty could not have been more fitting for a series that hinged around the art of storytelling. The name of the series was borrowed from a traditional nursery rhyme that ran "I'll tell you a story about Jackanory, and now my story's begun, I'll tell you another about Jack and his brother, and now my story's done". In her 1994 book Into The Box Of Delights, original series producer Anna Home revealed that she had later discovered that the word 'Jackanory' originally referred to an early form of political protest song, and claimed to have felt somewhat let down that she never recieved a single irate letter accusing the BBC of perpetuating political bias to children!

Ironically, the story of Jackanory itself has been rarely told. With this first volume, however, you can trace for yourself the route that the series took from its inception in 1965, and would continue to pursue while the rest of Britain – so certain narrow-minded rewriters of cultural history would have us believe – was supposedly hallucinating its way through a Carnaby Street-derived psychedelic freakout. Of course, Jackanory would outlast the 1960s, and make the move into colour broadcasting. But we'll find out more about that...in the next issue.

TJ Worthington
June  ‘03