Jack Dee

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Crackanory was an adult version of the children's storytelling show Jackanory, which I remember from my own 1960s boyhood as a cue to go upstairs and lick the paint off my lead soldiers. This, though, was inspired, featuring Jack Dee being glum and Sally Phillips twinkling with irony, each taking the armchair to tell a story illustrated with filmed action and bits of animation.

The narratives - one a modern fable about a man who idly tweeted something about a pop star and wished he hadn't, the second a twisted tale about a genius toymaker who died and had himself stuffed so that his family could enjoy him staring at them at dinner - were fun, engaging and highly crafted. Nice one, Dave, I felt like saying.

Sitting down and listening to someone read you a story. How long is it since you did that? Not since you were a kid, I'll bet. But that's what Crackanory, the belated grown-up follow-up to children's favourite Jackanory, is asking us to do.

It seems an oddly perverse choice of revival in this age of multitasking, e-readers and texting while you're eating your dinner and listening to your iPod all at the same time. Slowing right down and listening to someone else talk at you: that requires you chill that pulse rate right down.

But it's worth the effort. The opening double bill of slightly twisted short stories repaid giving them your proper attention. As Jack Dee told topical tale Bitter Tweet, a barbed attack on social media manipulation that featuring a hapless bloke called 'Dazpants80' crossing tweets with singing fringe Joaquin Blieber, it was simply impossible not to be pulled into this sharply drawn world.

True, there were some concessions to a modern audience; it wasn't just Dee sat in an armchair. There were some simple dramatised sequences - Dazpants80 finding himself a prisoner in his pub - and a few animated distractions to soften the blow of simply listening.

But for the most part, this was Dee as storyteller, delivering the lines of writer Nico Tatarowicz. It felt like a comforting throwback to a simpler age, which was rather odd, given the subject matter.

The second story, Toby Davies's What Peebee Did Next, told with a knowing tongue in her cheek by Sally Phillips, was more of a throwback to the old Jackanory, albeit with a gruesome sense of humour.

The story of a toymaker who left his happy family an unusual bequest, it had the ring of a Grimm fairy tale, a moral homily popping up to save the day at the 11th hour. At least I felt like I'd had a beginning, middle and end. Some five-season dramas don't deliver that.

Are you sitting comfortably? The Jackanory format receives a post-watershed polish. Turning the pages of tonight's inaugural storybooks are Jack Dee and Sally Phillips, with tales involving a bumbling berk unthinkingly invoking a social media Twitstorm, and a toymaker deciding that death need not prevent quality time with his increasingly uneasy family. Dee's faux-weary cynicism and Phillips's knowing exuberance might leave you hankering for the comforting tones of a Cribbins or Rushton, but a rare chance to enjoy some warmingly lo-fi television.

Updating children's storytelling classic Jackanory for 21st-century grown-ups, TV stars take turns to sit in a big, soft armchair and demonstrate the enduring allure of the spoken word.

Screened in pairs, tonight's brace of comedy shorts opens with Jack Dee, whose deadpan sarcasm is a perfect match for Bitter Tweet, an internet fable following the fate of a Twitter addict followed by Sally Phillips, whose pert delivery is equally well matched to What Peebee Did Next, a tale about toys, grief and taxidermy.

On paper this is a bit odd. Using the format of kids' favourite Jackanory to tell grown-up stories feels like a futile exercise. In reality it scores more hits than misses. This is partly down to the choice of storytellers: Jack Dee is the perfect voice of Nico Tatarowicz's modern-morality tale about the perils of social media, featuring Sightseers star Steve Oram as a Twitter-obsessive; while Sally Phillips's twee delivery adds an edge to Toby Davies's macabre story of a toymaker made into an automaton after his death. Both writers have worked on big comedy sketch shows (That Mitchell and Webb Look, Armstrong and Miller) so each story is darkly funny and neatly crafted. Get sitting comfortably.

A nice idea, this, as Dave continues its understandably low-budget move into original programming. Split into two halves, Crackanory offers fairytales for adults.

First, Jack Dee reads Nico Tatarowicz's gloomy Twitter parable Bitter Tweet in which a smug urbanite finds himself at the centre of a social media storm after casually insulting a Justin Bieber-style pop phenomenon. And then Sally Phillips narrates Toby Davis's What Pee Bee Did Next, a more uplifting - if slightly macabre - affair in which an eccentric toymaker attempts to look after his family after his death.

Clearly, the quality will vary over the series but there's something deeply, atavistically satisfying about being read to and something pleasingly minimal about these two tales and the very basic mode of their rendering. Worth a look.

While one doesn't like to laugh at other people's misfortunes, that was pretty much encouraged during I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down, in which comedian and musician Rich Morton chatted to a variety of stand-ups about those nightmares gigs that remain impossible to forget.

While this was a thoroughly entertaining half-hour, Morton rarely gave any of his interviewees a namecheck, which became frustrating for the listener. At the top of the show, we were told he was going to be talking to Jo Brand, Tim Clark, Jack Dee, Milton Jones, Lucy Porter and Ian Stone. True, it was easy to know when Dee, Brand and Porter were contributing, but the rest of the time it was a bit of a guessing game.

However, aside from this hiccup was a stream of amusing anecdotes about disastrous corporate gigs - prompting one comedian to try to escape by hiding in a dumb waiter - horrible hecklers and that one person in the audience who doesn't laugh.

Dee was in particularly good form, describing how if a Comedy Store gig went wrong in the early days of his career, he would tackle the challenge of walking through the audience in order to leave the venue by wearing his motorcycle helmet, as if he had just delivered a pizza.