Crackanory

Final chapters from a series that has been less Jackanory for adults, more finding your TV tuned to audio description mode during a genial Tales Of The Unexpected reboot. Before the big book is placed back into the bookcase, there's time for Hugh Dennis to tell the tale of Jack, a superhero juggling his day job at a care home with the marginally more exciting world of cat rescue. Then, Stephen Mangan reads the story of a former activist rediscovering his idealistic edge when confronted with a chicken-chomping despot.

Radio Times review

Radio Times makes a cameo in the first of the stories here. It's a cautionary tale, Richmond Hammond informs us - attempting an ominous smile. It's also a silly one: a postman becomes the perfect boyfriend by reading someone's mail.

Second in the storytelling chair is comic actress Jessica Hynes, who is much better at sinister. Written by Holly Walsh, it's about a woman who wakes up hung-over to find her eight-year-old self staring at her from the foot of the bed. This one is more satisfying, although is more likely to give you nightmares than fits of giggles.

Radio Times review

The thinness of the series' premise is exposed in this week's two stories. It's always a delight listening to Rebecca Front and Kevin Eldon weaving their magic in the reader's chair, but their tales aren't particularly inspiring. Toby Davies's story of what happens when a writer of erotic thrillers finds a lost Shakespearean manuscript in his attic feels forced, while Eldon's parable about gratitude plays like a menacing Mr Men and is graced by a performance by The Thick of It's Alex Macqueen - the very personification of Mr Uppity.

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.

TV review: Crackanory

It was quite amusing and also presumably quite cheap to make, so there might be future series, although Crackanory will struggle to have one tenth of the lifespan of its role model.

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.

Crackanory review

A show such as Crackanory is dependent on the varied voices of individual writers even more than its roster of big-name performers, so almost inevitably some tales will appeal more than others. The opener showed both what can be achieved from a fertile imagination, and the disappointing product of a more pedestrian approach.

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.