Crackanory

Charlie Higson: 'Storytelling is bigger than ever'

With Crackanory bringing stories for grownups to Dave, its star Charlie Higson talks to Charlotte Runcie about our long heritage of telling tales.

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.

Crackanory preview

Hats off to the writers of each of the Crackanory stories too. Each one as bizarre, crazy, warm and funny as the next.

Crackanory review

The content so far seems to show that Crackanory certainly has the talent to be a cult hit.