Not quite the same old story ... Jackanory
Of late, I can only recall one BBC attempt to revive a televisual brand-name from the pre-digital era: the supposed "update" of Ask The Family that replaced Robert Robinson's almost unbearably wholesome quiz show with an apparent mixture of Family Fortunes and Tiswas, anchored by the woeful Dick and Dom. Compared by one admiring blogger to "watching your favourite aunt prostitute herself", it was pulled from the schedules and consigned to the historical bin. Nobody cried, nor complained. Indeed, before writing this, I spent five minutes online trying to confirm that it actually happened.
Compared to that, today's relaunch of Jackanory was a shining triumph. Relative to the original, however - and though my view of all this will inevitably be skewed by '70s nostalgia and thirtysomething snootiness - I wasn't all that sure. To bring back a show solely anchored around one person reading from a book and sporadic illustrations would, I will concede, have been pretty much unthinkable - though watching a fifteen minute launch-show in which John Sessions was shoehorned into what looked distinctly like a cut-price version of Shrek, the inevitable modernization looked lamentably half-cocked. The once-central man-reading-from-book shot only appeared three minutes from the end; before that, proceedings were built around a loose mélange that seemed to sully the charm of the original format, while complicating what might have been a reasonable attempt to Beebify the kind of animation pioneered by Pixar.
From the top, then. Sessions was reading/dramatizing Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's Muddle Earth, a retooling of the kid-lit trope whereby a boy (and his dog) accidentally tumble into the space/time/whatever continuum and end up in an alien world populated by frogs and wizards, while wondering how they'll get back in time for tea. The environment in question ("For a start is has three moons. And of course, the abundance of pink, stinky hogs, sleeping, farting trolls and exploding gas frogs mark it out as something quite extraordinary"), was nicely rendered, and the boy playing the lead role evidently did his best. The problem: in among the multiple moons and exploding frogs, they had to find room for Sessions, dressed in a crew-neck jumper and pulling the required theatrical faces.
A failure to follow the resulting mess may, I suppose, be traceable to the intellectual sluggishness that comes with age, but really: what with the reading, acting, animation, singing curtains, floating bathtubs and exploding frogs, I failed to have much of a clue what was going on. Imagine Toy Story punctuated by workaday shots of Tom Hanks and Kelsey Grammar dressed in saggy casualwear, and twice as complicated. Not good, I'm saying.
Oh, and just to prove it wasn't 1978, one of the minor characters was shown baking "snot bread". Next week: the return of Swap Shop, with Myleene Klass, the ugly one from Busted, and some swearing. Or there again, perhaps not, eh?
