‘It’s Friday! It’s five-to-five! It’s
CRACKERJACK!’
Popular TV chef Zena Skinner on Crackerjack with Leslie Crowther and Peter Glaze in the 1960s
Brian J. Robb looks back at the classic anarchic kids’ gameshow hoping to score a Crackerjack pencil...
They say you can tell someone’s age by which Crackerjack presenter they remember: if it’s Eamonn Andrews or Leslie Crowther, they’re proper old.
However, if you remember Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart or Stu Francis, then you’re young-at-heart and remember the 1970s or 1980s as if it were yesterday! Without Crackerjack there’d likely have been no Tiswas, Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, or Number 73, all of which lifted bits of the Friday tea-time show’s ground-breaking format.
On air from the mid-1950s to the mid- 1980s, Crackerjack was one of the most enduring BBC children’s shows, clocking up over 450 episodes (over 300 are now missing from the archives). Largely remembered for its iconic introduction—’It’s Friday! It’s five-tofive! It’s Crackerjack!’—the show reached its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, launching many television personalities’ careers, including Eamonn Andrews, Leslie Crowther, Ronnie Corbett, Stu Francis, and... er, the Krankies. Well, they can’t all be winners.
The junior comedy-variety show was created by BBC producer John Haddon Downes, who produced and directed it for its first decade, returning later in the 1970s.
Eamon Andrews quizzes a schoolboy contestant
Host Michael Aspel (centre) with guests (l-r) Rod Mclennan, Jillian Cooper, Frances Barlow and Peter Glaze in 1969
Downes had been a RAF pilot who’d won a Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroic exploits; the show’s title came from wartime flyboy slang for a ‘crackerjack jet pilot’.
Downes had gone on to various jobs in the entertainment business, including as a circus ring master (a skill no doubt useful controlling Crackerjack’s live studio audience of lively kids).
After completing a producers course at the BBC, in 1955 he’d pitched the idea for a combined children’s game show and variety show to legendary BBC children’s producer Freda Lingstrom (she was behind Andy Pandy and The Flower Pot Men, before she became Director of Children’s Television).
Many of the things now associated with Crackerjack were not there at the start, including the iconic opening slogan. Crackerjack went out live on Friday afternoons—that’s how we all remember it, but it began its record-breaking long run on 14 September 1955, a Wednesday! Sacrilege!
Downes’ idea was simple, and came just in time to meet the launch of rival service ITV on 22 September 1955. Broadcast live from the King’s Theatre on Hammersmith Road, and from 1963 the BBC’s Television Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush, Crackerjack drew upon the kind of material that used to be presented in these former live variety theatres. There’d be comedy sketches, silly routines, and pastiches of well-known movies and books, but with the added element of live participation from an audience of up to 500 children, all of whom yelled out ‘Crackerjack!’ whenever the show’s title was mentioned. The BBC had never tackled a children’s show with a live audience before, but the prospect of proper competition from ITV meant that an ‘anything goes’ approach was adopted. Downes promised: