TV Pop Diaries
Pop Music on British Television 1955 - 1999

A feast of corny comedy featuring resident comic butt-end Peter Glaze, aided (throughout the sixties) by Pip Hinton and Jillian Comber.

Masters of ceremonies over the years included Eamonn Andrews, Leslie Crowther, Michael Aspel, Ed Stewart and Stu Francis. It never attracted huge pop names like The Beatles, but it was usually worth the watch.

The show properly prepared us for the weekend. It was like a panto, but you didn’t have to wait until Christmas. It had it’s own repertory company, which would change every now and again, but the comedy (and the gags) didn’t. Few shows conjure up so much audience anticipation as “it’s Friday, it’s five to five, it’s Crackerjack!” Then the audience, usually made up of boy scouts and girl guides, then responds the only way it could, by shouting “Crackerjack” back at the MC. To test the show’s respect and celebrity, feel free to do the following, stand on a crowded street anywhere in the world and shout “Crackerjack” and wait for the response, that’s the way to spot a Brit abroad.

The final series in the mid-eighties had its theme performed by Chas and Dave. Every few years the suggestion of a revival comes, and then goes, but at the beginning of 2020 it happened, it returned! Stu Francis, Don Maclean and other surviving past members said hello on the first show.

Does anyone still have a Crackerjack pencil? They might have been six of them to a box.

CRACKERJACK

BBC / BBC1

12th September 1955 to 21st December 1984