Jackanory

Name: Jackanory
Genre: Drama

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One actor, one chair, one book read aloud for fifteen minutes — the least televisual idea the BBC ever ran for thirty years.

Jackanory opens with a main title sequence of 27 seconds.

At 27 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.

It arrived on BBC One in 1965, when Grandstand, This Is Your Life and Top of the Pops were also on the network.

The opening titles

27s

Fan upload.

1960–ITVDrama

The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

1965–NBCDrama

"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

1965–1969CBSDrama

An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.

1962–1971NBCDrama

The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.

1968–2012ABCDrama

Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.