In the Bible Belt they say “the family that prays together stays together”. In 1960s Britain the phrase might have been “the family that watches TV together stays together”. That was certainly the case with mine. I have no memory of my mum and dad watching TV with us kids after about 1968, which was probably when their marriage started falling apart. But I have golden memories of Friday teatimes in the early 1960s, when we would all giggle at the inane jokes and shout answers to the daft quizzes, and my dad would say “Cor!” whenever a leggy girl assistant appeared, to which my mum would retort: “Your eyesight’s getting worse, isn’t it?”

The programme was Crackerjack. Forty years on, its curious rituals are still ingrained on my memory. The first was that whenever a presenter said “Crackerjack”, everyone had to scream the word – in the studio, in the living room, maybe across the whole of Britain. Odd how easily we could be excited then. Kids also got tremendously thrilled if they won a Crackerjack pencil. Yes, a whole pencil. The BBC really knew how to woo the viewers in those days.

It was a programme with its roots in panto, variety, and the slapstick films of Chaplin and (more recently) Norman Wisdom. There were terrible puns and knockabout skits that seemed to have been scripted, rehearsed and filmed in about 30 minutes. Years later I met Johnny Downes, the fighter-pilot hero who invented the show, and he said that it was more like ten minutes. But Downes had a genius for nurturing telegenic talent (he later discovered Basil Brush), and the unknowns he hired for Crackerjack – Eamonn Andrews, Leslie Crowther, Peter Glaze, Ronnie Corbett, Michael Aspel – made a huge impression on my young mind. For years I thought that the weekly verbal skirmish between Crowther and Glaze was the ultimate in saucy repartee. It was only when I got to Cambridge and went to the Footlights that I discovered that comedians were allowed to mention sex and booze.

The other famous element of Crackerjack was the quiz, Double or Drop. Some poor nipper would be bombarded with questions. A right answer would win a prize; a wrong answer a cabbage. Either way, it was amusing, because the kid had to clutch them all for the duration of the game. Inevitably, someone would drop the lot, and probably be scarred for life by this humilation in front of ten million viewers. How we laughed at home!

In the 1980s, when the BBC thought the show needed pepping up, losers were sprayed with gunge instead of getting cabbages. Oddly, this sophistication failed to save the programme, and it was culled after 29 years. Nowadays, I guess, you would have to offer a Crackerjack iPod at least – and maybe even a Crackerjack wardrobe of Nike trainers – to get the full attention of Britain’s prepubescents.

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