Jackanory is a long-running BBC children's television series that was designed to stimulate an interest in reading. It began on December 13 1965, the first story being the fairy-tale Cap o' Rushes read by Lee Montague, it was believed that the last ever episode was on March 24 1996, clocking up around three thousand five hundred episodes in that time, but the series returned on November 27 2006.

The show's format, which hardly varied over the decades, involved an actor reading from famous children's novels or folk tales while seated in an armchair, although later episodes took the radical step of allowing the presenters to stand up. From time to time the scene being read would be illustrated by a specially-commissioned still drawing, often by Quentin Blake. Usually a single book would occupy five daily fifteen-minute episodes, from Monday to Friday. A few Jackanory stories took the form of a play rather than stories being read, in a series of thirty minute fully-cast and costumed dramas entitled Jackanory Playhouse. These included a dramatisation by Philip Glassborow of the comical A. A. Milne story, "The Princess Who Couldn't Laugh."