Some good I mean to do

Welcome to CrackLEARjack, a genuine innovation in the field of interactive, infinitely refreshable, Shakespeare-out-of-Glaze tragicomic playlets which make education.

The premise is almost insultingly simple. Remember Crackerjack? Remember those pantomimey bits at the end where pop hits of the day were shoehorned into the script, frequently in the most contrived manner?

Now, remember King Lear? Course you do - it was on last Christmas with that David Tennant out of Star Trek. Me, I preferred the Deborah Warner version. At the Almeida, of course, not the later Brian Cox one at the National. But that's just me.

Now remember that copy of Punch, possibly from the early eighties, which suggested the addition of a Portakabin to the side of the Vatican could add £££ to the value of His Holiness's residence? This was before the credit crunch, of course. But the general principle still applies.

Now wouldn't it be great to add metaphorical £££ to the value of Shakespeare's King Lear? It's already a technically accomplished play rivalling the best of Rattigan, according to theatre expert Michael Billington - but what about a supercharged Lear, if you will, one which could exert a visceral hold on its audience, gripping even tighter than the feisty Nahum Tate remake? That, truly, could be a work for the ages.

And that's where I - and, perhaps, you, the ordinary reader - come in. Don't get me wrong. I'm taking nothing away from Shakespeare's accomplishment. But what if Lear could be somehow combined with Crackerjack? Think about it. Like that wonderful compound created out of the magic of De Niro and the power of Minnelli in that top box office smash New York, New York.

But how would such a thing come about? First we have to define our terms.

What IS Crackerjack? Well, it's not Stu Francis and the Krankies, for a start. It's not that Chas and Dave signature tune. Okay, backtrack. No, not Eamon Andrews. That's the ur-Crackerjack. Crackerjack proper begins when Leslie Crowther, already the comic, takes over presenting duties when Andrews leaves. Don McLean? Okay. Bernie Clifton? Yes, alright, but that's as far as it goes. Ladies? Pip Hinton - obviously. And Gillian - Gillian, you know, the motherly one who was also beautiful but somehow not as threatening as Pip Hinton. And other ladies later whose names I've forgotten. Was it Jan Somebody who was a regular presence in the seventies?

And of course, throughout all the real incarnations of the show, shining like a beacon - a plump, perennially irritated beacon - is our natural Gloucester, Peter Glaze. He's even got the glasses.

Glaze: a beacon

Okay, so we have our Crackerjack boundaries. But that covers a big chunk of the sixties and the sevnties. Do we narrow it down to a particular week, month or year when it comes to choosing pop hits? No. For me, something ended when Leslie Crowther left the programme; on the other hand the pop hits of the seventies which are associated with the Clifton and McLean regimes provide richer pickings for our project.

Having defined our terms, let me now state as clearly as possible the intention of this blog.

Each entry shall consist of a scene from King Lear. The dialogue will be entirely Shakespeare's. I do not want, in any way, to take away from his already considerable accomplishment.

But - and here's the genius of the thing - whenever an opportunity suggests itself in the scene for a 70s pop hit (an actual chart hit or turntable hit; no album tracks, so none of that "Led Zep" nonsense - yes, I know they featured in the brief-lived "Album slot" in TOTP, I KNOW that) then it shall be inserted into the script in the manner of a libretto - the opening lines in block caps.

So any hit from Jan 1st 1970 to Dec 31st 1979. The only embargo is on songs by the group Queen, as an overose of royalty could cause needless confusion plus I hate them. And from memory, we did not alway hear the full version of the song in the Crackerjack pantomime sequences, so only two or three lines need be reproduced. It is permissable to start midsong - the spoken interjection in the Mixtures' Pushbike Song being an obvious corollary to Kent's "For good or ill, let the wheel turn" - but I will endeavour to avoid such measures.

Like the greatest art, this project will never really be finished. When I am gone, there will be other hands, other memories of seventies songs which may - who knows? - prove more apposite than mine, even though it's technically my idea so really the credit goes to me anyway, cause you don't pay for a franchise for nothing, do you? Without me, this idea wouldn't exist.

But I must put such ill thoughts away for now. CrackLEARjack is bigger than any individual - even though, were there to be any kind of awards ceremony, you'd obviously need someone to represent the multitude and I'd be perfectly happy to do that. If I was needed. But of course, Shakespeare himself needs to be acknowledged. Without him, I'd never have had the idea - and really, he is literally fifty per cent of what you read upon the page. Nice one, Will.

And now, for good or ill, let the wheel turn. One scene for each blog entry until my work is finished. Some good I mean to do, indeed.