The BBC is to revive the children’s TV show Crackerjack, 35 years after it was last aired.

The broadcaster announced that the programme, which originally ran from 1955 until 1984, will be made at MediaCityUK, in Salford, by BBC Children’s in-house production team. It will air next year on CBBC and iPlayer.

The programme was introduced every week with the phrase: “It’s Friday, it’s five to five … It’s Crackerjack!” It was originally filmed in front of an audience of children in London, and included teams of children competing in games, as well as comedy and music acts.

The BBC said the show would be updated for “today’s connected generation giving them an all-round, interactive experience while retaining the beating heart of what etched Crackerjack into the affections of British children for three decades.” There will be 10 episodes in the series.

The programme will include a return of the Double or Drop game, in which children are chosen from the audience to answer questions, winning prizes for correct answers and cabbages for incorrect ones. Contestants have to hold their prizes for the duration of the competition without dropping them. As in the original show, Crackerjack pencils will be awarded to contestants.

This series will be presented by the children’s TV presenters Sam Nixon and Mark Rhodes, who will follow in the footsteps of Eamonn Andrews (who later presented This Is Your Life), Leslie Crowther, Michael Aspel, Ed Stewart and Stu Francis.

Cheryl Taylor, the head of content for BBC Children’s, said: “Crackerjack is just one of several fabulous series that Children’s in-house productions have developed this year. It’s the perfect vehicle for our much-loved stars Sam and Mark and promises to usher in a new era of frenetic family fun and whizzbang audience antics.”

The production team has also announced other new commissions, including a revival of the 1990s children’s drama The Demon Headmaster and the mystery drama Get Even, about four teenage girls who expose injustice.

The Demon Headmaster is to be remade with a “super head” of an academy school as the villain. The show, which is based on the children’s books by Gillian Cross, follows a group of children who realise their headmaster is using hypnotism to gain complete control of their school.

Greg Childs, director of the Children’s Media Foundation, said reviving Crackerjack was a good way of appealing to parents, but added: “We wonder whether it will be as attractive to children, especially those who have migrated in great numbers to watching content on their personal devices, and mainly short-form content on YouTube. It will be interesting to see if the digital plans behind Crackerjack will help solve that problem.”

He welcomed the news that the BBC was investing in live action content for older children by commissioning Get Even. “We have been calling for additional content for the upper end of children’s programming (12- to 15-year-olds) for some time now, as this age group is currently underserved by the public service broadcasters,” he said.

In December 2017 the government launched a £60m fund to help make children’s television programmes in Britain, in reaction to a sharp increase in children watching foreign-made programmes on Netflix and YouTube.

The media regulator Ofcom has previously called on British broadcasters to produce more original programming for young people, and last month it published research showing that UK children aged five to 15 spent more time online than they did watching TV in a typical day.

While they found children’s online time stopped increasing for the first time in 2018, averaging at two hours and 11 minutes per day, the amount of time they spent watching TV every day fell again, by eight minutes, to an hour and 52 minutes.

YouTube was the most popular place for children to watch videos, with 80% using it. Nearly half (49%) of all children, and a third (32%) of those aged three to four, watched subscription on-demand services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Now TV.

Research published in October last year found that 16- to 34-year-olds spent about an hour and 20 minutes a day consuming BBC content, around half of the average amount of time across all age groups. It found one in eight young people did not watch or listen to any BBC programmes at all in a given week.

“The decline in use among young people is a concern, not only because this audience group is less well served but because young people are critical for the future relevance and success of the BBC,” said Ofcom.