Be More Than Just a Number
Sep. 27th, 2007 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnWhitney has been watching a lot of Numb3rs recently. Even though I insist on calling it "num-three-ars", I find the idea of the programme very interesting - it's different from all the other police dramas in that it includes the use of often slightly stretched mathematics to solve each week's particular crime. But after seeing a couple of episodes, I suddenly realized that the whole thing was bizarrely reminiscent of an 80s schools programme called Wondermaths (which has an opening theme incredibly similar to Look Around You's parody of schools programming).
It's likely that not many people will have heard of this programme, as I was the only one to genuinely watch these sorts of things while everyone else grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or because we were in Britain, Censored Watered-Down Hero Turtles) or the like - it was an schools programme that had a science fiction setting to it, with a guitarist called Christopher Lillicrap (that's his name, honest) playing the part of Zak in a ghastly shell suit, accompanied by a woman named Stella and a wedge-shaped robot called Hudson that meeped annoyingly in a weird sort of nondescript European accent and constantly bumped into most of the other bits of the set due to the ineptitude of whoever had the remote control behind the camera.
The storyline, as far as I remember, was that they were somehow stuck on a ship called the Investigator and had to find a way back home to the planet Theta (yes). Each week they would be faced with a problem such as finding out which of their fuel cells were about to explode, repairing a crucial component on the outside to stop the ship from freezing, or navigating the lanes of a space highway (a constant pattern of changing from blue to red to green to yellow - something that is still easier than spending a minute on an American freeway), and eventually work it out using some form of maths. It was brilliant, really.
The best bit, though (and what I'm still trying to find) was the fantastic sort of synth-pop ending music. The talent of people responsible for children's TV themes in the 80s extended even to maths-based schools programmes - they just can't write them like that any more.
It's likely that not many people will have heard of this programme, as I was the only one to genuinely watch these sorts of things while everyone else grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or because we were in Britain, Censored Watered-Down Hero Turtles) or the like - it was an schools programme that had a science fiction setting to it, with a guitarist called Christopher Lillicrap (that's his name, honest) playing the part of Zak in a ghastly shell suit, accompanied by a woman named Stella and a wedge-shaped robot called Hudson that meeped annoyingly in a weird sort of nondescript European accent and constantly bumped into most of the other bits of the set due to the ineptitude of whoever had the remote control behind the camera.
The storyline, as far as I remember, was that they were somehow stuck on a ship called the Investigator and had to find a way back home to the planet Theta (yes). Each week they would be faced with a problem such as finding out which of their fuel cells were about to explode, repairing a crucial component on the outside to stop the ship from freezing, or navigating the lanes of a space highway (a constant pattern of changing from blue to red to green to yellow - something that is still easier than spending a minute on an American freeway), and eventually work it out using some form of maths. It was brilliant, really.
The best bit, though (and what I'm still trying to find) was the fantastic sort of synth-pop ending music. The talent of people responsible for children's TV themes in the 80s extended even to maths-based schools programmes - they just can't write them like that any more.
