Wondermaths

[davidn]

Quite a while ago I wrote a post describing this fantastic schools programme called Wondermaths and lamented how I couldn't find any of it on the Internet. Now, a year and a half on, I'm immeasurably proud to bring it back to the world myself, thanks once again to my parents and their VHS to DVD convertor.

This was British 80s edutainment at the height of its glorious tackiness, and was a maths programme dressed up in a continuing story about Zak, Stella and their robotic pet, a baby Dalek called Hudson, trying to get to Earth for a holiday, where they completely waste their time by visiting Taunton. On the way they encounter various life-threatening space phenomena that can only be defeated by the power of maths, such as constructing a scale model to find out which fuel line they should repair to prevent the ship from freezing, or working out which shapes wouldn't tesselate to escape from the web of a giant spider.

Everything looks about as wobbly as you would realistically expect from a British space program, with the frequent checking of the manual and worrying about teatime, but I've no idea where Hudson is meant to be from - he sounds like someone from France trying to speak like a Welshman with a German accent. Apparently bright and reflective shell suits were all the rage in the future, making them look slightly like The Scousers In Space (and see just before 5:00 on the video above for the unexpected punchline to that comparison).

The best part was provided by the guitarist who played Zak, who was honestly called Christopher Lillicrap (of the Noel Gay Organisation For People With Really Stupid Names), because quite apart from his colossal overacting throughout, he wrote the typically masterful 80s theme music for the end credits. In the song he calls the crew "a magnificent three", but there's very little evidence of this in the episodes - in fact, looking at it now I'm very surprised that he didn't just shoot Hudson out of a cannon after having to spend the first couple of episodes with him. Meep, meep.

Comments

[pami-zee.livejournal.com]

I just watched that episode for, um, revision. I didn't think I'd remember Hudson's "Emergency, emergency" quite as well as I did!

[kibet.livejournal.com]

I never got that at school. I did check Colin Davis out on IMDB and found that he wrote an episode of Blakes 7, if it is the same guy. Wondermaths is nowhere to be found on that though.

I don't think i ever got any maths programs, it was all the Badger Girl, Geordie racer, through the dragons eye, Dark towers, etc... I remember when we had to have it at the same time as the A class (we were in the B class) and we endlessly ridiculed them because their teacher forced them to read out the recap.

[davidn]

I can't recall ever getting maths programmes while actually in school either - these are all things that my parents recorded for me to watch before I reached school age. We definitely had the Look and Read series, though (here you go! I loved the way that Spuggy's dad was Inspector Lewis.)

And I can just imagine that bored chant that everyone's class seems to be forced to do in primary school. "Good morning!" "Good-mor-ning-miss-us-Gull-in." Hideous!

[kibet.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the pauses that meant if suddenly the headteachers name became paupolopodaus it could fit. you did forget to extend the "o"s in everything though.

So that is why they read out the recap, we were meant to. Not surprised my class never followed the rules.

[bookwormsarah]

I came across this while trying to find something about Wondermaths - thankfully I am not alone in my memories! I particularly remember an introduction to probability involving sandwiches...

[davidn]

Fantastic to hear you remember it too! I definitely recall the sandwich episode as well, with the gigantic sandwich machine and the permutations of white bread, brown bread, one white AND one brown slice, Thousand Island dressing... it hasn't appeared in the old videos yet but I'll put them up as I find them!