‘17 is a prime number – eccentric’: how Numberblocks became a kids' TV hit

When the first lockdown struck and schools closed, parents suddenly found themselves reassessing their approach to screen time. Their choice was simple: they could either labour on, attempting to piece together a ramshackle Rube Goldberg parenting strategy that kept their children healthy, happy and educated, while maintaining their own obligations to full-time employment, or they could bite the bullet, plonk them in front of the telly and hope their kids’ brains wouldn’t entirely atrophy.

Luckily for me, the decision was taken out of our hands. “I want to watch Numberblocks,” our then five-year-old declared a day or two into his extended break from reception class. He was, of course, referring to a CBeebies series where some cubes sing songs about themselves. How did he know about Numberblocks? Because he watched it at school. And, figuring that if it was good enough for school it was good enough for us, we stuck Numberblocks on. And he was transfixed. His two-year-old brother watched along, and was very quickly able to do sums himself.

By no means were we alone in letting our kids watch. “Our views doubled in lockdown last year,” says Stephanie Gauld, the digital director of Numberblocks. “Our official channels were having about 1.6m views a day. Now we’re at 3.3m.”

Created by Joe Elliot, who had previously found success on CBeebies with spelling-based series Alphablocks, Numberblocks has become wildly successful. Kids love it because it’s bright, colourful and full of silly characters. Parents love it because compared with, say, Paw Patrol, it’s The Ascent of Man. And teachers love it because it’s useful.

The reason for this is that the show is developed in part with the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics. Debbie Morgan, the centre’s director for primary mathematics, plays a hands-on role in consulting on every episode.

“All previous maths programmes for younger children have been about a character who does some maths,” she says. “They go on a picnic, and they share things out. They go fishing, and they count the number of fish that they caught. So the maths have been an add-in. But with Numberblocks, the characters are the maths.”

She’s talking literally. Each character in Numberblocks is a block of numbers. So One, perhaps the protagonist of the whole show, is a single cube. Two is made of two ones stacked together. “Three has three juggling balls,” adds Morgan. “The characteristics that interest children are actually mathematical characteristics; 17 is a one-off and does all these crazy shapes, and is a bit eccentric because he’s 17 and a prime number.”

“The way I was raised, and most kids our age were raised, is that our first engagement with numbers were the symbols for numbers,” says Oli Hyatt, who produces Numberblocks with Elliot. “Which is silly because the symbols really don’t mean anything.”

“The structure of mathematics is really important,” adds Morgan. “How the maths works, how it fits together. The range in which it works. So, for example, four can be a line or a square, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s still four. So we’re understanding the conservation of four. It’s not about a symbol.”

Simon Taylor, the show’s director, chips in. “My kid definitely thinks of things in shapes and square numbers now. The symbol that’s written on top of the blocks is important because, eventually, that’s how we annotate it. But to him, he’s already in his head working out shape, scale and different things you can do with it.”

“Lord Puttnam [the film producer and educator] does this really interesting speech about how, if you take any profession from 100 years ago, it would be unrecognisable in today’s environment,” says Hyatt. “But, broadly speaking, you go into a school and it looks the same. A guy stands out in front – with kids at desks – doing stuff on a board. Puttnam is a big advocate for change. And I think our approach of visualisation and making it fun, engaging and hands-on is a gamechanger. It’s changing outcomes for millions of kids around the world.”

Hyatt explains that the visual nature of Numberblocks is especially useful when it comes to teaching teen numbers. “Counting to 10 is fine,” he says. “Then you do 11 and 12, and then you go into these teen things. In many other languages, their number structure tends to be simpler, so you’d get to 10, then ‘10 and one’, ‘10 and two’, and so on. We get a bit weird from 10 to 20. We go all wacky. And I don’t think that helps kids. But when you have it as a visualisation – so it’s ‘Here’s 10 and two’, ‘here’s 10 and three’ – they really understand it. They don’t have to worry about these teen things because they’re just weird. They don’t mean anything.”

It’s amazing to see how well children connect with Numberblocks. However, my theory is that this is because kids are young enough to blindly accept what they’re watching. Many of the parents I know are perturbed by the process in which the Numberblocks are created. Let’s say there’s an episode where Three and Four are talking. Maybe Three trips up and lands on Four. At this point, Three and Four vanish completely. They’ve been Frankensteined into a new identity. Seven looks different from Three and Four, and sounds different, too. Where did the other numbers go? Did Seven kill them?

My guess is that, when my children’s generation reaches the point of overthinking the childhood shows of their youth, this is what will freak them out the most; the same way Henry the Tank Engine getting bricked into a tunnel freaked out mine, and the sight of a human baby trapped inside the Teletubbies’ sun freaked out the generation after. So, while I had the Numberblock brain trust with me, I thought I should do the decent thing and ask. What happens to the soul of a Numberblock after it has been absorbed into a bigger Numberblock?

“You know, we had a really interesting conversation with the writers about that recently,” says Taylor. “Andrew, our head writer, made a very good point which is that you can’t apply literary rules to a Numberblock story because the whole thing just falls apart. The beauty of it is that it all starts from the math rules first.”

Yes, but where do they go? “I think we used to joke there’s like a cloud storage thing, where all their consciences go,” Taylor continues, before backing away. “But, of course, that’s weird.”

So where do they go? “I had a friend who got married,” offers Hyatt. “He was one, then they became two, and he lost his personality.” Please consider this a definitive answer.

Season five of Numberblocks is about to start on CBeebies and, if my children’s strangulated noises of glee at the prospect of finally seeing the concept of infinity being introduced are anything to go by, it’s going to be just as popular as ever. The growing confidence shows, too, because this time the series will tackle some much trickier concepts.

“There will be a lot of multiplication,” says Morgan. “We’ve got threes hanging off trapezes and all sorts of things. And we’ve got a physical table to mirror the times table, that the Numberblocks can jump on to, join together and go up. Then we tried to think about things that we haven’t had. So there’s one we’ve just done, which I think is brilliant, and that’s time. A 15-minute episode on time.”

Like counting in teens, Morgan reveals that time is much harder to teach in this country than it needs to be. “The reason it’s not complex in some other countries is that we talk about “‘20 past’, and ‘20 to’,” she says. “Many other countries only ever use ‘past’. We’ve used a phrase in the episode, so when it goes past one o’clock, it’s just ‘one and a bit’. First, they just learn about the hours, until we get to two. And then we’ve got two and a bit, then we’ve got three and a bit, and we’re good at counting in fives now, we’ve done the five times table. So we can count minutes in fives. But we only go past.”

When asked what they’re most proud of, the Numberblocks team all have stories about people who have been in touch to tell them how much tangible help the show has given children; either watching kids who have struggled with maths suddenly thrive because of the way the information is presented, or kids with additional needs who have been brought out of themselves by the storytelling.

“The nicest letter we ever got was with Alphablocks,” says Hyatt. “It was from a dad whose child had severe special needs and had never even attempted to speak before. But they watched Alphablocks, and they started repeating the sounds and, whether knowingly or not, was saying the words. They were doing the phonics. It was such a nice letter.”

That must be so rewarding, I say, slightly choked up.

“We later caught him selling knockoff DVDs on eBay,” he adds. “We had to phone him up and tell him to stop.”

Numberblocks series five airs weekdays on CBeebies at 8.10am