Threes Are Good: Numberjacks
In the depths of six weeks of massively expanded screentime, let’s turn back the clocks to a baffling Noughties classic.
Hi all. It’s been a while. It always feels like there’s a big rush to do everything before the summer holidays, and then… what? Time just sort of goes into a vortex. I literally left this sitting, ready to send, for a solid month while I went to train geek heaven, marveled at 80s holograms, and took the twins to a hipster bouldering wall in Brixton. So, apologies for the delay!
When I was small the summer holidays felt like six weeks of watching the clouds float through the sky while carefully placing blades of grass on the surface tension of the paddling pool water, but things seem to move at a faster pace now. Or do they, for children? I hope you are all finding a bit of peace and sanity in the midst of the craziness.
Part of my pre-holiday rush was sorting loads of health stuff (boring, but improving) in the course of which a kindly NHS physio sent me this paper about shoulder pain which has absolutely blown my mind. Did you know they did *pretend surgery* on people’s shoulders to see if the placebo effect happened? (It did.) It is such an interesting, accessible, read, about how little we actually know about shoulders (and by extension the whole human body). It is also the text that has finally convinced me to ✨do my stretches✨ — so a great read for anyone who has aching shoulders.
After that massive tangent let’s talk about kids’ TV. It’s the summer holidays, is everyone going to get slightly more screen time than they usually have? Realistically, yes. So let’s broaden our horizons and go back to the past.
Noughties Revival
You can’t move for Y2K revival, from chain belts and Juicy Couture to actual Girls Aloud playing at the O2. So I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon (bring back Urban Decay gunmetal nail polish) and talk about a children’s TV classic from this era: Numberjacks. Obviously, I wasn’t watching kids TV in the noughties. I was busy straightening my hair and making terrible life decisions, BUT my niece was, and this was her favourite show. (Numberblocks is unrelated to Numberjacks, a thing that deeply confused Editor Tom for a while during the preparation of this newsletter.)
Numberjacks recounts the adventures of a bunch of anthropomorphic blob shaped numbers who live inside the couch of a London family: this bit is actually genius, because what child doesn’t wonder if things live inside speakers or TVs, or under their beds and sofas? The Numberjacks go about their everyday lives inside their sofa until a call comes in from an “Agent”, one of a squad of children who report problems that need solving (OK, getting weirder). One or two of the Numberjacks fly out on location to foil the plans of the “Meanies” (this is just strange now).
I started watching it with the twins last summer – there’s loads of episodes on Youtube – and they love it. I can say it is without a doubt the best secret sofa-inside computer-animated number superhero show I’ve ever seen.
The animation is absolutely of its time – you can hear the computer processors whirring in order to make a pool-noodleesque numeral pogo slowly around the screen. Remember that weird noughties satin-texture fabric they made handbags and jackets out of? I bet the Numberjacks all feel like that to touch. However, children seem unbothered by this; it may as well have been made with Disney live action reboot levels of CGI.
Nice one, Three-zer
I feel like comparing watching children’s TV to being on drugs is lazy: it’s been done a thousand times, blah blah, The Magic Roundabout, students watching Teletubbies…. I don’t exactly live in fear of cliché, and even I think it’s a step too far.
However, I defy you to look at “The Numbertaker” – the primary Meanie – and think of anything other than a Jeremy Deller site-specific installation where he’s talking about getting some proper Mitsubishis off a geezer in a layby off the A3. He has his own theme song! He has a “number sucker-upper”! He looks like he played the Pyramid Stage in ‘97! Come on, the guys who wrote this had to have had access to the “good stuff” and you can’t convince me otherwise.
(Also, because I love a rabbit hole, turns out the actor who played the Numbertaker went on to be a White Walker in Game of Thrones and a bunch of Doctor Who baddies… transferable skills.)
The other Meanies are just as strange. Spooky Spoon is a floating purple spoon with a face, a sort of narcissistic Hyacinth Bucket who mixes up everyday objects with chaotic results. Ms. Spoon is what we now call “a messy bitch who lives for drama” and it occurs to me that a lot of Gen Z influencers were probably watching Numberjacks as children. Spooky Spoon would definitely have a TikTok channel where she talks a lot about other people’s “toxic personality traits” and gaslights her followers into thinking they need to buy her wellness products. Look at this magnificent fan edit and ask yourself: did Spooky Spoon create a generation of perfectly-contoured Instagram scammers? I’m just thinking out loud.
There’s also Problem Blob, a sort of sentient bogey with an Alien-style eyeball on a stalk who slobbers green slime over everything. It is a long time since I read Freud’s Totem and Taboo but whoever decided that parents of toddlers needed more bodily fluids, thanks to an expectorating snot villain, should do jail time. Still, he amuses the children and that’s what counts, right?
But what *is* counting?
Numberjacks is absolute bants: things disappear, the kids tell the squidgy numbers, they go out of the sofa arm where they live into the real world and fix the problem with shonky green screen special effects. Is it entertainment? Yes, absolutely. Is it teaching anyone maths…. Errrrrr…. To channel Spooky Spoon, does anyone even care? NO!
The official Numberjacks website says the show is about “excitement, fun and learning, thinking skills, problem solving and maths,” and I’d argue that reflects their priorities while making it. It’s probably quite good for teaching small children number recognition, and maybe some addition. There’s an episode about zero which is quite handy given it’s more of a mathematical concept than a thing that really exists. But at the end of the day, maths learning is the poor relation of plot, and by plot I mean the numbers faffing around arguing about who gets to go out on a mission. Have a boss! Implement some structures! I’m amazed they manage anything! Chain of command, people.
If you actually want your children to keep up with maths in summer holidays, then Numberblocks is on iPlayer. But if you are running out of ideas in the final weeks and want to spend a rainy afternoon thinking WTAF, then the Numberjacks summer special (a sort of extended universe special featuring ALL the baddies) is here. And if you’re on a long journey, I wrote this guide to things you can watch with sound down here.