The Story of 1

I absolutely love this movie! It was my favorite thing to watch in my free time. It is a must see and really changes your perspective on life.

This is a terrible movie. The format is bad. The effects are bad. There's not much anyone can get out of this aside from a few facts about the history of numbers. You'd get more entertainment of just googling the origin of symbols. This thing is a literal punishment. It is so bad. It fails at every element you need for a successful documentary (aside from providing a few basic facts). This thing is so bad and cringe worthy. No one should watch this thing.

Some of the very best documentaries of the last decade or so have been made by Terry Jones--yes the same Terry Jones who was on "Monty Python's Flying Circus". However, don't expect this and his other films to be strictly comedies (though they have a lighthearted and occasionally funny spirit)--they are intellectually stimulating, very well made and wonderful in their own right. His films on the Crusades, Barbarians and Medieval Lives are terrific--and this is why I chose to see this film about the number 1.

"The Story of 1" is an interesting film--just the sort of thing you might want to show to high school math students to teach them about the history of mathematics and counting. The show is like a history lesson and goes from the earliest time in Sumeria to the present time. Topics covered in this show are how city life necessitated counting and arithmetic, that some Aboriginals DON'T have numbers at all in their culture, the cubit and temple building, Pythagoras, imaginary numbers, Roman numerals that can't cut it and how India solved these problems, abacus versus numerals and the binary system. It's all told in as interesting a manner as you can use (considering the topic) and cute little CGI animations as well as Jones' script breath a lot of life into material most would assume MUST be boring. Well worth seeing.

Our world is built on numbers and the first of these was the number 1. Starting with scratches on a bone and heading through the Greek philosophers to the development of the Roman Numerals and the Arabic number system that fed through to the numbers we use today. It sounds like a rather select audience programme that you would expect to find on BBC4 and be a rather stuffy affair. So credit to BBC for making it as fun as possible and sticking it on a primetime slot on the main channel BBC1.

Using Terry Jones semi-comic presentation style, the film is built on two key aspects. The main part of the film is based on Jones' narration, the actual words he says. Without being aloof or inaccessible, the film tells the story in a fascinating and enlightening way – never going into too much detail but doing enough to actually make you feel like you have learnt something and have a very broad knowledge base on which to go off and find out more. The other aspect is the delivery style – colourful, irreverent and fun. Mostly this works and the graphics and comedy add entertainment value to the film without taking away from the interesting content; however at times the constant computerised numbers do get a little annoying and I did want it to be too cheerful and populist but I suppose it was damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

Jones is a good presenter because he holds these two directions together – seeming genuinely enticed by the subject while also enjoying himself. He is perfect for the broad approaching while he also drops in some great little bits of trivia (the word bankrupt coming from the Italian courts punishing a cheating banker by breaking his table; or the Italian zero being so mistrusted as a symbol that its original name giving us the word "cipher" today).

Overall, it may annoy the more aloof viewer of intellectual, stuffy documentaries about maths and science but this film succeeds in presenting the potentially dull subject in such a lively and entertaining manner that it deserves the audience it won. Perhaps a little too populist at times, it is still very interesting and enjoyable and is the sort of programme that almost makes you think that the BBC is fulfilling its public service charter. Well, I did say "almost".