Out in the Mexican desert, the villagers cheer. Little Juan has scratched a line in the sand. His mama beams with pride. His mentor nods solemnly at this creation.
“Thank you, El Nombre,” Juan says, wide-eyed. “That is the best ‘one’ I have drawn.”
From beneath his sombrero and Zorro mask, El Nombre delivers his verdict.
“And it’s a good one, Juan. Just make sure it’s not your last one, Juan.”
And with that, a rope swings in from nowhere. The masked hero grabs hold, swoops into the air, and disappears to the sound of trumpets. Until, of course, he is summoned next episode when Juan is ready to learn the number two.
For 90s kids, this is how the BBC taught us to write numbers. Originally a two-minute sketch within the award-winning primary school series Numbertime, the stop motion parody El Nombre quickly became a breakout hit. Each mini-episode saw our masked hero swoop in to solve the village’s mathematical problems, always to the tune of the Mexican hat dance. And did we mention everyone in these stories is a gerbil?
Rewatching them now—many are on YouTube and BBC iPlayer—there’s so much joy in how entertainingly daft the jokes are. Wordplay, slapstick, parodies of western film tropes. Surely we didn’t appreciate this as three-year-olds?
“The trick,” says Christopher Lillicrap, creator of Numbertime and many other children’s shows, “was to entertain the teachers. They’d be the ones forced to watch the same episode on loop. If they laughed, they’d keep putting it on for the kids.”
Now spending time in Greece and bringing out new music—he composed the music in the show as well—Chris has agreed to sit down with us and reminisce about making television shows for children, while we try to fill in the lore of this seminal education experience.
Left: Douglas Fairbanks as Zorro (1920). Right: A gerbil. Combine these two things, add some stop-motion puppetry, and you have El Nombre.
Something, educate and entertain
In retrospect, it’s obvious why Chris put himself in the teachers’ shoes. “I was a teacher in a former life. I’d been told at grammar school, you see, that I couldn’t go and be an actor—I should get a proper job. Go and teach drama, they said. That’ll get it out of your system.”
So after three years of teacher training college, he landed a job at a tough secondary modern school in Mansfield. “At one point I had to separate two hulking great teenagers having a fight in the library. I found out the week after I left, one of them put an axe through his dad’s head. It was that kind of school.”
But he discovered quickly that if he entertained his students, he could teach them better. “We could do unconventional things. Once, the headmaster came walking through the hall while I was doing drama with the kids, and I had them playing football. But the whole thing was mimed! He eventually noticed there was no ball. ‘How did you do that?!’ he asked.”
Despite the ‘proper job’ leanings of his own teachers, Chris points to their positive influence: “I had an English teacher called Mr Jefferson. And one week I wrote this essay about an alien professor—I called it ‘Once There Was Man’. The professor was explaining about Earth: once there was man, but he wiped himself out. Well, Mr Jefferson insisted on standing up and reading it to the class: he had shown it to his wife, who thought it was absolutely brilliant. That was the moment I thought, hang on, I can write things.”
And given his career trajectory, surely mathematics was also a triumph? “I was abysmal at maths. It amuses me now that with Numbertime, we ended up winning a Royal Television Society award—but for a subject I was useless at! I failed my CSE maths.” But with one teacher, he made real progress. “When I was 14, we had Mrs Carter—oh no!” She had a reputation for being extremely strict. “But I had a completely different opinion of her once I got to know her! I went from 22nd in the class to fifth. Suddenly I understood some stuff!”
And there were at least some cheerleaders for Chris’s dramatic ambitions: “We’d put on The Pirates of Penzance. One night, two very drunk teachers came up to me and said, ‘Lillicrap, if you don’t go on the stage, we’re gonna hunt you down and kill you.'” This thought came back to him after a year teaching in Mansfield. “I thought, sod it. I’m gonna go do what I want!”
So Chris took a massive pay cut to drive a van for a children’s theatre company. “You got an extra fiver if you drove the van. So I was on the princely sum of £25 a week.” From there, he moved into repertory theatre, in the company of Zoë Wanamaker and (now Sirs) Jonathan Pryce and Richard Eyre. “It was fabulous, we even had our own football team”.
Eventually, television called, although initially inauspiciously. “I auditioned for Play School. I knew I’d done a brilliant audition—the camera crew were falling about. I thought, I’ve cracked this.” Then came the rejection letter. “Years later, I asked why. They said: you were far too interesting. You didn’t just sit there and say ‘what’s through the round window?’ and sit quietly for ten minutes.”
Luckily, Judy Whitfield, a producer at the BBC, had seen the same audition. “She phoned up and said she was doing a new programme called Playboard. Would I like to present it and write the songs? This was 1976—a really hot summer, not that I noticed, I spent six weeks inside a studio and then it rained.”
Chris’s first programme for the BBC was the 13-episode series Playboard in 1976. Broadcast mostly on Sunday mornings and aimed at under-fives, the show featured puppets and was set in a fairground; Chris would tell stories and sing songs. The puppets themselves had their own theatre tours. Photo: Chris Lillicrap
It was the start of a long career in children’s television, creating and presenting We’ll Tell You a Story and Flicks—shows based on reading books—which together ran for ten years. This put him on both sides of the BBC–ITV divide, a rarity in the days when crossing channels was almost unthinkable. “When Morecambe and Wise left the BBC for ITV, it was front page news. People didn’t cross. But somehow I did. And no one seemed to notice.”
The… Name?!
After presenting gigs began to dry up—“I was getting old, you know, I was over 30!”—Chris moved into writing and was offered Numbertime. “The original first series was, at heart, back to the 60s. It was a sketch show, Monty Python or Not the Nine O’Clock News, but for kids. I remember sitting at the kitchen table all night thinking: we could do with some animation in the middle. I came up with a sort of Zorro idea, but of course we can’t call him Zorro. I land on El Nombre.” At this point, Chris acknowledges the elephant in the room. “Which is stupid, because nombre doesn’t mean number at all in Spanish! It’s a complete misnomer!”
But the stories became a very good way of making concepts relatable. “We could do things like fractions, because, hang on a minute, what does Little Juan like? Pizza? Everybody wants a different topping? So they divide the pizza up into halves and thirds. And that was how it started.”
El Nombre eventually outgrew Numbertime and became its own series. “Children’s BBC had said, yes, they’d like us to do an El Nombre spinoff, but they wanted no education in it whatsoever. This was in a meeting at Television Centre between me, the head of children’s and the head of education: powerful women you wouldn’t want to argue with.” Somehow, Chris ended up refereeing. “‘Well,’ said the head of education, ‘there’s got to be some educational content.’ I said, ‘When this meeting finishes, I may or may not have a job…! So how about we agree there will be no overt education in it, but a bit like Sesame Street, a few things might creep in.’ And of course they did.”
The big argument
Readers might expect counting to 10 to be uncontroversial, but you’d be wrong. “We had a big argument about whether we include zero or not. Because Numbertime had 10 programmes planned. It’s obvious, isn’t it? One to 10. But our educational adviser said we need to start with zero—inclusive counting, they called it. Well, that’s 11 programmes! And I thought, well, we can’t start with nought—try writing a programme about nothing! In the end we slipped in the fact that if we take one away from one, we’ve got nothing. I think that was the end of the argument.”
Other arguments were more surreal. “There was a wedding in one episode, and I remember a long discussion over whether Little Juan should wear sandals or be barefoot—this was a big cultural thing. I pointed out that he’s a gerbil and, well… that threw a spanner in the works.” Another time, “we wanted to do a Halloween episode, dividing up pumpkins, but at the time the BBC was worried it was too occult”.
Sometimes technical issues provided narrative challenges. “As the writer, you’re contracted to write 10 scripts and you’re paid per script, but there’s a separate budget for the animation company. So there would be a conversation—what if I want to do aliens, space lasers or blow things up? Once I was told I’d put something in the script which was a big problem… water! Because in stop frame animation, it is! But they said to leave it with them and they came up with a way of doing it.”
With experience, Chris mastered the politics of script approval. “I learned this when I was doing my first series for Thames Television: if you want to sneak something in, put something more outrageous just before it. Always give the producer something to put a pencil through. Then they’ll ignore the bit you really wanted to get in.”
Sometimes the producers are probably right, though. “There was an episode of Rainbow I wrote, called Long, Longer and Longest. Jeffrey and Bungle were rolling out pieces of plasticine and comparing lengths. Well, only when we’d got to the point of recording did we suddenly realise what it looked like. Cut!” The episode never made it to air.
Oh no, he doesn’t
So does Chris recommend his career journey? “No! My wife, Jeanette, and I produced pantomimes, and we’d always have children in it. You’d get the mum come up to you who thinks her daughter’s going to be Bonnie Langford and she’d ask for advice to get her daughter into acting. And I would always say, ‘discourage every possible opportunity!’ Ninety-five percent of the acting profession is unemployed at any time. This business is 90% luck and 10% talent. Even if you have the 10%, you still need luck.” He recalls friends who visited him during a run of The Lion in Winter. They asked what he was doing next. “I said I didn’t know. Maybe a commercial in the Caribbean, maybe nothing. That’s the life. ‘Well, what about your mortgage? How do you sleep at night?’—Well, sometimes I didn’t!”
Children’s TV at least provided some stability. “The great thing about the education stuff was that you’d have a contract that allowed for repeat fees. So you’d get paid several times over by the seventh showing. And people are watching it in Nigeria, in Israel and in Australia.” Between Chris and his wife, they kept things going: “Usually, when one was working, the other wasn’t, but sometimes neither of us were, which is when we then started writing shows and plays, and started producing, because if you just did one thing and sat and waited for the agent to phone, you could sit for a very long time.”
Numbertime ran for eight years and the El Nombre series was formed of 24 episodes. “I mean, it came back to bite me some years later. I was filming a different series in Coventry and this teacher comes storming over: ‘Christopher Lillicrap! I’ve got a bone to pick with you! If I hear that song—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7… 8, 9, 10—again, I’m gonna throw up!’ I said I was terribly sorry. She said, ‘Your only saving grace is that by the end of term, all my class can count to 10!’ Now, at that point, of course, the children don’t know how they’re counting to 10. That’s the bit the teacher does. I’ve just lit the fuse.”
“They’re all going around the playground, singing it!” Now you, too, can enjoy the soundtrack to our childhood.
Music in Monastiraki
When Chris and Jeanette retired, they started spending more time in Greece. A new era of creativity beckoned, culminating in Chris releasing an album of eleven songs—“an eclectic mix!”.
“I became used to, over the years, writing songs for a purpose. But musically, I didn’t realise that I didn’t write anything unless somebody said. So with the album, I suddenly started writing things, not for children. Apart from the one track my grandchildren love. Somebody during lockdown wrote to me and said, did I have a copy of it? Because his daughter wanted it at her wedding. The song’s called Eric the Whale, and the chorus is ‘Yo ho ho, yo ho ho, I’m Eric the Whale, that’s me’. Of course I sent them a copy, but I thought the groom’s gonna get a bit of a shock.”
Chris’s pride and joy, seen here—a cherry red sunburst Ibanez guitar—was cracked in a railway platform/breeze/gravity interface incident. In the midst of the pandemic, 40 years later, he found a 12-string 1970s original in a Greek market. Buying it brought him back to writing songs after 20 years. Photo: Chris Lillicrap
By chance, in an old music shop in Athens, Jeanette had spotted a cherry sunburst guitar hanging on a wall. It was an Ibanez, just like the model Chris had owned but damaged 40 years earlier, when a gust from a passing train knocked it over (the BBC refused to cover it—a ‘foreseeable accident’.) The model had been discontinued but now, against all odds, here was a perfect replacement—and a 12-string as well. He bought it, and soon after, songs started to flow again. Funny ones, like I’ve Got an App for That (a woman marries a Samsung Galaxy), nostalgic ones, like The Good Old Days (a patchwork of 1960s lyrics), and poignant ones, like You Will Be Me—“an old friend liked the implied threat to young people!”. You can watch the video for the latter on YouTube.
So he recorded the songs, shared them around, and at the age of 76, was invited to sign a record deal. “A friend said at this age, it must be some sort of record.” But surely Captain Tom still takes some beating? “But he didn’t have an album. And I’m not having Michael Ball sing on mine!”
Keep counting
So how much maths is left in his life? “Every morning, I look at the exchange rate. For pensioners abroad, it actually matters—the chancellor says the wrong thing, and we’re all so much worse off. The biggest thing has been, dare I say, the dreaded B-word. I used to get €1500 for £1000 and this morning I can get €1130. That’s a big difference.”
Chris remains amused, but also rightly proud, that despite failing his CSE maths exam, he has taught generations how to count. “It’s interesting, you don’t realise the impression that maybe you make.” Chalkdust readers might agree with his philosophy of ‘entertain, and they learn something’.
But to the serious business—would El Nombre pass GCSE maths today? “Of course. He’d be insulted to have to take it. Little Juan, I’m not so sure. Maybe I’d be passing notes through the window.”
And where did the characters end up? “Mexico! Or probably in a cupboard somewhere. I had Little Juan at one time. I must have a look upstairs and see if he’s still around.”
Whatever their fate, one thing is clear: El Nombre never taught anyone Spanish. But thanks to Christopher Lillicrap, a generation of children learned something just as valuable: that numbers can be fun.
Chris’s album—What Ever Happened To—is out now, published by Wienerworld. The lead song, You Will Be Me, is available to watch on YouTube. He blogs at chrislillicrap.com.
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