The Story of One

You can’t see it and you can’t touch it and yet it’s mankind’s most important discovery – it’s the number one and this is its story.

In this unique documentary Terry Jones takes us on a humour filled numerical mystery tour as he retraces the rise of the number one and its extended family. It’s a surprising story that starts in a world of cavemen, crashes headlong through the most fabulous civilisations in the ancient world, side-steps the Dark Age, stirs up the Renaissance, and finally explodes into the Information Age.

The story of the number 1 is the story of Western civilisation, it reveals how the most celebrated civilisations in history were achieved, where our modern numbers came from and how the invention of zero changed the world forever and saved us from having to use Roman numerals today.

The programme was first broadcast on BBC1 in the UK and uses computer graphics to bring the number 1 to life in various guises and locations around the world.

An Impossible Pictures production for the BBC