Carol Vorderman: My maths manifesto for the nation

A glittering TV career, an MBE, various honorary degrees, tens of thousands of TikTok followers and the only person to win the (now cancelled) Rear of the Year award multiple times. There are many accolades that Carol Vorderman has been afforded during her 40-year career, yet few mean more to her than her claim to having possibly taught more people alive in Britain than anyone else.

Through books, tapes and online classes, the former Countdown star has – according, at least, to my remedial fag-pack maths – educated more than a million people since the late 1980s. She started when the national curriculum was introduced in 1988 with instructional classes on VHS, and she’s subsequently taught generations of adults and children. ‘It’s quite funny,’ she says. ‘I get approached by people in their late thirties and forties who remember buying a copy in Woolworths when they passed their GCSEs, and they tell me that they’ve still got an old video in the attic.