What is the current UK #1? In my experience this is a good question for any quiz night, especially a school quiz night. Most of us who are parents of school-age children have gone through times when we had no idea what was top of the charts. We might get to a stage where our children can keep us up-to-date with the nation’s biggest sellers but in the meantime there will be unfamiliar songs and artists. For the record, as I type these words Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa are #1 with “One Kiss”. It’s Harris’s 9th contribution to a UK chart-topper and Ms Lipa’s second, after last year’s “New Rules”.

For many of us there are many factors that contribute to our decreasing familiarity with the top of the charts, whether we have children or not. These can include age, the demise of “Top of the Pops” and a lack of enthusiasm for some of the songs that are either the biggest sellers or, increasingly, the most streamed. Another major factor is the sheer number of songs that have made it to the top in recent decades. In 1992, for example, there were a mere 12 chart-toppers. In 2000 there were 42 (yes, count them, forty two) different #1s in just over 11 months, between the Westlife double A side that saw in the millennium (“I have a dream” / “Seasons in the sun”) and “Can we fix it?” by Bob the Builder, just in time for Christmas 2000. The numbers for 2012 and 2014 were 36 and 38 respectively. The last two years have been kinder to us: only 10 different songs made it to #1 in 2016 (and that included 15 weeks of “One Dance” by Drake), and 14 in 2017.

“One Kiss” is into its second week at the top and I have heard it far more often than its immediate predecessors, one week each for Drake’s “Nice for What” and “Freaky Friday” by Lil Dicky featuring Chris Brown. It first came to my attention with an appearance by Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa on The Graham Norton Show the day the song reached #1 and it has been played regularly on my radio station of choice (BBC Radio 2).

The presence of a number in the song’s title has prompted me to think back over other chart-toppers that have featured numbers. I thought of 15, which would be a jackpot winner on BBC1 quiz show “Who Dares Wins” if this were offered as a question, and then decided to look them up. There are 46 in all, including ordinals, numbers in place of words and words that mean the same as “on one occasion” or “on two occasions”. They are listed at the end of this article. If you want to test yourself, look away now and don’t scroll down for a while.

In fact, “Who Dares Wins” did feature a similar question last weekend, a jackpot round that asked for the names of any chart acts (solo artists, duos or groups) that have reached the UK Top 40, and include a number in their title. I was watching it on live TV for a change, just my 13-year-old son and me in the room, and typed out 18 artists before the contestants had named 3. They stopped at 3, unable to name another 3 artists with confidence, and made 5k rather than the 50k that was on offer. They weren’t even sure of Five Star (15 UK top 40s, and a highest chart placing of #2, for “Rain or shine”). My list, before the screen displayed a selection of the available answers:

Four Tops / Four Pennies / Three of a kind
U2 / S Club 7 / Temperance 7
Jackson 5 / 2 Unlimited / 5 Star
Electric 6 / Maroon 5 / Fun Boy Three
Sham 69 / Eiffel 65 / One Direction
Three Degrees / 911 / A1

I failed to remember 10cc (my favourite band when I was 12) or East 17, both of whom have had at least one UK #1.

If you’re still trying to think of UK #1s that feature a number look away now, otherwise here’s the full list, with explanatory notes at the end about ordinals, numbers in place of words and words that mean the same as “on one occasion” or “on two occasions”.

The UK #1s that feature a number in the title

In chronological order

In numerical order (by the lowest number if the title contains more than one number)

Ordinals, numbers in place of words and words that mean the same as “on one occasion” or “on two occasions”

The lists above include the following six titles in which the numbers are either ordinals (first, second, twelfth), numbers in place of words (2 instead of “to”, 4 instead of “for”) and words that mean the same as “on one occasion” (“once”) or “on two occasions” (“twice”). If you want to omit them the list of songs that contain numbers comes to 40, rather than 46.