Richard Carpenter 1933-2012

Richard Carpenter, creator of Robin of Sherwood, died at the weekend. I first encountered him on BBC schools television as the host and writer of the Look and Read serial Cloudburst; aimed at slow-reading eight-year-olds this series was essential viewing for the literate pre-schooler in the 1970s. His credits as a writer of family television series for ITV were long - Catweazle, The Ghosts of Motley Hall, Dick Turpin and of course Robin of Sherwood. He also wrote the first series of The Scarlet Pimpernel for the BBC in the late 1990s, but while he started work on the second, the transmitted series was credited to other hands. I remember Mark Ryan, Nasir in Robin, praising 'Kip''s imagination when he visited the Oxford Arthurian Society in 1995. A few years later I went to a National Film Theatre retrospective of Carpenter's work. He deserves more attention than he receives.