Richard Carpenter (RoS Series Creator and Writer)

Personal Information

Richard 'Kip' Carpenter was born in 1929 in King's Lynn, England. He went to the Old Vic Theatre School and started out his career as an actor in repertory and several TV series and movies in the fifties and sixties.
He died of a heart attack on 26 February 2012 in his home in Hertfordshire, England.

He was married to actress Annabelle Lee (Mad Mab in Rutterkin!) and they had two children, Tom and Harriet.

Credits

Richard Carpenter has been writing for television since 1969. Two seasons of the award-winning "Catweazle" were followed by many episodes of "Black Beauty", three complete series of "The Ghosts of Motley Hall" and the "Dick Turpin" series.

Richard became one of Britan's leading television writers. He has written three ten-part adventure series for the BBC, "The Boy from Space", "Cloudburst" and "The King's Dragon" as well as the screenplay for the feature film, "Dick Turpin" (LWT/RKO).

In 1980, Richard wrote the HTV series "Smuggler" and in 1981 was co-author of the BBC's "The Baker Street Boys", a children's serial with a Sherlock Holmes back ground. He created "Robin of Sherwood", probably his most famous work, and wrote books on RoS for Penguin/Puffin. He then did a follow-up series to "Smuggler" called "Adventurer".

Since RoS, Richard Carpenter has written several award-winning programmes including: "The Winjin' Pom", "The Borrowers", "The Return of The Borrowers", "Stanley's Dragon", a "Catweazle" film script, "True Tilda", "The Famous Five", "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and "I Was A Rat".

Here's Kip's original handwritten treatment for RoS which shows how he originally envisioned it and what came to pass.

Websites

Interviews