Farewell, Edward of Wickham

 Most people will think of Jeremy Bulloch in his role as Boba Fett, but I remember him best as the leader of the village of Wickham and ally of the outlaws in Robin of Sherwood.

He's just died, aged75.

His son Robbie played Edward's son Matthew of Wickham.

He also appeared in Doctor Who - in the Time Warriors (the story that introduced Sarah Jane Smith) and, even earlier, in The Space Museum with the First Doctor. 

California Fires Threaten Famous Movie Locations

California is burning.
The wildfires are destroying whole towns (the entire town of Malibu has been evacuated), and over a thousand people are missing. There have been many deaths, and thousands of people have lost everything.
So it's really only a small footnote to the situation to be concerned that Sherwood Forest is in danger - or at least, the stand in for Sherwood Forest that was used for locations in the 1938 Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland movie The Adventures of Robin Hood (still my favourite Robin Hood film).
The area is actually known as Bidwell Park, and 5 acres of Upper Bidwell Park are burning. South of the Park, around the town of Chico, 700 acres have burned.
Meanwhile, at the Paramount Ranch, the Western town outdoor set has also burned down, according to Backlots blog. It's been used as a movie set for 90 years, most recently for the series Westworld.

The Bandit of Sherwood Forest

This is the 1946 swashbuckler with Cornel Wilde as the son of Robin Hood - and watching it has cleared up a false memory I had.
I thought I remembered a scene from the Richard Greene Robin Hood series, in black and white, in which Robin is captured and must fight a duel with (I thought) the Sheriff, but first he is kept in a cell for three days without food or drink, so the Sheriff is sure to win. During this time, Maid Marion (I thought) swings baskets of food and water to his cell window, so he isn't starved at all.
What I was actually remembering was this film, which is in glorious Technicolour (though I may have watched it in black and white, it's so long ago). It's Cornel Wilde in the cell, and it's Lady Catherine who swings baskets of food over to him - and he's fighting the Regent of England in a trial by combat, because William of Pembroke dearly wants to kill the boy himself.
And it occured to me that William of Pembroke, played by Henry Daniell, is probably meant to be William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, who was indeed Regent of England during the minority of King John's son Henry III (the boy king in this version has the most appalling pageboy wig). And William Marshal, historically speaking, was one of the good guys, and most unlikely to be plotting to kill the boy king and crown himself, while throwing out Magna Carta and banishing the Earl of Huntingdon (original Robin, Cornel Wilde's dad, who returns to the greenwood to fight tyranny).

And then I started thinking about all the ways the film could be made better than it is.
We start the film with lots of bowmen riding through the forest to a meeting with the Earl/Robin, including old friends Friar Tuck, Little John, Will Scarlet and Allan-a-dale. Earl Robin is about to attend a meeting at Nottingham Castle of the Regent's Council, and he fears for the future of the country.
There's one glaring omission in the meeting of old friends here - where's Marion?
And Earl Robin then rides to the castle alone.
This would not happen. Earls had a retinue to follow them everywhere. So if the film makers wanted to start with a bit of spectacle, why not start with Earl Robin and his retinue heading for the meeting, during which he discusses his worries with Marion and Young Robert (who in the film is in the North Country, who knows why? and is not recognised as Robin's son when he first meets the outlaws). Then, when the meeting goes badly and Robin is banished, he can go to the Queen's chambers to collect Marion, telling the Queen his plans as he does so, and leave the castle - and then collect all his old friends together in the greenwood. This would also get over the old "love/hate at first sight" plot line with Lady Catherine, because Young Robert would already know her from Court, and not try to sexually assault her in a humourous way the first time he meets her in the greenwood when she and the Queen have fled the castle.
But at least the film did have two named women talking to each other, and not about a man, and at least Lady Catherine (Anita Louise) made decisions and didn't just hang around waiting to be rescued.
The fight scenes weren't bad, as long as you accept fencing with broadswords. Cornel Wilde was actually an Olympic class fencer, and you could see they were going for the Errol Flynn 1938 Robin Hood film look, with fencing shadows on the walls and a Korngold-style musical score. Cornel Wilde had a cheery grin when he fenced, but he wasn't Errol Flynn.

An Apple for an Archer

They missed a trick when they were naming the characters for this episode of The Adventures of Robin Hood - the 1950s version starring Richard Greene. I would have called them all after apple varieties.
As it is, the young hero is Timothy Cox, who grows apples but can't shoot a bow - and he needs to win an archery contest in order to marry the girl he loves. He's played by a young Kenneth Cope, who went on to become Marty Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, who glares moodily at Paul Eddington, a regular guest actor, who started his Robin Hood career as Second Peasant and worked his way up to be villain of the week. In this episode he is Pierre of Bordeaux, a Frenchman who can shoot with the longbow but prefers to lounge around playing the gittern (a sort of early guitar). He doesn't expect poor Timothy to make a good show of things at the archery contest planned for the hand of Mary Quartermaine - who is also a pretty good shot.
So Timothy goes off into the greenwood, where Robin Hood teaches him how to shoot - and in doing so gives a lot of information about how bows are made, the correct stance for shooting, and the different arrowheads.
When I was re-enacting regularly, members of our group (including me) used to do "the arrow talk", with a variety of different arrow heads, and all sorts of interesting information about the making of the bows and the linen bow strings, and fletching the arrows - and the scenes where Timothy is learning about bows and arrows is practically the prototype of that re-enactor talk!
He wins the contest, of course.

From Sherwood to Westeros

I happened to see a copy of the Sun today, not a newspaper I normally read, and there was a story in it about an actor who was giving evidence in court against the man who had bitten part of his ear off. The actor's name was Clive Mantle, and that rang a faint bell with me.
So I looked him up and found, to my delight, that he had been Little John in Robin of Sherwood in the 1980s. In fact, he was recorded as saying it was one of the most enjoyable acting experiences of his career.
He's done a great variety of things since then, on film, TV and stage, most notably a surgeon in Casualty and Holby City - but I very rarely watch anything like that, so I hadn't noticed him.
Now he's back in something I am following, though - he's Lord Greatjon Umber, one of the Stark bannermen, in Game of Thrones!

Welcome to Sherwood!

It's one of the great foundation myths of England (the other is King Arthur, the just king) - the Outlaw of Sherwood Forest, bold Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. He's one of my favourite fictional characters - I grew up loving Errol Flynn and Richard Greene in the role, and I enjoyed the addition of paganism in the 1980s Robin of Sherwood (Richard Carpenter, the creator of Robin of Sherwood, is probably also responsible for all those Muslim characters who have cropped up in films ever since, with his inclusion of Nazir in the band). I was delighted to see Captain Picard as Errol Flynn in the Next Generation episode Qpid (though the best line in that episode went to Worf, and his "Sir, I protest. I am not a Merry Man.")

The point is that there is a strong undercurrent in the British psyche about fairness, and standing up to tyranny and unfair taxes.

That's why I was delighted to stumble across the blog of Damh the Bard, at www.paganmusic.co.uk/blog - it's called The Bardic Blog, and on 2nd April, he posted a free download of a song called The Sons and Daughters of Robin Hood. It's a protest song against our present Sheriffs of Nottingham and Prince Johns, and I think I've found a new favourite folk musician.
His blog is well worth a read, too, for anyone interested in Paganism.

Patrick Troughton

When I realised how little I knew of Roddy McDowall's career, outside Planet of the Apes and Fright Night, it occurred to me that I didn't know a lot about Patrick Troughton's career, either.

Patrick Troughton became the Doctor in 1966. I was five years old, and I loved William Hartnell. I understood that Patrick Troughton was the same man, but I hated his silly hat and the way he played the recorder. What finally stopped me watching was an episode where what seemed like armies of Daleks were exploding on screen, revealing the Kaleds writhing horribly inside. My gran had to keep turning to ITV, and then flicking back again to see if it was all over - and after that we didn't watch it at all for a long while. When Patrick Troughton changed into Jon Pertwee, I suddenly took an interest again, but it took me a very long time to realise that Patrick Troughton had actually been rather good as the Doctor, and that some of those old episodes were worth watching.

Apart from the Doctor, I was aware that he had been the very first TV Robin Hood, though the episodes were filmed live, and I was too young to have seen any of them. I did enjoy seeing him in The Box of Delights - it was a book I loved as a child ("The wolves are running!" sends a chill down my spine even now). He was the magical Punch and Judy man who gave the Box to Kay Harker.

I'm a life-long Robin Hood fan, and I grew up on re-runs of Richard Greene's series - and there was Patrick Troughton again, playing various villains and good guys. In those days you only got to see the episode once - no videos or DVDs - so it was possible to have the same actor appearing as different characters all over the place. Paul Eddington, later famous in The Good Life, started off as Second Peasant and ended up as Count de whatever in a later episode!

He was also in films - playing the blind man harried by harpies in Jason and the Argonauts, that classic Ray Harryhausen film.

In the mid-Seventies, there was a children's serial called The Feathered Serpent, set in Aztec times. What I mostly remember is the young men in the production tying their hair back with the thick wool we used to call Dougals, which were fashionable briefly at about the same time as those clacker balls that got bashed together in a rather dangerous fashion. I also remember the heroine being poisoned by the evil chief priest (Patrick Troughton being really quite scary) and being totally paralysed, unable even to blink.

And just recently, I was hunting down some pictures online and came across a blog dedicated to Swallows and Amazons - especially the filming of the stories in the 1970s. The blog is called Sophie Neville, and it is quite fascinating. There was Patrick Troughton again, playing the eel man in The Big Six!

Apart from all this, he was another actor who always seemed to be working - he was in masses of TV series, did quite a lot of theatre work, and a few more films, and he appeared at Doctor Who Conventions as well.
And now I'm starting to collect the DVDs of his time in Doctor Who, with a new appreciation of his time in the role.

Childhood Heroes

The writer of The Age of Uncertainty blog was talking about his childhood heroes a little while ago, though I only caught up with reading the blog today. We had one or two in common: Virgil Tracy and Mr Spock, and I suspect (though I haven't checked) that I'm around the same age as he is.
Virgil Tracy, of course, was the second of the Tracy brothers, the one who flew Thunderbird 2 - and Thunderbird 2 was my favourite of all the aircraft and rockets by a long way. It wasn't only the lift off sequence with the palm trees bending back - it was the idea of having all those smaller craft and vehicles, like Thunderbird 4 and the Mole, in those interchangeable pods. And there was a moment in one episode, where Virgil saves Lady Penelope from being run over by a train in a tunnel. He's lying on the track, inches from speeding death as the train passes over him, and he's looking at Penelope. I know these were puppets and they didn't have facial expressions really, but at that moment I was certain that Virgil was in love with Lady Penelope but he would never tell her!
Mr Spock is an obvious hero to have - for me, anyway. I never did go for the gung-ho Captain Kirk types. It was nearly always the sidekick, the quiet one who was brave without being flashy about it, and Spock was intelligent, calm, logical - and not as emotionless as he liked to pretend.
One hero who was definitely not a sidekick was Robin Hood! For me, it had to be the Errol Flynn version, or Richard Greene from the 1950s, standing up against official injustice with a sword, a bow, and a quick wit. Actually, Errol Flynn was one of my heroes in just about any film he appeared in - as Queen Elizabeth's favourite Sea Hawk in court or rowing a Spanish galley, or as Captain Blood, or Don Juan, as long as he was in period costume and handling a rapier, I was there. (In those innocent days, I knew nothing of his activities in the bedroom - it was his skill with a sword I admired).
Also skilled in handling a sword, and using his quick wits to get across enemy territory to save the besieged city of Casale, (in a war I otherwise knew absolutely nothing about) was the Chevalier de Recci, the Flashing Blade himself. Looking back, they had every single swashbuckling cliche thrown into the mix, but it was all such fun!
Ilya Kuriakin was another sidekick who I liked much better than the over-suave Napoleon Solo. I spent ages, around the age of seven, practising how to say his name, and also practising the Vulcan salute.
And in those days when all nice little boys and girls watched Blue Peter, and made their own models with stickyback plastic and washing up bottles, John Noakes was a definite hero - always the one to do the dangerous stunts, and also the one with the friendly but naughty dog ("Get down, Shep!").

Now, I'm a girl, so I knew I couldn't really grow up to be Robin Hood or Ilya Kuriakin. Fortunately, in the 1960s and early 70s there were some pretty good role models for girls. So I wanted to be Emma Peel of the Avengers, and Sharon McCready from the Champions - with the ability to speak telepathically to the other Champions and throw bad guys across the room. I wanted to be George from Enid Blyton's Famous Five, looking like a boy and exploring secret passages with my faithful dog, and I wanted to be Sarah Jane Smith, exploring time and space with the Doctor.

Actually, I still want to be Sarah Jane Smith, and if I ever hear that wheezy old Tardis engine - well, when I disappear, that's where I'll have gone.